The Inferno of Dante

I think it's good to read this every ten years or so, to marvel at Dante's inventiveness at the miseries these souls (heavily weighted toward those who were his contemporaries) have made for themselves, and how he makes himself so perfectly clueless about the very cosmology he devised. I paid particular attention to how as the author and his guide descend into Hell the sense of fantastic horror increases in a way that I don't think existed before. It felt like the aim was to burn out all vice in the Dante character so that he could re-emerge on the other side ready to take the path back toward heaven, maybe because of all the strife and tumult he'd experienced in his very political life up till then.
Reading the whole book in a month, about one canto a day, it just the right pace to allow one to study the endnotes. Most of the individual stories he crams in here I'd already forgotten from the previous times I've read the book. Of course many of these have now been adopted by other artists, but there are lots of others whom we know only through a couple of lines of verse seven centuries after they lived.
This is the second time I've read Pinsky's translation. I like it, but maybe not as much as John Ciardi's which seems more graceful, less brutal in places. The poem is a terrible beauty, studded with those amazing metaphors Dante was so fond of.