Dante's Divine Comedy

Journey to Joy: Inferno

In this story, Dante is a likable but unheroic man who wakes up in a dark wood and learns that the only way for him to be rescued from death is to follow a friendly guide who will lead him down through all the sections of hell. There they have dozens of vivid encounters with fiendish creatures and human victims. This quick educational field trip through foul darkness opens Dante's eyes to how evil works in our lives and helps him to begin to understand what is truly good.

I have emphasized Dante's sly wit and startling moral, psychological, and spiritual wisdom. His main purposes were to set forth the beauty, humor, and horror of human life; to peel away our dangerous illusions of adequacy; and to lead us all upward toward the eternal heart of reality.

I was pleased to read the review of this book by Cambridge University's Barbara Reynolds, Co-translator of Dorothy Sayers' The Comedy of Dante Alighiere The Florentine: Paradise and author of The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante:

"Kathryn Lindskoog has provided a very readable and engaging introduction to Dante.... Her aim has been to provide a faithful restatement of Dante's poetry in clear English prose, for the sake of the story. She achieves this aim admirably. She also achieves more. Her notes are informative and interesting. Her Introduction is fresh and challenging.... Many new readers will have reason to be grateful to her."

This volume begins with an introduction to the entire Comedy that is unmatched for liveliness and readability. In addition to traditional aids for understanding Dante, this introduction and the notes that follow provide a variety of new material.

Here are the titles I gave to Dante's first 34 cantos:

1. The Dark Wood
2. Beginning Again
3. The Entry Hall of Hell
4. A Bright, Hopeless Castle
5. Lost Lovers
6. Gluttons in Sludge
7. From Mammon to Mud
8. By Boat to a Glowing City
9. Through the City Gate
10. Burning Tombs
11. Edge of the Precipice
12. River of Boiling Blood
13. Suicide Forest
14. A Fiery Desert
15. Along the Embankment
16. A Crimson Waterfall
17. The Face of an Honest Man
18. Driven by Demons
19. Upside-Down Ministers
20. Backward Magicians
21. Boiling Tar
22. Brawling Guards
23. Golden Cloaks
24. A Snake Pit
25. The Reptile Men
26. Flames like Fireflies
27. Caught by a Black Cherubim
28. The Devil's Sword
29. Sick Souls
30. An Everlasting Quarrel
31. Towering Giants
32. In a Lake of Ice
33. Frozen Tears
34. Once More the Stars

"The Inferno in Lindskoog's capable hands gallops forward, expressed in a terse and sinewy prose... The narrative moves as fast as Dante does, scrambling ever downward in company with his guide, the poet Virgil, 'down,' as C. S. Lewis wrote, 'to the frozen centre,' where Satan stands forever in the ice of his frigid selfhood. After that, everything else in the Commedia leaps upwards.... Happily recommended."

--Nancy-Lou Patterson, in The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal
"Reader-friendly prose; good background material." --Religious Book Club
"A highly readable edition that adds a variety of new material, supplemented by references to Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and many other Dante commentators." --NEW YORK REVIEW
"Kathryn Lindskoog's retelling of the Comedy superbly achieves for our age the aims which Dante had for this masterpiece in his own age." --JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

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