“Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” the rich man asks Jesus. “ Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven” is the reply. The rich man is sorrowful and turns away. “ It is easier,” Jesus remarks to his disciples, “ for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Some thirteen hundred years later, the poet, politician, and philosopher Dante Alighieri, banished from his native Florence and thus largely bereft of this world’s goods, was nevertheless having trouble threading the eye of that needle. It seems that there are other attachments, aside from wealth, that make it difficult for us to turn our backs on this world. Passion, for one: Dante had loved a woman who rejected him, married someone else, and then compounded the affront by dying young and thus remaining forever desirable. Ambition was another: Dante had written a provocative work of political philosophy suggesting the kind of state that would give man the freedom to pursue perfection—hardly a scenario in which divine grace appeared to be important. Now, though, he found himself confused, disoriented:

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

for the straight way was lost.

So begins the Inferno, in a new translation by Robert and Jean Hollander (Doubleday; $35). It’s a feeling that many around the age of forty, as Dante was, will recognize. How to proceed? As day breaks in the dark wood, the poet sees a mountain before him. It is Mount Purgatory, the way to Paradise. But suddenly three ferocious beasts are blocking his path—a wolf, a leopard, and a lion. They are lust, pride, and avarice, some commentators say. They are incontinence, malice, and mad brutishness, say others. They are Dante’s Florentine enemies, the French monarchy, and the papacy, say yet others. Whatever or whoever, they are insuperable.

Just as the poet despairs, a figure emerges from the gloom and offers an unusual alternative. By special intercession of his dear departed Beatrice, now in Paradise, Dante is to be given the opportunity to approach the blessed place through Hell. After some hesitation, he decides to go. It was a fatal decision. Hell would never be the same again.

“For all of us,” Borges wrote, “ allegory is an aesthetic mistake.” Benedetto Croce and, to some extent, Schopenhauer, concur. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “ I hated, even as a child, allegory.” When a work of literature is reduced to a series of equivalences, he complained—white horse equals faithfulness and truth—it is explained away. We read it once, and we never need read it again.

The Divina Commedia, among the most celebrated of poems, is almost always presented to us as an allegory. Certainly this is the case with the heavily annotated edition that my son is poring over in high school in Verona. Who is the figure who appears to Dante in the wood? He is Virgil, the great Roman poet of the Aeneid, emblematic in the Middle Ages of the best that can be achieved by reason and conscience.Who is Beatrice? The embodiment of heavenly truth, the commentaries say. And the pilgrim poet? Obviously, he is Everyman. Would Lawrence, we wonder, have read such a poem even once?

Yet, long after the fires of Hell have burned themselves out, the debate about the Divina Commedia rages on. Leafing through the commentary that Robert Hollander has prepared for the new translation, one is immediately made aware of a sharp rift between different schools of opinion on the poem: the romantics, who were convinced that Dante sympathized with the sufferers in Hell, thus subverting the Christian tradition; and the traditionalists, equally convinced that, while the pilgrim in the poem sometimes wavers, the poet behind the work wholeheartedly endorsed every last, lacerating pang of a misbegotten, unrepentant humanity. Hollander, an academic, is decidedly among the anti-romantics and enters the fray with gusto. Meantime, his wife, a poet, who was responsible for the versification of the new translation, has also written a poem entitled “ A Mix-Up in Dante,” in which two unrelated characters from the Inferno, Francesca and Ulysses, enjoy a casual affair in a mishmash of contemporary settings; it’s a piece that implicitly supports her husband’s position that these two figures, adored by so many, are nothing more than incorrigible sinners. Until one has read the Inferno itself, it is hard to understand why the debate is so heated.

The poet turns away from this world. He is going to descend the nine circles of subterranean Hell, shin down Satan’s hairy legs to a hole at the very core of the planet, squeeze through, then climb out of the globe at the antipodes, scale the mountain of Purgatory, and achieve Paradise. That is the over-all trajectory of our allegory: man in contact with sin, man rejecting sin, man purifying himself, man returning to his Maker.

But by virtue of this holy pilgrimage Dante also intends to become one of the most famous poets of all time: human, historical time. What’s more, he will use the journey to stage a last, poignant meeting with the ever-beloved Beatrice. So has he really turned away from this world? The poem teems with contradictions and antithetical energies. Virgil, we soon suspect, is not merely the abstract apex of human piety and reason but the great poet whom Dante sought hardest to emulate, a charming individual who has not been admitted to Paradise, for the simple reason that he lived too early to accept Christ’s offer of salvation. It’s an outrage.

