The Inferno

001

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

 

Canto I - The Dark Wood of Error

Canto II - The Descent

Canto III - THE VESTIBULE OF HELL

Canto IV - CIRCLE ONE: Limbo

Canto V - CIRCLE TWO

Canto VI - CIRCLE THREE

Canto VII - CIRCLE FOUR

Canto VIII - CIRCLE FIVE: Styx

Canto IX - CIRCLE SIX

Canto X - CIRCLE SIX

Canto XI - CIRCLE SIX

Canto XII - CIRCLE SEVEN: Round One

Canto XIII - CIRCLE SEVEN: Round Two

Canto XIV - CIRCLE SEVEN: Round Three

Canto XV - CIRCLE SEVEN: Round Three

Canto XVI - CIRCLE SEVEN: Round Three

Canto XVII - CIRCLE SEVEN: Round Three

Canto XVIII - CIRCLE EIGHT (Malebolge)

Canto XIX - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Three

Canto XX - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Four

Canto XXI - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Five

Canto XXII - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Five

Canto XXIII - CIRCLE EIGHT : Bolgia Six

Canto XXIV - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Seven

Canto XXV - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Seven

Canto XXVI - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Eight

Canto XXVII - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Eight

Canto XXVIII - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Nine

Canto XXIX - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Ten

Canto XXX - CIRCLE EIGHT: Bolgia Ten

Canto XXXI - THE CENTRAL PIT OF MALEBOLGE

Canto XXXII - CIRCLE NINE: Cocytus

Canto XXXIII - CIRCLE NINE: Cocytus

Canto XXXIV - NINTH CIRCLE: Cocytus

“It is Mr. Ciardi’s great merit to be one of the first American translators to have ... reproduced [The Inferno] successfully in English. A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original ... a spectacular achievement.”

—Archibald MacLeish

 

“Fresh and sharp.... I think this version of Dante will be in many respects the best we have seen.”

—John Crowe Ransom

DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in 1265. Considered Italy’s greatest poet, this scion of a Florentine family mastered the art of lyric poetry at an early age. His first major work, La Vita Nuova (1292), was a tribute to Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life. Dante’s political activism resulted in his being exiled from Florence, and he eventually settled in Ravenna. It is believed that The Divine Comedy—comprising three canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso-was written between 1308 and 1320. Dante Alighieri died in 1321.

 

JOHN CIARDI was a distinguished poet and professor, having taught at Harvard and Rutgers universities, and a poetry editor of The Saturday Review. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1955, he won the Harriet Monroe Memorial Award, and in 1956, the Prix de Rome. He died in 1986.

001

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To Judith

 

Cosi n’andammo infino alla lumiera,
parlando cose, che il tacere è bello,
si com’ era il parlar colà dov’ era.

Translator’s Note

When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same “music,” the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.

Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from language to language is better conceived as a “transposition” than as a “translation,” for “translation” implies a series of word-for-word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries any more than piano sounds exist in the violin.

The notion of word-for-word equivalents also strikes me as false to the nature of poetry. Poetry is not made of words but of word-complexes, elaborate structures involving, among other things, denotations, connotations, rhythms, puns, juxtapositions, and echoes of the tradition in which the poet is writing. It is difficult in prose and impossible in poetry to juggle such a complex intact across the barrier of language. What must be saved, even at the expense of making four strings do for eighty-eight keys, is the total feeling of the complex, its gestalt.

The only way I could see of trying to preserve that gestalt was to try for a language as close as possible to Dante’s, which is in essence a sparse, direct, and idiomatic language, distinguishable from prose only in that it transcends every known notion of prose. I do not imply that Dante’s is the language of common speech. It is a much better thing than that: it is what common speech would be if it were made perfect.

One of the main sources of the tone of Dante’s speech is his revolt from the Sicilian School of Elegance. Nothing would be more misleading than to say that Dante’s language is simple. Overwhelmingly, however, it seeks to avoid elegance simply for the sake of elegance. And overwhelmingly it is a spoken tongue.

I have labored therefore for something like idiomatic English in the present rendering.