Sunday, August 04, 2013

Inferno

This Pinsky translation of Inferno attempts to translate the "everyday Itanlian" of Dante to everyday English. At the start, this seems to work. However, Dante fills the book with details of many local Florentines. Alas, these don't translate well to modern days. (Perhaps if we add Bush, Tom Cruise and Obama we'll get a more true translation.) I also began to lose the flow of the narrative as it continued on. At the start, it seemed to go through degrees of "badness". The people were getting progressively worse. Dante was criticizing them for their sins, and comparing the sins of the well known to the sins of the not-so-popular. However, it later seemed to fall into a "tell-all" book where he criticized the local Florentine luminaries.

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