This startling new translation of Dante's" Inferno" is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland's most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante's epic, Carson's virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing--a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf" and Ted Hughes's "Tales from Ovid," Ciaran Carson's "Inferno" is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.