Robert Hollander is the scholar and linguist of the pair, and his voluminous notes are not only a brilliant and often necessary line-by-line guide to the complexity of the work but an impressive overview of the Dantean commentarial canon.
But I’d had the new edition by Robert and Jean Hollander recommended to me, and I’ve spent the last few weeks reading through it, excitedly, canto by canto: it’s a remarkable accomplishment. Merwin and several others have all put their hands to it. Sisson, Burton Raffel, Mary Jo Bang, Robert Pinsky, W.S. And since then translating Dante seems to have become poetry’s most popular indoor sport: Allen Mandelbaum, Mark Musa, Robert Durling, C.H. I had read Louis Biancolli’s and John Ciardi’s translations when younger, and neither had really struck home since then I’d sampled other versions as I’d run across them. Some years ago a friend set me a challenge: to find a translation of Dante as good as Robert Fitzgerald’s version of the Iliad.
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