Beatrice, meanwhile, is Beatrice Portinari, whom Dante had worshipped since he was nine years old. And the pilgrim poet, as it turns out, is not Everyman but Dante Alighieri in person. The same goes for the damned. Never merely murderers, thieves, or pederasts, they are magnificently, abjectly themselves, still sinning and suffering in a place that, far from abstract or notional, is scorchingly, stinkingly real.

But how can a living man go unscathed through Hell? And how can a reader follow him? Will the poem be bearable? “ Abandon all hope, you who enter here,” the words above the gate announce. Hopefully, we go through. First, Dante sees the wretched souls of those “ who lived / without disgrace yet without praise.” Aimlessly following a whirling banner, they suffer because they would rather be anyone but themselves. Well, we’re used to people like that. Six hundred years later, T. S. Eliot would see them flowing over London Bridge. “ I could not believe death / had undone so many,” Dante says. Nothing new here.

Across the River Acheron, in the limbo of the first circle of Hell, are noble souls who, like Virgil, perished before Christ got around to saving us. Homer and Plato are here and, with them, all the tiny children who die unbaptized. Their torment is that “ without hope we live in longing.” So far, we can handle it.

But now the horror begins: souls tossed this way and that on stormy winds, torn apart by a three-headed dog under endless rain, sunk in bogs, sunk in boiling pitch, sunk in shit, sunk in blistering tombs, sunk in solid ice. Dante sees sinners forever unconsumed in consuming fire, forever scratching the scabs from their flesh, forever metamorphosing into snakes and lizards, forever upside down in filthy holes, forever brushing off burning embers that sift constantly down onto searing sand. How can he pass through it all unharmed? And how can Robert Hollander conclude his introduction with the remark that this is “ not a bad place once you get used to it”?

“So as not to be hurt,” says the Taittiriya Samhita, “ before coming near the fire, he wraps himself in the metres.” It’s a formula often repeated in the Vedic texts. Whether “ he” be god, priest, or mere mortal man, in order to approach the sacrificial fire, through which alone the heavens can be conquered, he must wrap himself “ in the metres.” It’s good advice. The real punishment of Dante’s damned is not this or that torture—many in Purgatory will face similar sufferings—but the fact that the torture can know no end. An adulteress is trapped forever in her moment of passion, a suicide is irretrievably marooned in the circumstances that led him to dash his brains out against a prison wall. It’s a place of obsession, a place where time has stopped and thought has become its own prison. To get through it, we must wrap ourselves in the metres, for metre obliges us to keep moving.

Now we see why Dante chooses as a guide a poet renowned for the perfection of his verse. As Virgil leads Dante from circle to circle, he first directs his attention, inviting him to talk to the damned, but then, crucially, he decides exactly how long Dante is to be allowed to stay in any one place. “ We must not linger here,” Virgil says, or, again, “ Let your talk be brief.” The constant danger is that the poet will find himself paralyzed:

The many people and their ghastly wounds

did so intoxicate my eyes

that I was moved to linger there and weep.

It’s an understandable response when you’ve just spoken to a decapitated nobleman holding his head by the hair. But Virgil is having none of it. “ What are you staring at. . . . The time we are allotted soon expires / and there is more to see.”

In short, Virgil sets the pace. It’s not that we need to think of him as a personification of metre. It’s just that he understands, as no one else does, the mutually tensing, only apparently contradictory vocations of poetry: to take us to the core of things, but then to get us safely out on the other side, with the reassuring, even anesthetizing progress of verse.

The metre in which Dante chose to wrap himself involved the arrangement of hendecasyllables—lines of eleven syllables—in the verse pattern known as terza rima. The poem progresses three lines at a time, the first and third lines rhyming and the second setting up the rhyme for the opening line of the next threesome. Once we have a sense of the role this structure plays in the story—how it thrusts us before what is too awful to contemplate, then snatches us away—we can begin to appreciate how difficult the Inferno is to translate, and how all-determining the initial decision: What form am I going to use?

The choice of staying with Dante’s terza rima is only for the boldest, or most reckless. Here is Dorothy Sayers giving us the speech in which that epitome of recklessness Ulysses remembers his voyage through the Pillars of Hercules, an act of hubris that, in Dante’s version of the story, led to fatal shipwreck:

No tenderness for my son, nor piety

To my old father, nor the wedded love

That should have comforted Penelope

Could conquer in me the restless itch to rove

And rummage through the world exploring it,

All human worth and wickedness to prove.

