The abundance of new translations and new editions is wonderful but also overwhelming. Which one to choose depends largely on your prior experience with Dante and your knowledge of foreign languages. As many readers (including T.S. Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges) have found, Dante's Italian can be understood pretty well with a working knowledge of another Romance language and/or Latin. The best way to read the poem in English would be to use a nearly literal translation as a guide to the Italian, along with extensive notes to explain the many obscure references.

On both counts, the gold standard is the new translation by Robert and Jean Hollander (the Inferno is out in paperback, and the Purgatorio has just appeared in hardcover). The Hollanders' free verse sticks very closely to the Italian, line by line and stanza by stanza. Their English is graceful and lucid and makes it easy to follow Dante's Italian. In addition, their editions have useful indexes, guides, and extensive scholarly notes—more than the reader needs, in fact, but the Hollanders' textual and historical debates are always fascinating, should you choose to plunge into them.

Other translators, especially poets, are less faithful to the original in their attempt to create a self-sufficient English poem. Readers looking for a stand-alone English Inferno are well served by the Anthony Esolen translation, new from the Modern Library. Esolen has faithfully rendered Dante's terza rima into blank verse, which can't replicate the rhythm of the original, but makes for a pleasantly flowing English poem. Where the syntax diverges from Dante's, readers can compare it to the Italian on facing pages. This edition, as well as being beautifully produced, is also annotated (Esolen provides a mini-essay for each canto) and contains 12 of Gustave Doré's lithographs. For the Purgatorio, the renowned poet W.S. Merwin provides a faithful English verse translation, though the diction and verse are often ragged in a way more characteristic of Merwin than Dante. And Modern Library has also reissued, in paperback, Longfellow's historic translation of the Inferno, without the Italian, but with extensive notes. This remains a lovely and noble version, though readers may find Longfellow's style distractingly archaic.

More ambitious, in a way, are the versions that try to preserve Dante's terza rima in English. This verse form, in which the middle line of each three-line stanza rhymes with the first and last lines of the next stanza, is absolutely integral to The Divine Comedy. At once intricate and propulsive, it invokes the trinity symbolism that led Dante to divide the poem into three books of 33 cantos (plus one extra in the Inferno). But English has many fewer rhymes than Italian, which means that English terza rima usually sounds labored and unnatural. (Very few English poets have used it, Shelley being a notable exception.)

Michael Palma's Inferno does about as good a job with terza rima in English as could be imagined: As a sustained poetic performance, it is splendid. But, inevitably, Palma must sacrifice the exact meaning and diction of the original, and he often resorts to uneven lines, half-rhymes, and heavy enjambments to keep the scheme going. His Inferno is probably best appreciated as an English poem by those who already know the original. That goes triple for Ciaran Carson's Inferno, which is more of a carnival or fantasia version of Dante. Carson's terza rima is zany and slangy and departs freely from the original; its own energies and strengths are almost the opposite of Dante's.

Readers looking for a literal translation to use as a crib are very well served by Robert M. Durling's. (His Inferno appeared in 1994; the Purgatorio comes out this spring.) Durling translates each three-line stanza into a unit of prose, following Dante's word order closely, sometimes to the point of being awkward in English. This gives little sense of the movement of the original, but makes it easy to follow the Italian. And Durling, too, offers encyclopedic notes.