Acclaim for This Book
ACCLAIM FOR THE HOLLANDER TRANSLATION OF INFERNO
“A distinguished act of poetry and scholarship in one and the same breath, the Hollander Dante, among the strong translations of the poet, deserves to take its own honored place.”
—Robert Fagles, translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey
“The new Inferno, as this is likely to be called, is both majestic and magisterial and the product of a lifelong devotion to Dante’s poetry and to the staggering body of Dante scholarship. The Hollanders capture each and every accent in Dante, from the soft-spoken, effusive stilnovist poet, to the wrathful Florentine exile, to the disillusioned man who would become what many, including T. S. Eliot, consider the best poet who ever lived. The Hollanders’ adaptation is not only an intelligent reader’s Dante, but it is meant to enlighten and to move and ultimately to give us a Dante so versatile that he could at once soar to the hereafter and remain unflinchingly earthbound.”
—André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir
“The present volume makes the poem accessible to the lay reader and appealing to the specialist: the translation is both faithful to the original and highly readable; the introduction and notes are dense without being overly scholarly; the bibliography consists predominantly of studies in English, encouraging further investigation by English-language readers.… A highly worthy new Inferno that is the mature fruit of years of scholarly, pedagogical, and creative work.”
—Choice
“The Hollanders’ [translation] is probably the most finely accomplished and may well prove the most enduring.… The annotation is crowded with useful insights and bits of information and keeps us abreast of scholarly opinion across the ages.”
—RWB Lewis, Los Angeles Times
“The notes following each canto, besides being up-to-date in scholarly terms and full of the insight produced by decades of teaching, reflection, and scholarship, are of genuinely useful length and pertinence. The decisions they made about the translation seem completely successful.… This is the translation for our time and probably beyond.”
—National Review
“A brisk, vivid, readable—and scrupulously subtle—translation, coupled with excellent notes and commentary. Every lover of Dante in English should have this volume.”
—Alicia Ostriker
“English-speaking lovers of Dante are doubly in the Hollanders’ debt: first, for this splendidly lucid and eminently readable version of Dante’s Hell, and second, for the provocative, elegantly written commentary, which judiciously synthesizes a lifetime of deeply engaged, wide-ranging scholarship, as well as the past six centuries of commentary on the poem. No student of Dante would want to be without it.”
—John Ahern, Antolini Professor of Italian Literature, Vassar College
“This new Hollander translation deserves to sweep the field.… Robert and Jean Hollander, both practicing published poets, have produced an English text of remarkable poetic sensitivity while never traducing the original Italian or pretending to supplant Dante’s poem with one of their own. They have given us the Inferno in English, not a modern poetic medley on themes by Dante. And Robert Hollander has supplied precisely that kind of commentary the student or general reader needs—an economical and graceful edifice of explanatory notes resting firmly on a foundation, massive and deep, yet invisible and therefore not distracting to the reader’s eye, of the erudition of a lifetime’s study of the medieval Italian poets.”
—John Fleming, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University