Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins.
Dante Alighieri was born in 1265. Considered Italy's greatest poet,
this scion of a Florentine family mastered in the art of lyric
poetry at an early age. His first major work is La Vita Nuova
(1292) which is a tribute to Beatrice Portinari, the great love of
his life. Married to Gemma Donatic, Dante's political activism
resulted in his being exiled from Florence to eventually settle in
Ravenna. It is believed that The Divine Comedy-comprised of three
canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso-was
written between 1308 and 1320. Dante Alighieri died in 1321.
Robin Kirkpatrick is a poet and widely-published Dante scholar. He
has taught courses on Dante's Divine Comedy in Hong Kong, Dublin,
and Cambridge where is Fellow of Robinson College and Professor of
Italian and English Literatures.
“A masterly translation.” ―Judith Thurman, The New Yorker
“Kirkpatrick brings a more nuanced sense of the Italian and a more
mediated appreciation of the poem’s construction than nearly all of
his competitors. . . . There is much to recommend here―certainly
the intelligence, the energy, the linguistic range. . . . His
introduction and canto-by-canto notes are remarkably level and
lucid, as attentive to structure as to syntax, language and motif,
and deftly cross-reference the whole poem. On their own, they would
justify the price.”
―The Times (London)
“We gain much from Kirkpatrick’s fidelity to syntax and nuance, and
from the fact that the Italian is on the facing page for our
inspection. . . . His introduction . . . tells you, very readably
indeed, pretty much all you need for a heightened appreciation of
the work. . . . Kirkpatrick edges us, smoothly, into Dante’s mind,
and shows just how and why his influence has seemed to grow with
the passage of time. We even get a map of trecento Italy (nestling
against a map of hell). . . . If the Purgatorio and Paradiso are as
good as this, then English readers will, I hope, start
familiarising themselves with the two-thirds of the work most never
get round to reading.” —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
“Likely to be the best modern version of Dante . . . The
perfect balance of tightness and colloquialism.” —Bernard
O’Donoghue
“This version is the first to bring together poetry and scholarship
in the very body of the translation—a deeply informed version of
Dante that is also a pleasure to read.” —David Wallace,
University of Pennsylvania
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