Inferno

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by Dante Alighieri,

Translated by Elio Zappulla

Random House, Inc

Due/Published October 1999, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 0679757082

"As poetry, Mr. Zappulla's English Dante is successful—. The power of Dante's descriptive poetry should be apparent, and that is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a translator."—Washington Times

In this new rendition of a timeless classic, Italian scholar Elio Zappulla captures the majesty and enduring power of the Inferno, the first of the three canticles of Dante's The Divine Comedy, unarguably one of the masterpieces of world literature. Rendering Dante's terza rima into lyrical blank verse, Zappulla's translation makes accessible to the modern reader the journey of the famed Florentine poet Dante through the nine circles of hell. With Virgil at his side, the great poet descends through horrific landscapes of the damned—dark forests, boiling muck, and burning plains filled with unspeakable punishment, lamentation, and terror—depicted with gruesome detail unmatched in all literature. Richly annotated, this translation takes even the first-time reader on a truth-seeking journey whose imaginative and psychological discoveries make clear why this work persists at the heart of Western culture.

"If Dante's Inferno is a cautionary tale of the history of human depravity, it is also an amazingly complex narrative, treating timeless ethical themes, medieval philosophy and religion, tendentious political issues and deeply personal events."—San Diego Union-Tribune