I’m getting more than a little tired of economics after four months of writing RGD and more than thirty interviews in two months, so I think it makes sense to accede to the will of the readers and go with the Inferno portion of La Commedia Divina, which beat RGD by a vote of 133 to 128. I’d previously been leaning towards Commentarii de Bello Gallico, but that finished a distant fourth with only 28 votes. Here is a link to the Cary translation; those who prefer Longfellow or Norton translations may be interested in this three-way comparison site. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use Cary supported by the bilingual edition that features Robert Pinsky’s translation.
Ironically after all that, the translation with which I’m most familiar, and which inspired my economic satire, was Lawrence Binyon’s. But I think it’s best to work with the freely available texts. Start reading Canto 1 for next Saturday.