Inferno

"Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang has translated the Inferno at a moment when popular culture is so prevalent that it has even taken Dante, author of the fourteenth-century epic poem The Divine Comedy, and turned him into an action-adventure video game hero. Dante wrote his poem in the vernacular, rather than in literary Latin. Bang has similarly created an idiomatically rich contemporary version that is accessible, musical, and audacious. She?s matched Dante?s own liberal use of allusion by incorporating cultural references familiar to contemporary readers: Shakespeare and Dickinson, Freud and South Park, Kierkegaard and Stephen Colbert. With haunting illustrations by Henrik Drescher, this is the most readable Inferno available in English, a truly remarkable achievement." -- from publisher's website.