BOOK

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation

by Robert Pinsky

Illustrations by Michael Mazur

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $35

When Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) completed his Commedia sometime in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, he broke new literary ground by becoming the first Italian poet or produce a formal aesthetic work in the volgare, the native tongue of Tuscany.

While the French, Germans and even the English had vernacular literary forms with precedents dating back into the Middle Ages, no comparable literary tradition existed in Italy. Dante changed all that.

Accordingly, Renaissance historian George Holmes has written that through his Commedia Dante "establish [ed] the volgare as a great literary tongue" and in doing so committed "the most fundamental act of Italian self-assertion in the medieval and Renaissance period."

The bold symphony of Dante's volgare comes to life with renewed vitality in Boston University professor Robert Pinsky's new verse translation of Inferno, the first and mostfamous of the three cantiche of the Divine Comedy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35).

In Pinsky's translations, passion triumphs over literalness and the result is that Pinsky--the author of several poetry collections--reveals his true identity in his work: He is more a poet than a translator. The fruit of Pinsky's labor, a vivid and passionate Inferno, is the benefactor of this bias.

The author stresses accuracy of images, metaphors and tone over the conventions of form. He dodges anachronistic language in favor of conveying the true emotion of the text the modern day reader. His vocabulary reflects the meaning packed concision of Dante's own.

But this does not mean that the translator sacrifices accuracy in the name of making his lines rhyme. Working with a "more relaxed definition" of rhyme, Pinsky fills out the Inferno's tercets with `half rhymes," like "aim/come," as well as the more traditional "full rhymes,' like "plunder/under."

Pinsky's fresh, vital language doesn't wither in the face of Dante's infernal landscapes. Take, for example, the description of the myriad souls collecting at the river Archeron:

As leaves in quick succession sail down in autumn

Until the bough beholds its entire store