Robert Hollander says that it is heavily indebted to John D. Nevertheless, her translation is a poem, and it sounds like one. Relieved of the task of rhyming, she is able to stay closer to Dante’s wording. She has used blank verse, primarily: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Some translators have compromised on aba, cdc-in other words, rhyming in twos, not threes-but that’s not easy, either, if you’re trying to be faithful to Dante’s text. In English, it is next to impossible, as can be seen in the frequency of ridiculous forced rhymes in terza-rima translations. In Italian, where almost every word ends in a vowel, you can come up with such a number. To reproduce the Comedy in English terza rima, it has been calculated, approximately forty-five hundred triple rhymes are needed. The notes are by Robert, who is a Dante scholar and a professor emeritus at Princeton, where he taught the Divine Comedy for forty-two years.ĭante’s poem is fiendishly difficult to translate into verse, partly because of its lovely, garlanded rhyme scheme, terza rima-or aba, bcb, cdc. Jean Hollander, a poet, was in charge of the verse Robert Hollander, her husband, oversaw its accuracy. At the same time, it is lofty, the more so for being plain.

It is more idiomatic than any other English version I know. Now their Paradiso (Doubleday $40) is out. The Hollanders’ Inferno was published in 2000, their Purgatorio in 2003. If you haven’t yet read the Divine Comedy-you know who you are-now is the time, because Robert and Jean Hollander have just completed a beautiful translation of the astonishing fourteenth-century poem. The Paradiso was Dante’s third and last chance to turn our thoughts toward redemption, and he went at the task directly.

Divine comedy hollander