Of the three sections of Dante ’s Divine Comedy, the first section, Inferno, has always been the most popular. The medieval equivalent of a thriller, Inferno features Dante and his faithful guide Virgil as they traverse the complex geography of Hell and confront many hair-raising threats before reaching the deep chamber where Satan resides. Now, in this dazzling translation, described as “a remarkable achievment” by Stephen Greenblatt, Clive James communicates not just the transcendent poetry of Dante’s language but also the excitement and terror of his journey through the underworld. Instead of Dante’s original terza rima, a form that, in English, tends to show the strain of composition, James employs fluently linked quatrains, thereby conveying the seamless flow of Dante ’s poetry and the headlong momentum of the action. As James writes in his introduction, Dante’s great poem “can still astonish us, whether we believe in the supernatural or not. At the very least it will make us believe in poetry.”