Literary translation is suspect; it is too often a reply masquerading as an echo. Given as much, the deft translation of even pedestrian works is at best a daunting task; Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is on another level altogether. The endlessly supple mastery of language, rhythm, verse structure, rhyme, and narrative, located on every page of one of the most geometrically balanced literary architectures ever envisioned, cannot be easily imposed on another tongue.

Clive James knows Dante, and the seductions of translation. “That had to be the aim [of translating Dante], impossible as it seemed; to generate the force, both semantic and phonetic: the force of both meaning and sound.”

With those words, James precedes his sometimes daring, often gorgeous interpretation of “The Divine Comedy.” He is well armed for the struggle. One of the world’s foremost literary critics, he has been pondering Dante for decades, thinking deeply about the perils and promises of a another possible English translation.

“The Divine Comedy” was written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and 1321, and consists of 14,000 lines of terza rima poetry–a form of chain rhyme generally following an A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C (and so on) scheme with concluding lines or couplets. The three sections of the “Comedy”– “Inferno,” “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” — are organized into 33 cantos, or sections, each, with a single concluding canto to make up a total of 100.

James’ most daring departure from earlier translations is the substitution of quatrains for much of Dante’s terza rima — a choice that may seem relevant only to literary elitists, but which in fact has profound consequences, for even the average reader, throughout. Without descending into the esoterica of the differences, rhyming quatrains generate forward velocity, creating a more muscular, declarative kind of narrative.

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