The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Alighieri, Dante

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590171144 ISBN 13: 9781590171141

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2004

Synopsis

This startling new translation of Dante's Inferno is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland's most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante's epic, Carson's virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing—a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, Ciaran Carson's Inferno is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast. He has been awarded the Forward Poetry Prize, The Irish Times Literature Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Yorkshire Post Prize. Shamrock Tea was longlisted for the Booker Prize and The Inferno won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2003. Carson’s prose books– Last Night’s Fun, The Star Factory, and Fishing for Amber – form a body of work unique in Irish literature.

From Booklist:

While news-making controversy rages over the mounting mound of Bible translations, yet another Dante's Inferno in English doesn't much bother anyone. Nor should it in the case of Ulster poet Carson's version. Comparison with dual-language editions confirms it is faithful to the original, only with a slight Scots-Irish accent (e.g., in using girn instead of snarl), which may require occasional recourse to a collegiate dictionary. Writing in Dante's form, terza rima, necessarily with plenty of off rhymes (English isn't rhyme-rich like Italian), Carson nicely manages the form's propulsive thrust; when Virgil wants Dante to get a move on in this version, we share his urgency. Carson says that as he got deeper into the work, he took a lot of walks around Belfast. Perhaps the rhythm of his pace infected that of his verse. At any rate, this is brisk reading, and the journey from the dark wood through Hell's nine circles to Satan's waist and beyond has seldom been so bracing. An excellent choice for first acquaintance with a perpetually fascinating classic. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1590171144
• ISBN 13: 9781590171141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328