Rating: 
Summary: A True Masterpiece
Review: ... This translation - the Hollanders' - is rendered by beautifully readable, relaxed, English verse that is remarkably close in meaning to Dante Alighieri's great poem. The music of the poem is a harder thing to imitate, but the Hollanders have given us a lovely sounding diction. Which is to say that it is an excellent translation. But more importantly, here's why you need to own this translation: People REALLY need to know why Dante Alighieri's Commedia is great and why they should read it even if they're not assigned it in school. Not only do they need to know why, they also need to experience the poem profoundly, even though its inception is seven centuries past. Anybody who would bring into the world yet another translation of this poem must be able to answer that question in one way or another. These translator's do that in an excellent user-friendly format: beautifully made rendering of the verse, followed by brief, illuminating line-commentary at the end of each Canto. Also, read the introduction. It's not one of those forbiding 77 page monographs that one finds so often at the start of too many wonderful books. This one's fresh, to the point, and gets you into the poem very quickly. This in itself is worth the price of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: a beautiful side-by-side inferno
Review: A side-by-side (Italian and English) Dante is a real treat. The medieval Italian is beautiful even if you don't understand it, and you cannot help but learn something if you glance at it every now and then.
The Hollanders translation is lovely and literate. It seems very close to the Italian and is well annotated. The notes cover not only historical and literary allusions but some of the translators' choices and interpretational debates as well. There's an outline before each canto and every line is covered in the after notes. Names, places, and subjects are indexed. There are a map of Hell and an outline of sins and punishments at the front, but more diagrams might be useful.
If I could only have one Inferno, this would be it. For those who need more visuals, books of illustrations by Gustave Dore and others are available separately.
Rating: 
Summary: its a great book, but ultimately disgusting
Review: I had to read this for English AP in High School. Now I found it to be a very well-written book. The poems are excellent and certainly dramatic; the setting is incredibly imaginative. Again, Dante might have been writing only symbolically throughout the book; certainly, all the tortures may be interpreted this way, if at times the interpretations are a bit forced. In the end, the book as an artistic structure is very sound. It is the author's attitude, and world-view, as revealed in this book, thats so very disturbing. I was incredibly surprised to find that 'sullenness' is considered a sin (?!?) and that sullen people are buried in marshes. What the heck?. The plight of everyone in hell is portrayed as just, but to the modern reader, comes across as pitiable and horrific, and also produces disgust at the nature of a God that would perpetrate such crimes. In fact, I was most jolted and surprised by the fact that Brutus- whom I walways considered noble, if misguided- is considered one of the three WORST sinners of all time! Dante's Hell is the reflection os an angry, wrathful and ultimately evil God. A god who sets up arbitrary rules and requires his populace to follow them, and then punishes them eternally for deviating. After reading this book, the feeling you get is that everyone is going to hell, if its all true. For not believing in God one will burn in a coffin forever. For committing suicide one will be turned into a thorny tree and suffer at the hands of harpies. For being homosexual one is forced to run across burning sands while fire falls from above. For lying to a friend one will suffer from all manner of diseases and corruptions- all of this FOREVER. Ultimately, I was disgusted by the book. I suppose one could, as an apologist for Dante, argue all these tortures are meant merely symbolically. But I don't believe that, and would rather not read a similar book again, no matter how high the artistic achievement.
Rating:
Summary: A major step forward in my understanding.
Review: I have started several Infernos and have dropped every one of them at some point, unwilling to continue Dante's journey. This is the first one I have read all the way through, enjoyed, and learned an immense amount without hurting my head at all. I'm no authority on Italian but I am an avid poetry reader and I found the translation to be superb; there is no straining for effect, nor does it sound flat and/or prosaic. It's a subtle and highly admirable balance of the dramatic and scholarly. But it's the outstanding notes that really make this version work for me. Detailed without being overwhelming and referenced by line for ease of use, they bring up the key points of interpretation (as well as a lot of fascinating lesser subjects) in a friendly and enlightening manner. I now envy those who have been fortunate enough to take Robert Hollander's class on Dante, but take solace that having his and his wife's wonderful work in this handsome volume may be the next best thing to being there. If you have found the Divine Comedy too daunting in the past, I urge you to check out the Hollanders: they provide great poetry for enjoyment and much food for thought, and all without "dumbing down" what is truly one of the greatest works of the human imagination. For me, a revelation.
