Jordan Mattox

I am reading the Divine Comedy for the first time and using the Clive James translation, which I’ve found to be highly readable. One question that I do have with epic poetry is that if we are not using the original language, do we need to maintain the line by line formatting or could it just appear as a prose text. Not sure the value of having the sentences broken up in that way as it does retain many of the cadences from the original Italian. Could be totally out of my depth here. 

One interesting feature of the book so far is how the inner parts of hell are reserved for those who committed acts of deception, lying and stealing. And those who murdered and cheated receive more lenient punishments. Dante points to Aristotle’s understanding of immoral behavior, but it does seem a strange concept relative to the modern understanding of the severity of crimes. Dante would have Madoff suffering the worst forms of punishment and a mass murder would have a more lenient experience in the lake of fire. I may write more about this as I reflect on how it interacts with our modern forms of justice.