This startling new translation of Dante's Inferno is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland's most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante's epic, Carson's virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing—a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, Ciaran Carson's Inferno is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.
Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast. He has been awarded the Forward Poetry Prize, The Irish Times Literature Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Yorkshire Post Prize. Shamrock Tea was longlisted for the Booker Prize and The Inferno won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2003. Carson’s prose books– Last Night’s Fun, The Star Factory, and Fishing for Amber – form a body of work unique in Irish literature.
This startling new translation of Dante's Inferno is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland's most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante's epic, Carson's virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing—a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, Ciaran Carson's Inferno is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.
Author
Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast. He has been awarded the Forward Poetry Prize, The Irish Times Literature Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Yorkshire Post Prize. Shamrock Tea was longlisted for the Booker Prize and The Inferno won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2003. Carson’s prose books– Last Night’s Fun, The Star Factory, and Fishing for Amber – form a body of work unique in Irish literature.