SOURCE: A review of The Inferno of Dante, in The New York Times Book Review, January 1, 1995, pp. 3, 21.

Ahern is an American educator and noted Dante scholar. In the following favorable review of The Inferno of Dante, he discusses the difficulties of rendering into English Dante's "vulgar eloquence" and his polyphony of narrative voices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson recommended Dante's Commedia as the textbook to teach the young the art of writing well: "Dante knew how to throw the weight of his body into each act…. I find him full of the nobil volgare eloquenza; that he knows 'God damn,' and can be rowdy if he please, and he does please." Neither Emerson nor his young admirer Walt Whitman gave us a rowdy American "Comedy." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation appeared in 1865, a decade after Leaves of Grass. As a professor of Romance languages and the author of Evangeline, Longfellow...