Reddit reviews Inferno (Bantam Classics)

I recommend the Allen Mandelbaum translation. It's very faithful to the text, but also readable, and is printed alongside the original poem.

> Because court chose to put them there

Yes, as punishment.

I do not agree that hell is some sort of "cosmic prison" precisely because its purpose is not punitive. Punishment in the Christian system exists so that one can be reformed, so that one might have the impetus to change one's ways and become a better person (in that sense Purgatory is far more analogous to a prison: it is punishment for sins with the purpose of being corrective—we do call prisons "correctional facilities," after all).

Yet hell does not exist to reform the sinner. Reform in hell is impossible, because one's renunciation of love is absolute. Rather, hell is the unfortunate logical necessity of the Christian soteriological framework. If we are free beings then we must be able to make the free choice not to love. Given that human beings are immortal, there must be a post-earthly place for those who choose not to love; hence, hell.

Another work to recommend would be Dante's Inferno, in which that greatest of Italian poets imagines that those in hell are so attached to their sins that they would choose the sin over anything else, even over the possibility of love.

The versions I got, this publisher for all three, had a couple good things in it. One, the italian was on the left hand pages, the english on the right, so you could still see the poetry. Two, all of the three were about 300 pages of text, and then about a hundred pages of finer print notes. I didn't read all the notes, but I used a good bit of them. They definitely helped me understand a good part of the history I definitely was lost on.

Should you go back? Yes. That's my opinion. The translation I had, even if you didn't read the notes, was simply a beautiful sounding translation. The beginning of purgatory is the most boring part, which I didn't even think bad, but it definitely gets better and more interesting when he goes through the seven deadly sins. Paradise is simply awe inspiring. You need to get through Purgatory just to get to Paradise. Purgatory was the worst of the three if I had to rank.

This is by far my personal favorite translation of Inferno. I've tried a couple of other translations, they just weren't as poetic. I also like that this has the original Italian side-by-side with the English, and the illustrations are interesting.