Purgatorio by Dante Page A

unflinchingly earthbound.”
    —André Aciman, author of
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
    “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
    “This new version of
The Inferno
wonderfully captures the concision, directness, and pungency of Dante’s style. Like a mirror, it reflects with clarity and precision the Italian original. Each canto’s set of copious, authoritative notes complements the facing-page Italian and English translation. A grand achievement.”
    —Richard Lansing, Professor of Comparative Literature, Brandeis University
    “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

ALSO BY JEAN HOLLANDER
    Crushed into Honey: Poems
    Hugo von Hoffmansthal,
The Woman without a Shadow
(translator)
    I Am My Own Woman: The Outlaw Life of Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s Most Distinguished Transvestite
(translator)
    Moondog: Poems
ALSO BY ROBERT HOLLANDER
    Allegory in Dante’s Commedia
    Walking on Dante: Poems
    Boccaccio’s Two Venuses
    Studies in Dante
    Il Virgilio dantesco: Tragedìa nella “Commedia”
    André Malraux,
The Temptation of the West
(translator)
    Giovanni Boccaccio,
Amorosa Visione
(translated with
    Timothy Hampton and Margherita Frankel)
    Boccaccio’s Last Fiction: Il Corbaccio
    Dante and Paul’s “five words with understanding”
    Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande
    Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire
    Dante: A Life in Works
    The Dartmouth Dante Project (founder and director)
    The Princeton Dante Project (founder and director)