The Inferno of Dante

Robert Pinsky's new verse translations of the Inferno is above all a poem, and shows the contemporary reader as no other version in English has done why Dante is universally considered a poet of great power, intensity, and vision. Strikingly readable, rapid and various in style, this is a faithful rendering by a widely admired American poet. Pinsky preserves the form of Dante's poem, terza rima, without distorting the flow of English, using slant rhyme and near-rhyme to approximate the sweeping formal energy of the original.