Rating:
Summary: read it!
Review: i knew the story, of course, but had never read the poem. My greek mythology knowledge is rudimentary. none of that matters this brilliant update of the poem is easy to read and the notes to each canto ensure you understand all the references it was the best book i have read for quite some time, so do not be put off if this looks like a heavyweight prospect ... its not .. its fun, entertaining and educative all rolled into one go for it!! five stars
Rating:
Summary: Great work of art
Review: I stumbled upon Dante's Divine Comedy a couple years ago, when I was 15 I believe. While watching the movie Seven I noticed the refernce to Dante's Inferno... I had heard the name before but only now did I think to research it. I went to my local bookstore and picked up Hollander's translation for two reasons, I wanted a hardcover version, and I had read great reviews from Amazon about it. Well I got it home and began reading it immediately. From cover to cover, I thought the book was tremendous. Granted this is the only translation of Inferno that I have read, I can say that this is my favorite book of any I have read. Hollander's words are strong enough to depict a vivid picture, but not so overbearing and tedious that I wanted to put the book back on the shelf and forget about it. I highly recommend that anybody interested in reading Dante's works should pick up this book and add it to their collection. Thankfully, Purgatorio and Paradiso are in the works now and should be out this year, and by judging from the work in this book, I can confidently guess that those too will be extraordianry.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece!
Review: It doesn't matter if you have read every other translation of Dante's immortal poem, if you haven't read Hollander's, you haven't fully absorbed the amazing power of this classic work of art.
Rating:
Summary: The Lord of Fantasy
Review: Medieval illuminators liked to illustrate whole stories in every miniaturesque detail on barely more than a square inch of parchment. We see the bread loaf on the table, bricklayers work on unfinished walls which direct the view to a landing ship. Hunters chase game in a near forest. It is this view into a doll house, the comfort and cosines of enclosing walls and complete self-sufficiency that stirred the medieval mind. It is the mind of a child, a child with not enough supervision. It doesn't wash, terrorizes the streets in gangs, it is illiterate and hysterically credulous, it brutalizes animals and immolates witches; it is a street-wise thug, superstitious like a fox, ill fed, blaspheming and continually drunk, because only beer avoids the ever present diarrhea which lurks in every well. In such surrounding, hell needs to be painted in strong colours. But trapped in a lifelong purgatory of ceremony and feudal obligation, the individual may seek escape into prayer and a paranoid paradise of speculation and beauty. This is not a ripping good yarn of conflict and conquest; just a travelogue from a parallel universe. It comes with much philosophical baggage and ponderous logic, all of which is no longer quantum physics and something of a drag. It dresses in exactly 100 cantos, each of exactly the same length. We modern readers fail to appreciate such pedantic workmanship: we ask for a more organic texture, for a crisscross of leitmotifs and echoes. Only gradually emerges how tightly knit everything falls into place. This is great poetry, not a soap opera. Entering Dante's universe, we find ourselves in the realm of an absolute power, with a gigantic concentration camp at its feet, where victims cannibalize each other and Satan himself is the "Herr Commandant." Penal colonies circle a mountain all the way up to the Lord's own top security compound, while the intellectual opposition lingers in exile: Inferno (Canto 4) is not such a bad place after all. The visuals are intense and very specific. We pass the frowning squint of distant bystanders, address a man who can barely stop scratching his eczema while spurred to race along naked - familiar images, a survivor may remember from Auschwitz. A demon (named Dr. Mengele, no doubt), performs life surgery on Mohammed, but forgot to anesthetize. The poem's topography reaches from a city with red mosques behind a wall of iron to the unfolding rose at the centre of the empyrean. No other poem makes you hear the Sun's thundering silence; the scattered leaves of an entire universe