Scene @ Paradiso Launch Party

Robert Hollander is flanked by Jason Epstein and Gerry Howard at a party Tuesday night celebrating Doubleday’s publication of Paradiso, the final volume of a translation of Dante Alighieri‘s Divine Comedy he undertook with his wife, poet Jean Hollander, nearly a decade ago. Before snapping the picture, I chatted with Hollander about how he and his wife decided to undertake the translation while he was in the initial stages of putting Princeton’s Dante Project online, and she had argued against using the modified version of John Sinclair‘s prose translation he was preparing. Then he talked about all the happy emails he was getting from college professors now that they didn’t have to switch to other English-language versions in the middle of the semester after assigning students Inferno and Purgatorio (which came out in 2000 and 2003). The early critical reaction to their translation has been equally enthusiastic, with more reviews sure to follow. (Now that the whole trilogy is in, maybe they’ll finally get a mention in the NYTBR, which, as far as I can tell, hasn’t touched Dante’s poetry since W.S. Merwin tackled Purgatorio in 2000.)

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