Recommended reading - Dante’s Inferno, poem by Dante Alighieri (1321):

The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso

By Dante Alighieri.

Translated by John Ciardi.

Published by Berkley.

Originally published 1321.

This edition published 2003.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0451208633

ISBN-13: 978-0451208637

Description:

The authoritative translations of The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso – together in one volume.

Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri’s poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise – the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.

Now, for the first time, John Ciardi’s brilliant and authoritative translations of Dante’s three soaring canticles – The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso – have been gathered together in a single volume. Crystallizing the power and beauty inherent in the great poet’s immortal conception of the aspiring soul, The Divine Comedy is a dazzling work of sublime truth and mystical intensity.

Dante's Inferno: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

By Dante Alighieri.

Illustrated by Paul Brizzi and Gaëtan Brizzi.

Published by Harry N. Abrams.

Published 2024.

Hardcover.

ISBN-10: 1419776754

ISBN-13: 978-1419776755

Description:

Acclaimed animators Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi adapt Dante’s literary classic Inferno in the sweeping, dramatic style that brought The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Fantasia 2000 to life.

Literary aficionados will appreciate this decadent graphic novel adaptation, which does not seek to sand down the source material. Likewise, adults whose imaginations were fueled by films like Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame as children, which the Brizzi brothers animated sequences for, will be swept up in this lushly illustrated adult fable, unfettered by the demands of corporate animation studios.

Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi make this famously dense literary classic accessible without distorting it and betraying the spirit of the Italian genius. They deftly translate it into comics while taking care to preserve the heart of the story: a taste for excess, dramatic tension, and the inevitable darkness of the subject matter.

Guided by the poet Virgil, Dante crosses the nine circles of Hell to find his beloved, Beatrice, in Paradise. Along the way, he must recognize and reject each of the incarnations of sin. In each circle of Hell, Dante confronts both sinners and demons, from Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, and Paris, whose loves were famously their downfall, to the Greek Furies and Medusa, to heretics like Epicurus, whose teachings claimed that the soul died with the body, now forced to writhe in a flaming tomb for eternity.

Each layer of Hell reveals monsters, gods, historical and mythological kings, philosophers, queens, and hordes of the miserable, faceless damned, all culminating in a confrontation with Lucifer himself.