So on the deep and open sea I set

Forth, with a single ship and that small band

Of comrades that had never left me yet.

How the timbers strain here. Rove and rummage as the translator may through the resources of Victorian verse, all too often the rhyme clangs like a buoy in fog, rather than quietly chiming the passage from one moment to the next.

More recently, Robert Pinsky, remarking on how much more easily Italian can be rhymed than English, decided to go for a terza half rima, as it were, combining it with a versification so full of enjambment that the division into stanzas often appears quite arbitrary. It seems appropriate to quote Pinsky as he deals with the subject of painful internal rearrangement. Here we are in Canto XXVIII presenting the damned Mohammed at a time when there was no need to fear an ayatollah’s response:

No barrel staved-in

And missing its end-piece ever gaped as wide

As the man I saw split open from his chin

Down to the farting-place, and from the splayed

Trunk the spilled entrails dangled between his thighs.

I saw his organs, and the sack that makes the bread

We swallow turn to shit.

Despite Pinsky’s facility, one is everywhere aware of the effort required to achieve even these half rhymes, while in the process the focus of the verse often falls on the most unlikely words. “ Bread,” for example, is not in the original, and readers may be forgiven for having the odd impression, if only for a moment, that the bread is made by “ the sack,” the intestine. Everything becomes clear as the word “ shit” pulls us up brutally mid-line. But this is something Dante never does, for such effects break up the all-important flow.

Pinsky observes that some of the most effective renderings of Dante’s momentum have been in prose. Certainly John Sinclair’s 1939 translation is still a very safe bet if you want to sit down, read the Inferno right through, and then get up again. But what about the propulsive effect of the terza rima? “ In the genre called prose,” Mallarmé claimed, “ there are verses.” Here is Sinclair giving us the opening speech of the charming adulteress, Francesca:

O living creature gracious and friendly, who goest through the murky air visiting us who stained the world with blood, if the King of the universe were our friend we would pray to Him for thy peace, since thou hast pity of our evil plight.

These sentences have an austere rhythm of their own, and the archaic diction seems more acceptable without the alarm bell of forced rhyme. Sinclair’s version is rapid, to the point, and almost always close to the original. Nonetheless, we do miss the sense of constant, even division, of opening and closure, the reassurance of manifest artifice.

Robert and Jean Hollander’s new translation is, as an introductory note tells us, a reworking in free verse of Sinclair’s prose, reinforcing its rhythms, removing archaisms and awkwardness:

O living creature, gracious and kind,

that come through somber air to visit us

who stained the world with blood,

if the King of the universe were our friend

we would pray that He might give you peace,

since you show pity for our grievous plight.

With any translation of the Inferno, one can quibble ad infinitum, if only because the original just cannot be pinned down. But the Hollanders’ translation is a welcome addition, and, when one comes to all these versions fresh from a rereading of the original, it seems the most accessible and the closest to the Italian.

When Indiana Jones enters an ancient temple, we know what is about to happen. This sacred place, frozen in time, is going to be utterly destroyed. As the edifice comes crashing down, Jones will rush out into the fresh air of a world where nothing is sacred, except perhaps lucre and serial romance.

Over the centuries, the effect of Dante’s passage through Hell has been no less devastating. If the poet survives his journey unscathed, the same cannot be said of the infernal abode. Its ecology was too fragile for even this minimal tourism. And if commentaries on the Divina Commedia began to appear as soon as the poem was in circulation, it was partly because there was an apprehension that the place of punishment was in urgent need of shoring up. Robert Hollander takes his turn at this ghoulish maintenance duty with remarkable vigor.

Dante is sent through Hell to gain “ greater knowledge,” as Virgil says. Thus much of the poem is in the form of question and answer. As each new horror unfolds, we must “ understand” it. So we learn that on arrival each soul is assessed by the monster Minos, who indicates which circle he or she must go to by arranging his tail in the appropriate number of coils. We learn that milder sins are punished in the upper circles and more heinous crimes below. We learn that sins of incontinence are less wicked than sins of will; that the sins of sodomy, blasphemy, and usury are punished together because they all involve violence against God or His natural order. Who would have thought?

