The Divine Comedy

“Despite a glut of English translations (well over a hundred, by my count),” writes Dante scholar Robert Pogue Harrison, “New versions of the entire [Divine Comedy] poem or individual canticles continue to appear in rapid succession—six in the last decade alone.” Over at the New York Review of Books, he investigates three of the latest: Dan Brown’s Inferno, Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno, and Clive James’s Divine Comedy.

New this week: Clive James’s translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Edward O. Wilson’s Letters to a Young Scientist, Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley, and The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite.