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Translations · 1800 words · Updated with expanded scholarship America’s Strange Obsession With Translating Dante Here is a paradox worth sitting with: the United States, a country with no medieval Catholic heritage, no Romance language in its founding culture, and a constitutional suspicion of Old World hierarchies, has produced more significant English translations of Dante’s … Read more

I own thirteen English translations of Dante’s Inferno. Thirteen. Some sit gathering dust on my shelf. Others I’ve marked up so heavily they barely close. But here’s the strange thing: if I hand you Longfellow’s version and then Ciardi’s, you’d think they translated different poems entirely. The opening canto reads like a funeral dirge in … Read more