Most important, we learn that every sinner is punished by being subjected to a sort of intensification or symbolic inversion of his dominant crime. Being eternally boiled in pitch, Sinclair’s commentary explains, is an appropriate punishment for public officials who have accepted bribes, because pitch, like dirty money, is sticky, prevents clarity of vision, and rarely allows the sinner to surface. Diviners, on the other hand, who usurped God’s power by looking into the future, are properly served by having their heads reversed on their shoulders, so that they are constantly looking backward. How reassuring such symmetry is!

This exploration of Hell’s bureaucracy leads Dante to discuss the state of Italy and, especially, Florence, where all these crimes, he assures us, are daily being committed. Indeed, Dante’s Florence and Dante’s Inferno often seem contiguous in the poem, as if Hell were just one more busy Tuscan metropolis, seething with political intrigue and rivalry. Since such matters are a key subject of the poem, the provision of informative notes is essential. In this regard, Hollander is impeccable. The text is presented generously spaced—Italian on the left, English on the right—and with ample commentary easily and unobtrusively available at the end of each Canto. As neatly organized as Hell itself.

Still, we should not lose sight of the fact that Dante’s attention to current affairs, like the spell of the verse and Hell’s fascinating topography, is a strategy to prevent our being overwhelmed by the suffering of the damned. With similarly anesthetic intent, Dante likes to toss in the odd conundrum from time to time, to tease the lively intellect. Sinclair, for example, becomes concerned because he can’t quite see the appropriateness of the punishments of the tenth ditch of the eighth circle. Hollander confesses his perplexity that a character in the fifth ditch seems to have plunged straight down there from the city of Lucca, somehow bypassing Minos’ sorting procedure. How can this be? Screams of torture fade away behind the clamor of such questions.

But, if we don’t want to concentrate on mutilations and misery, we needn’t limit ourselves to puzzling over the small anomalies. Dante has set in motion a system here that will amuse endlessly. This morning, my newspaper offers the announcement:

ASTROCARTOMANTE Alessandra riceve pomeriggi serate distintissimi. [Fortune-teller—tarot and astrology—Alessandra receives afternoons and evenings gentlemen only.]

I ask myself: assuming Alessandra doesn’t repent, where is she going to lodge in Hell? If she is indeed a diviner, the fourth ditch of the eighth circle and an eternally twisted neck await her. But in the argot of Italy’s classified ads astrocartomante is code for prostitute. This would put her in the sins of the flesh, perhaps, somewhere in the milder upper regions of Hell.

On the other hand, there is hypocrisy here, is there not? A whore is passing herself off as a fortune-teller. And hypocrisy would plunge her back to the eighth circle, but in the sixth ditch this time, where she will drag her heels eternally under a cloak of gilded lead. Dante, as I recall, includes just one prostitute in the Inferno, inserting her, rather surprisingly, into the ditch where the flatterers wallow in shit. Why? Because when a lover asked if he had given her pleasure she would reply, “ Beyond all measure.” Our poet is nothing if not witty.

“Beyond all measure.” It is measure and measurement that make Hell, as Hollander says, “ not a bad place once you get used to it.” The many pleasing symmetries, between crime and punishment, landscape and spiritual reality, life and afterlife, give us a sense that all, even in Hell, is well.

Well, it isn’t. Deploying the encounters with great cunning, Dante will suddenly bring us up against an individual. A figure detaches itself from the crowd and tells a story of intense personal experience—Francesca recalling her passion for Paolo, or the noble Farinata rising proudly from a scorching tomb. Pier delle Vigne gives an account of his tragically blighted career and his suicide. His damnation seems incidental. Ulysses wonderfully re-creates the folly of his most glorious exploit. Who cares what circle he is in?

At these and other moments, as pity, or even admiration, swells in the poet’s breast, we know that, for all the satisfactions of moral pigeonholing, nothing has been explained. The individual—treacherous, Promethean, or merely unreasonable—is so much more than a single sin. There is a fierce tension here. Sensibly, Virgil hurries us on.

Not so Hollander. Ominously, in his introduction he has told us, “ Dante, not without risk, decided to entrust to us, his readers, the responsibility for seizing upon the details in the narratives told by sinners, no matter how appealing their words might be, in order to condemn them on the evidence that issues from their own mouths.”