bundle up in one flame. Similes stretch their wings and clouds of starlings and cranes crowd the sky; fishes mob the ponds at feeding time. T.S.Eliot tries to sell us Dante's pageant in the earthly paradise as a "higher dream" of spiritual beauty. Must be me, but a three eyed woman is a troubling sight. So are wings polka-dotted with wide open eyes, or green and crimson skin pigmentations. And this is just the beginning. Subsequently, Dante's encounter with his immutable sweetheart turns into a real nightmare, before it turns into something very different. Of course, this is a carnival of allegories and the modern reader uses to frown on allegory (but Kafka did it all the time). However in the end it comes all together in a visualization of meticulous accuracy and sensual presence. Modern attempts to create alternative worlds just pale by comparison. Dante is still the undisputed Lord of Fantasy. (On a more mundane level, his poem is of course a clever way of writing libel against his enemies.) A final observation: Poor Francesca who ended in hell for loving much, says: "if only the King of the Universe had been our friend ..." It echoes an other author of whom Dante himself had no first hand knowledge: "Gods make dangerous company," says Homer in the Iliad. There is more in this vein and the third part opens with an invocation of Apollo. Maybe it is merely a convention of learned poetry - but I wonder: why here of all places, at the entrance to Paradise? What kind of Christian is this Dante anyway? Just compare his position with the gospels's or Paul's existential assessment of this world's involuntary captivity in the clutches of evil. In Dante's presentation, sin is the voluntary failure of an individual. And what shall we think of this monumental idolatry, which Dante lavishes on his fish-blooded sweetheart, (who in real life was neither the first nor the last girl who kept the money in the family and married a banker instead of a poet?) The author seems to hold out on us, he seems to conceal the heretic in his heart. In the era before Dante, this type of idolatry was typical for the poetry at the "love-courts" in the Languedoc. So, how can a reader with English as his only language get an authentic taste of Dante? I am sure, it could be done to produce an englished Dante in terza rima of utmost clarity and a bearable minimum of padding, but it would take a bilingual and very talented translator and a publisher willing to subsidize a lifelong and single-minded effort. I don't see it happen, so for now only an accurate prose translation, paradoxically, will preserve the essentials of Dante's poetic substance - his accurate visuals and the wealth of sub-textual counterpoints. A Miltonian barrage of "thee" and "thou" will not do. Even an unrhymed merely rhythmical translation, like Musa's, sometimes compromises on clarity. Durling's translation is very good, Singleton's still the staple, Hollander's rendition appears even to preserve many of the Italian rhyme words. They do not resonate in English, but their position at the closing of a line allows to see how their semantics toss on the ball to their companions. Pinsky is only for fans of Pinsky.
Rating:
Summary: A Welcome Inferno
Review: The Hollanders have done a remarkable job in presenting Dante's Inferno. The annotations are extensive and varied as they pull from many authoritative sources. If you do not have a strong classics background, reading the Inferno is difficult as Dante referenced and copied the great epic poets who came before him. To read it, without the guidance of an experienced teacher or a superb annotation is to ultimately lose the book and wonder why it is a classic. The joy of this translation is that through its notes it opens the whole text to you and if you do get lost it is in mastery of Dante which is how it should be. The Hollanders should be proud and we eternally thankful for their intelligence and care which shine through their Inferno.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Translation
Review: The Inferno translated incredibly well. It has English/Italian side by side. The english reading is translated using the same verse structure and as close a translation as possible. Excellent explanation of the verse and character references in the story. I would highly recomment this work and translation. Hopefully, Mr. Hollander will also offer a translation of the Purgatorio and Paradisio.
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