The Inferno

This startling new translation of Dante’s *Inferno* is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland’s most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante’s epic, Carson’s virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing—a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney’s *Beowulf* and Ted Hughes’s *Tales from Ovid* , Ciaran Carson’s *Inferno* is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.