This startling new translation of Dante's
Inferno
is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland's most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante's epic, Carson's virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing—a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney's
Beowulf
and Ted Hughes's
Tales from Ovid
, Ciaran Carson's
is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.