Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
Love in Hell
By Bernard Knox
Inferno
by Dante Alighieri, a verse translation from the Italianby Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander
Doubleday, 634 pp., $35.00
Dante: A Life in Works
by Robert Hollander
Yale University Press, 212 pp., $25.00
Dante
by R.W.B. Lewis
Lipper/Viking, 205 pp., $19.95
This new version of Dante's Inferno, by an internationally famous Dante scholar and his wife, the poet Jean Hollander, is accompanied by a detailed, brilliant commentary that is itself worth the price of the volume. The publisher's claim on the dust cover—'The introduction, notes, and commentary on the poem cannot be matched for their depth of learning and usefulness for the lay reader'—is for once fully justified.The translation began as Professor Hollander's attempt to modernize the archaic English of John Sinclair's 1939 prose translation for the Princeton Dante Project.[*] His wife happened to look at his manuscript over his shoulder and asked, 'What is it? It's awful,' and, when told, pronounced it 'unsayable.' She took it away and returned it in two days with a version of the first canto; it was the beginning of a collaboration, not always harmonious, that produced the Inferno and has since almost finished a version of the Purgatorio scheduled for publication in 2002.
Review, 4306 words
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