One only need look at the cover of Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders’ adaptation of Dante’s Inferno to realize that this project is not your average translation. It is a self-conscious update, both visually and textually. The idea of modernizing the Inferno isn’t unwelcome; while most serious writing was still done in Latin, Dante himself wrote in vernacular Italian, leavening his epic liberally with contemporary—even personal—references. In the succeeding 700 years or so, Dante’s work has reached iconic status; most people at least know of the Inferno, even if they haven’t read it. So anything that can make Dante’s work more immediate, that can strip away the aura of Important Literature—less Obligation, more Pleasure—is desirable.
Most of Birk’s really interesting work is in the book’s artwork: Hell as an urban landscape with smog-choked skies and a topography scarred by power lines and hulks of misshapen buildings. Some 70 engravings maintain this motif—apt, though not particularly surprising. Birk would be kidding himself if he thought that depicting a megalopolis as hellish—or Hell as a megalopolis—was a particularly striking idea. But the creativity and energy he pours into his renditions is interesting enough.
The translation, meanwhile, is a curious mixture of stilted English and gutter-level slang. Physically, the result looks like poetry but isn’t; it sounds contemporary but not natural. The greatest problem the reader faces is keeping up with the multiple changes in register, from mythic to crude and back again. Sometimes the contrast, far from illustrating anything about plot or characterization, verges on the ridiculous. After the fourth or fifth time Dante addresses his guide as “Virg,” it’s hard not to wonder if we’re straying into parody.
Dante’s Hell is a richly detailed landscape, full of material for adaptation and translation; unfortunately, this attempt—ambitious as it is—suffers from significant unevenness. With the Inferno, the first of three books in the project, it’s hard to imagine how Birk will make the far more difficult and theologically fraught Purgatorio and Paradiso come out better, as vivid displays of suffering, which Birk skillfully depicts in both picture and in word, will not be able to carry him much further. Though visually arresting, his version of the Inferno is not the one to read if one is new to Dante—and perhaps only worth a skim for those who know Dante well.