Inferno

Author: Dante Alighieri

Props to the translator first of all. I think I picked up a copy of this book that the translator made a special effort to modernize it. It was very easy to read. It also came with various illustrations throughout the book which was a nice addition.

What to say about this book? It’s a poem about a person on a tour through hell. A nice summer beach read I’d say.

There are two other books in this series. The second is called Purgatory, and the third is paradise. I’ll let you speculate the setting of the other two books.

Some interesting structural factoids about this poem:

A careful look into the structure of the Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy reveals a rigorously conceived epic poem whose form grows from a careful symmetry. The combined cantos of the three cantiche—33, 33, and 33, plus Inferno’s opening canto as a prologue—add up to 100. This tripartite formula—multiples of 3 with an up-rounding 1—trickles down into other structural details. Each cantica contains 9 primary zones and a tenth, crowning feature. In Inferno, the 9 zones are the 9 circles, and the crowning feature is bottom-dwelling Satan. There is also the terza rima, the chain-rhyming tercets that thread the epic together. Each canto caps off its accumulation of tercets with a final, single line that rounds up to a multiple of 10.

Anyways, as I’ve mentioned in other write ups, I’ve been trying to read through some of the classics lately and this of course came up. I didn’t find it hugely impacting, but was certainly a unique read.