One Version of Dante

The Inferno of Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, with illustrations by Barry Moser. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980.

Allen Mandelbaum's translation is quintessentially postmodern, fully and multifariously cognizant of the private, political, sociological, historical and linguistic worlds of the Commedia. It privileges the complex play of language, the eccentric, the digressions, diversions and asides, the intense internal structure of Dante's verse, as is evident in the introductory elucidation:

“He needs every tangibility he can summon from the world of the shades---but summons personally, crossing into that world, witnessing. He needs to begin his journey from as state as like to death as one can get while still alive. He needs to read his Hegel well (just as Hegel must read him) to understand that not only the Christian but the Hegelian---or the Heideggerian---poet can gather ultimate energy from only one sure fount: the fear---the absolute fear---of death, a wood “so bitter---death is hardly more severe” (Inf 1,7). And to that end, it matters little whether what is feared is divine judgment or causeless nothingness, Madame Oubli and her company of Slabby-mists, of Nebel, Nichts, Neant and just Victor Hugo's 'old usherette' with he black spectacle.'”