April 3, 2004 – 10:34 am
Listen to this: Dante’s ‘Inferno’, Canto I, Lines 1-69
American Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky gave the world a new verse translation of Dante’s Inferno a few years back, and I bought the audiobook version of it after reading an article somewhere. The translation was amazing – but the casting was questionable… or at least very surprising: John Cleese.
So naturally, I was very pleased to hear Pinsky himself reading the first nine lines in Italian, and excerpts of the book in translation.
You can hear him read that and more of his poetry here. The sound quality may be pretty dire – but it’s still a nice thing to do for your ears.