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  • The American Scholar

    TO HELL AND BACK

    Sep 01, 2022 4 minutes
    Review by Graeme Wood

    The first complete English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy appeared in 1802, and over the past two centuries, new versions have proliferated beyond count, like Beatles covers or Sherlock Holmes movies. A diverting literary parlor game is to imagine the best translations that weren’t written. T. S. Eliot would have produced something soul bending; Anthony Burgess suggested that the world lost a great Inferno when Wilfred Owen died. A similar game could be played with Divine Comedy illustrations, of which Gustave Doré and William Blake have provided the best known that do exist. Goya and R. Crumb would have produced the best that don’t.

    Somewhere between existence and nonexistence is the version

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