Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Diane Jean Schemo

SOURCE: "Bringing Dante Into the Realm of Contemporary English," in The New York Times, January 31, 1995, pp. C13-C14.

In the following essay, Schemo discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Pinsky's translation. She also reports on Pinsky's reaction to the attention The Inferno of Dante has received.

It was not a late-born obsession with evil or the ways of damnation that drove Robert Pinsky to translate Dante's Inferno, the 14th-century poet's odyssey through hell. Rather, it was the challenge of tackling the first slice of the Divine Comedy, perhaps the greatest poem ever written. The Inferno had been rendered into English a hundred times by scholars and writers, and yet remained elusive, unmastered, poetry's Everest of the underworld.

Some, like Dorothy L. Sayers in the late 1940's, had gone for a strict line-by-line translation of the Divine Comedy, and ended up with a work that sounded stilted to the English...
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