Which translation of Inferno should you read?

The faithful poet’s version, and free. Longfellow abandons rhyme for unrhymed lines that follow Dante almost word for word, so as a crib to the Italian it is remarkably close, and there is real dignity in the cadence. It is also of its century: the diction is elevated and inverted (“Midway upon the journey of our life”), and modern readers feel the age of it. His notes, drawing on a circle of Boston Dante scholars, are still worth reading. Come to Longfellow for accuracy and gravity at no cost, not for a contemporary voice.

The first complete American Divine Comedy (1867); long a standard faithful English text (Project Gutenberg #1001 for the Inferno).

The Dante the Romantics read. Cary casts the poem in Miltonic blank verse, grand and knotty, and it was his 1814 version that first carried Dante deep into English literary life, with Coleridge lecturing on it and Keats taking it up the mountains. It is markedly archaic now, its word order twisted for the metre (“In the midway of this our mortal life”), and freer with the plain sense than a modern crib. Read Cary as a monument of early nineteenth-century English verse and for its sheer sonorous weight, not as a transparent window onto the Italian. Public domain.

The translation that established Dante in English Romanticism; admired by Coleridge, Keats, and Ruskin (Project Gutenberg #8789).

The one that proves terza rima can live in English. Pinsky, a working poet, uses a supple slant-rhyme to keep Dante’s three-line chain moving without contorting the sense, and the result is fast, muscular, and built to be read aloud. It covers the Inferno only, and purists note the rhyme sometimes costs a shade of literal accuracy, but no modern version better conveys why this poem drives. The facing Italian and Nichols’s notes round out a handsome edition. The top pick for a first, spoken Inferno.

Winner of wide acclaim on publication (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994); a Book-of-the-Month favourite and a standard modern verse Inferno.

The classroom Inferno for a generation. Ciardi, himself a poet, keeps a loosened three-line stanza and clear, contemporary diction, and his canto-by-canto notes are famous for opening the poem up to first-time readers. He describes his method as building an English equivalent rather than a literal echo, so it reads smoothly at a small cost in exactness. Some now find it a touch dated, but for a guided, readable trip through Hell with a trustworthy hand on your shoulder, Ciardi still serves beautifully.

The best-selling American Inferno for decades (New American Library, 1954); long the default assigned text in U.S. schools.

The scholar’s Inferno in English. Robert Hollander, a lifelong Dante man, supplies the fidelity and the vast commentary while the poet Jean Hollander shapes the blank-verse line, and the facing-page Italian makes it a genuine study edition. It is the version to read when you want to be sure what Dante actually wrote, with every allusion tracked, though the apparatus dwarfs the poem and the verse is more accurate than it is stirring. Less a first read than the one you graduate to.

The Princeton Dante Project edition (Doubleday, 2000); a benchmark for annotated fidelity in English.