Divine Comedies for the New Millennium

The difficulty of translating Dante has, paradoxically, created a steady of flux of translations. Around the year 2000, seven cantiche were translated by Dutchmen and seven by Americans, giving rise to a seminar on the state and tradition of translating Dante in both countries. In the course of discussing these landmark translations, contributors to this volume inevitably make statements about how Dante's masterpiece should be read: as a poem, to be translated fearlessly and confrontationally; as a scholarly text, to be treated cautiously and rigorously; or as some combination of the two?