Despite Dante's reputation as a great - perhaps the greatest - Christian poet, there is, as John Freccero remarks in his foreword to this bilingual edition, no hint of Christian forgiveness in the Inferno. It is the icy, unrelenting ferocity of the poem that both repels and attracts, and lifts it to an almost superhuman level, where it seems not so much the work of a man as the product of blind and savage Nature itself. The American poet Robert Pinsky's translation is a good, solid attempt to render the harsh music of Dante's Italian into the more prosaic straitjacket of English. He has sought to solve the problem of terza rima by opting for a sort of muscular assonantal scheme, or "system of like sounds", that works surprisingly well. "The goal," Pinsky says, "is to make enough of a formal demand to support the English sentence, but not so monstrous a demand as to buckle it . . ." The result is a rough-hewn, colloquial, Yeatsian verse that communicates the tragic bitterness which the non-Italian takes to be the essence of Dante. Not the definitive translation, perhaps - will there ever be such a thing? - but a fine effort. The book is handsomely produced, on good, heavy paper. The illustrations by Michael Mazur are suitably sombre.