Writer's Notebook: the Inferno

There are a few books in this world that own parts of my soul, and one of them is the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. This is an odd happenstance because it's a really, really long poem and I have an almost complete inability to appreciate poetry. On the other hand once you get past the poetry thing the Divine Comedy is obviously my kind of book: it's a self-insertion fanfic dealing with damnation and redemption. What's not to love?

There's a lot more I could say about why I find it so fascinating, but I don't feel like journaling about that tonight. Instead, I want to record a few thoughts about the various translations of the Inferno that I have read recently. There are a lot of different translations running around, and while I will always love John Ciardi's that's not to say that I can't love other translations as well.

That's the theory, anyway. As a practical matter I wasn't enraptured by any of the three I started with, but I'm not downhearted: there must be at least five other translations at Bennet Martin library, and that's not counting the one by Sinclair which I will apparently have to get via intra-library loan. But that's a project that will have to wait until after I get that book chapter written.

So, here is what I have so far:

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