Hell (Dante, tr. Sayers)

The first volume of Sayers's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, published by Penguin Books in 1949. She said she began the work after reading Dante in the original Italian in an air-raid shelter during the war, and she saw his Hell as a judgment of fact on the contemporary world. The translation keeps Dante's terza rima, the linked three-line rhyme, in modern colloquial English, and each canto is followed by detailed notes explaining its allegory and references, with an introduction on Dante's life and the poem's structure, diagrams and a glossary. Its first printing of 50,000 sold out quickly, and reviews were excellent, though critics then and since have objected to forced rhymes and archaisms. Her friend Charles Williams's study of Dante is credited with inspiring the project.