1933–2021 / b. 1928
A Dante scholar and a poet; their bilingual Inferno (2000) pairs a close verse rendering with an exhaustive commentary.
The scholar’s Inferno in English. Robert Hollander, a lifelong Dante man, supplies the fidelity and the vast commentary while the poet Jean Hollander shapes the blank-verse line, and the facing-page Italian makes it a genuine study edition. It is the version to read when you want to be sure what Dante actually wrote, with every allusion tracked, though the apparatus dwarfs the poem and the verse is more accurate than it is stirring. Less a first read than the one you graduate to.
⚠ Listed for completeness, NOT yet compared on this page. This site only characterises a translation once its passages have been read side by side against the others, and that sourcing has not been done for this version. No judgement here is implied either way.
⚠ Listed for completeness, NOT yet compared on this page. This site only characterises a translation once its passages have been read side by side against the others, and that sourcing has not been done for this version. No judgement here is implied either way.