Read Inferno first, in Allen Mandelbaum's blank-verse translation of 1980, with facing Italian and steady notes; then Purgatorio, then Paradiso, same translator to the end. The Divine Comedy is one hundred cantos in three canticles — thirty-four, then thirty-three, then thirty-three — and first-time readers mostly succeed by not improvising the order.
What Are You Actually Getting Into?
A poem in terza rima — interlocking triple rhymes — set at Easter of 1300 and left essentially finished at Dante's death in Ravenna in 1321: the story of a man shown, in order, what sin, repair, and joy actually are. Exiled from Florence in 1302 when his party fell, Dante wrote in the Tuscan vernacular at a moment when serious poetry was expected in Latin. The Comedy is a large part of why Italian sounds the way it does.
Virgil guides him through Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory; Beatrice takes over for Paradise. He called it a comedy because it ends well and runs in a middle style, not because it is funny — though it is, sometimes, on purpose. The architecture announces itself: Hell's descending circles, each punishing its own kind of disordered love; the terraces of Purgatory; the spheres of Heaven. You do not need the map memorized. The poem tells you where you are.
Which Translation of the Inferno Should You Read?
Any of three, honestly: Allen Mandelbaum's Inferno (1980), generous and quick, with the Italian on the facing page; Robert Hollander's version with Jean Hollander (Inferno, 2000), the most textually careful, with line notes that identify every Florentine; or Mary Jo Bang's Inferno (2012), deliberately contemporary in idiom and genuinely controversial for it.
Bang inserts modern references into her line, and a good part of the Dante world objected that the poem's strangeness was being domesticated; her defenders answer that every translation domesticates something. Either way she is best read second, after you know what is being substituted for. The elders — Dorothy L. Sayers's Penguin version (1949), John Ciardi's 1954 paperback, Clive James's one-volume Divine Comedy (2013) — remain in print and serviceable.
| Translation | Year | Line and notes | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Allen Mandelbaum | 1980 | Blank verse; facing Italian; canto-end notes | A first reading |
| Robert and Jean Hollander | 2000 | Terse verse line; fullest line notes | A second reading, and study |
| Mary Jo Bang | 2012 | Contemporary idiom; intentional anachronism | Argument, and pleasure |
Related stories: Where to Start With Kierkegaard · Where to Start With Rumi.
How Should a First Reading Go?
In order, in one voice, with the notes treated as identification rather than instruction. A workable method looks like this:
- Pick one translator and stay through all of Hell. Switching mid-descent blurs the voices.
- Read a canto, then its notes, then the next canto. The notes exist to identify people — Florentine bankers, popes, mythological thieves — not to interpret for you.
- Read parts aloud. Terza rima is a sound before it is a scheme.
- After Inferno, continue in the same voice: Mandelbaum's Purgatorio and Paradiso followed within four years.
- Reread Inferno with the Hollanders' notes, or beside their commentary hosted by the Princeton Dante Project, before deciding you are finished.
What Surprises First-Time Readers?
The politics, first. Half of Hell seems to consist of thirteenth-century Florentine faction-fights, and popes appear where you did not expect popes; Dante expected his first readers to recognize these people the way we recognize names in the news. The second surprise is tenderness: Dante places his own teacher, Brunetto Latini, in Canto 15 among the sodomites and still writes the meeting as love. The poem's judgments are exact; its feelings are not tidy, and it never pretends otherwise.
The third surprise is pace. Readers expecting a museum expect to be bored and instead find a poem that moves like a courtroom drama — examinations, verdicts, escapes. This is why the advice never changes: read it quickly enough to feel the current.
Do You Need a Commentary?
Some, but less than you fear. Mandelbaum's canto-end notes and the Hollanders' fuller apparatus identify nearly every name; the poem does the rest. What you do need is the willingness not to stop for every allusion on a first pass. Dante wrote to carry his readers along, and a first reading that halts at every statue never leaves the gallery.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it called a comedy?
For the medieval senses of the word: a middle style, a plot that begins in misery and ends in blessedness, and a vernacular where a poem about the miserable and blessed could be written. It is a content label, not a promise of jokes.
Should I read a prose translation?
For study, occasionally, yes — prose cribs clarify cruxes. But the Comedy is built of sound and rhyme; a verse translation that keeps some of the architecture will teach you more than a fluent paragraph that keeps none.
Is Paradiso worth the difficulty?
It is a different difficulty — light instead of bodies, theology instead of mud — and most readers who arrive find it stranger and better than they feared. Purgatorio, meanwhile, is the canticle people end up loving most.
Can I just read Inferno?
Millions have, and it stands alone well enough. But the Comedy's judgment only completes in Paradise: Hell is the easiest part to visit and the hardest part to understand alone.