Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell.

Midway through the journey of our life, a poet finds himself lost in a dark wood, and there begins the most famous descent in all of literature. This volume presents Dante's Inferno in the noble English of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

What it's about

Guided by the shade of the Roman poet Virgil, Dante travels down through the nine descending circles of Hell, meeting the souls of the damned and hearing their stories as he goes. Each circle punishes a particular class of sin, and the pilgrim's journey becomes a vast moral panorama of human wrongdoing and its consequences, rendered in unforgettable images of suffering, dignity, and horror. Longfellow's nineteenth-century translation, the first major American rendering of the poem, carries Dante's vision into English with gravity and devotion.

Themes

The Inferno is a profound meditation on sin, justice, and the order of the moral universe, but also a deeply human poem of pity, memory, and the encounters between the living and the dead. Through its damned souls it explores love and betrayal, pride and violence, and the terrible logic by which each sin becomes its own punishment.

Why it still matters

Dante's poem stands among the supreme achievements of world literature, and Longfellow's translation played a central part in bringing it to English-speaking readers. To read the Inferno is to confront one of the great imaginings of judgement and self-knowledge, as urgent now as when it was written.

Who it's for

For readers approaching Dante for the first time, for lovers of classic poetry and of Longfellow's craft, and for anyone ready to undertake literature's most extraordinary journey into the depths.