Product Description

"Inferno", the first volume of Dante Alighieri's "La Divina Comemedia", is an imaginitive tour de force. Dante's hero, Virgil, guides him through hell, showing him the inhabitants of each of its nine circles and examples of the divine justice meted out to them. Ciaran Carson's translation of the text is suffused with wit, anger and irreverent vigour and attempts not to diminish the pathos of the original.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #835316 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-17
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 296 pages

Review
"ON SHAMROCK TEA: 'Ciaran Carson is the circus act of contemporary Irish letters - a double-jointed marvel who defies the narrow, classifying imagination' Guardian

Ali Smith, Scotsman Books of the Year
‘Carson’s version...is the first I’ve ever read in which the English (because Irish really) ever seemed so kickingly alive’

Michael Longley, Irish Times Books of the Year
‘The propulsion and inventiveness makes his the Dante translation de nos jours’

Customer Reviews

Better than expected
I have to admit that I'm not a great fan of 'modernisations' of classics (Ted Hughes' Ovid et al.) but this was far better than I'd expected. I'd assumed that Carson would translate not just the poem, but also political references into the Belfast setting but actually he doesn't do this and, in fact, the poem remains set in C14th Florence.

And that's where the greatest flaw lies: the juxtaposition between C14th Florentine politics and mores explained in a sometimes idiomatic Belfast 'accent' doesn't quite work. That said this is a vibrant, flowing read that makes Dante more human than perhaps some of the more accurate translations.

Personally I think I'll always prefer the more stately prose of Sinclair (The Divine Comedy: I. Inferno: Inferno. Parallel Text Vol 1 (Galaxy Books)) but this is an excellent alternative perhaps for introducing Dante to new students.

A fascinating but flawed translation
Translating Dante into a modern idiom is obviously a desperately difficult task, especially if the translator aims to maintain some degree of loyalty to the distinctive but constrained metre and stanza forms of the original. And for a 21st century reader the flow of the verse is complicated by the often intensely referential content of the 'Inferno', involving many of Dante's Florentine contemporaries whose lives and stories are entirely obscure to us.

For me Ciaran Carson's commendable ambition has produced clunkingly uneven results. In places his language and expression are vivid and highly effective - generating 'powerful and arresting images' as one of the blurb reviews suggests, and transcending the classical stodge of earlier versions. But whereas other reviewers have seen much to praise in Carson's frequent and very conscious alternation between high-flown formal expression and Belfast-street colloquialism, I just found it disconcertingly incongruous and jarring. Particularly where casual and slangy terms are (as it seems) hauled in to achieve a pat rhyme, the effect is at times almost farcically smart-Alicky and at others perfectly bathetic.

So while this is a bold and interesting venture - and well worth the attention of Dante devotees, to see how they react - for me personally it ultimately falls a good way short of its aspirations.