Volume 42, Number 16 · October 19, 1995
Our Dante
By Bernard Knox
The Inferno of Dante
A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky, bilingual edition, illustrated by Michael Mazur, with notes by Nicole Pinsky, foreword by John Freccero
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 427 pp., $35.00
Dante wrote his great poem in the years between 1300, the fictional date of his descent alive into Hell, and his death in 1321. Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales between 1387 and his death in 1400. Few today can deal with Chaucer in the original Middle English; he is read mainly in translations, which began to appear as early as 1700, when Dryden published versions of three of the Tales in his Fables Ancient and Modern—Chaucer's language, he claims in the Preface, is 'so obsolete, that his Sense is scarce to be understood.' Yet, even today, no one would even dream of producing a modernized Italian version of Dante's Commedia. Though his text needs annotation and occasional linguistic explication, Italians know their Dante; his lines are as deeply rooted in the national memory as those of Shakespeare for modern speakers of English.
Review, 2212 words
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