The result is something heavenly

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Robert and Jean Hollander completed their project to translate Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ this summer with the publication of ‘Paradiso’ (Doubleday: 916 pp., $40). Their translation of ‘Inferno’ appeared in 1999, their ‘Purgatorio’ appeared in 2003. The final book arrived in August, and it’s frustrating that the most abstract part of Dante’s poem---and, most students of the poem admit, the least-read section---appeared in the dog days of summer. Did anyone at the publishing house notice Robert Hollander’s point, made in his introduction: ‘Even a veteran reader is startled each time he or she begins rereading the third cantica of this ‘theological epic.’ For here the usual accoutrements of poetic narrative are downstaged by the language of Scholastic discourse.... ‘

Hello, this is not beach reading.

And yet, the Hollanders have achieved a version that is supple and clear, a triumph considering that the subject matter isn’t lusty, colorful sin but Divine redemption:

That which does not die and that which must
are nothing but a bright reflection of that Idea
which our Lord, in loving, brings to birth.

Joan Acocella, in the New Yorker, finds much to appreciate in the Hollanders’ monumental efforts.

Nick Owchar