Read the Robert Pinsky translation

What I love about Dante is his combination of beautiful and evocative poetic language with the sadistic and vulgar. His imagination is so fevered and some of the tortures and images he creates are dark and terrifying and yet so, so lovely and evocative. There's a part where he describes two demons grappling like falcons until they plunge into a molten pit and the way he describes it is so sublime (in the aesthetic sense) in the way he uses high-flown language to describe the creatures and punishments of the underworld. I love that he puts all his personal political enemies and unfaithful lovers in hell and is doing this all to live in eternity with a woman he spoke to twice. Dante was truly the first poster