If, after reading this, you are concerned that you might get it wrong, not to worry. Hollander, unlike Dante, won’t let you. He uses his commentary not just to give us valuable information but to make sure that we do indeed add our weighty condemnation to God’s. Again and again, he tells us what the poem means and how we should feel about it. In his view of things, this entails feeling rather less than we felt when we actually read the poem. So Hollander tells us that Ulysses, despite being admired for his Promethean spirit by many poets and thinkers (Tennyson, Benedetto Croce, and Primo Levi are listed), is, “ in modern parlance, a con artist, and a good one, too. He has surely fooled a lot of people.” We’re told that Francesca, however poignant her words, is entirely calculating; she just wants to win our pity, while, in fact, “ it is pity itself that is here at fault.”

However disquieting, this assertion cannot be dismissed. It looks forward to a key line in the Inferno, where, when Dante shows pity for the diviners, Virgil protests, “ Qui vive la pietà quand’ è ben morta.” Literally: Here pity—or piety (pietà can mean either or both)—lives when it is good and dead. The Hollanders, determined to spare us misunderstandings, translate “ Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.” Sinclair more faithfully and enigmatically offers, “ Here pity lives when it is quite dead.”

No matter how we phrase the English, it remains inescapable that Dante is pointing to a scission within our notion of what piety is. “ Pity” and “ piety” stem from the same etymological root; we had hoped they were inseparable, but a contemplation of Hell, where God’s terrible vendetta is visited on the damned for all eternity, obliges us to see that if we want an ordered cosmos, with Paradise on top and Hell at the bottom, then pity will have to go. In this light, Dorothy Sayers’s translation of the thorny line is intriguing. “ Here pity, or here piety, must die,” she writes, acknowledging the alternative that it might be pity that lives, as it certainly does in Dante’s poem, while orthodox piety and its grim fortifications collapse.

Another provocative aside makes it clear that Dante appreciates the revolutionary potential of the tensions that galvanize his Inferno. In Canto XII, the poet finds himself slithering down a landslide that “ shifted / under my feet.” Reassuring as ever, Virgil explains that, when Christ came down to Hell after his crucifixion to rescue a select few, Hell was shaken by an earthquake. He goes on:

so that I thought the universe felt love,

by which, as some believe,

the world has many times been turned to chaos.

And at that moment this ancient rock,

here and elsewhere, fell broken into pieces.

This is a dangerous idea. The entrance to Hell bore the claim that the place was founded by “ primal love,” but here we have a suggestion that love is alien to order. Love leads to chaos because it tends to forgive; it isn’t interested in coiling tails and carefully divided ditches.

Whether Dante intended it or not, he has found that to bring pity into Hell makes for the most powerful poetry: human qualities that stir our souls are infinitely punished by a system we nevertheless feel we must accept as divine. To acknowledge this tension is also to expose an essential instability at the core of Christianity, a quarrel between rival visions of justice and of love which has kept Western society uneasily on the move for centuries, so that today it has become very hard for us to contemplate inflicting pain of any kind. If twenty-first-century man went to Heaven, he would soon be demonstrating to have Hell abolished.

Dante does not go that far. But, just as the Inferno cannot be reduced to a series of allegorical equivalences, so it resists any final theological interpretation. Indeed, the more rigid the orthodoxy a speech proposes, the more we sense its distance from the poet’s emotional response to what he sees. This is the aesthetic experience and the moral enigma that Dante gave us in the Divina Commedia. To try to “ solve it,” one way or another, is to forget that what we are talking about is a poem, not a religious treatise.

Whenever a magical world crumbles and its demons are put to flight, you can be sure they will turn up again elsewhere. So, on reading Dante, one is powerfully struck by how present he is in modern literature. Hell is gone, but the damned have been let loose among us. They are there in Eliot and in Kafka, in Borges and, above all, in Beckett, where they loom from the trash cans of “ Endgame,” from the heap of sand in “ Happy Days.” The same cannot be said of Beatrice and the blessed. Clinging to the wreckage, Ulysses and his crew survive for a thousand reincarnations, but the good ship Paradise, it seems, was lost with all hands.

Fortunately, Dante was not aboard. Having threaded the world’s most treacherous passage and dreamed up, for the other side, a Purgatorio and a Paradiso of great beauty and complexity but little excitement, he then awoke to find himself once again under the stars, where he remains with us to this day. It is a poor and shadowy sort of immortality for a man who no doubt believed he would be in the blazing light of Paradise, with the saints and the angels; but at least the commedia of literary fame, unlike that of Heaven and Hell, is not one that need be underwritten by the sufferings of the damned.