Dante

I read the Inferno in Robert Hollander's class at Princeton--it occupied two lectures in a survey course that started with Augustine and ended with, I believe, Thomas Mann--and sorry to say Prof. Hollander's efforts failed to make a Danteist out of me. Nor did working in an editorial capacity on R. W. B. Lewis's fine biography of Dante in the Penguin Lives series. But Tim Parks's marvelous New Yorker article, a review of the Hollanders' translation of Inferno from 2001, has come the closest to awakening in me a longing to re-read the poem, probably because Parks does not entirely buy the Hollanders' scrubbed version. The New Yorker web site has done everyone a service by posting Parks's original article--on the occasion of the final volume of the Hollanders' translation.

A Critic at Large: Hell and Back: The New Yorker