Hello -- Robert and Jean Hollander clearly know how to plug their
new translation of the Inferno (cf. below), but I thought I'd send it on to
the Spenser List to advertise it further.  It's highly lucid and extremely
well annotated; a "canonical" translation.

        Any "guest wordsmiths" among Spenserians?

                Best, Thomas H.

>Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 00:35:09 -0500
>From: Wordsmith <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: A.Word.A.Day--quartan
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>quartan (KWORT-n) adjective
>
>   Occurring every fourth day, counting inclusively, or every 72 hours.
>   Used of a fever.
>
>noun
>
>   A malarial fever recurring every 72 hours.
>
>[Middle English quartaine, from Old French, from Latin quartana, from
>quartanus, of the fourth, from quartus, fourth.]
>
>   "From here on we descend such stairs as these.
>   You mount in front and I will take the middle
>   so that the tail may do no harm.'
>   As a man in a shivering-fit of quartan fever,
>   so ill his nails have lost all color,
>   trembles all over at the sight of shade,
>   so was I stricken at his words."
>   Inferno XVII.82-88.
>
>   "Virgil, Dante's guide, warns him that the descent to lowest hell will
>   be accomplished by the aid of such terrifying creatures as the monster
>   Geryon. In simile, a device that Dante much employs, the poet compares his
>   behavior to that of a man entering the first stages of the quartan fever."
>
>Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote his great poem, 14,233 verses in rhymed
>tercets, between 1307 ca. and 1321. He called it "The Comedy" (the adjective
>"Divine" was added by a Venetian editor in 1555 and has "stuck"). Its
>narrative is based on a journey through the afterworld at Easter time in the
>year 1300 undertaken, at Heaven's prompting, by our narrator himself -- or so
>he would have us believe. In almost precisely one week he visits hell (the
>72 hours recorded in the first part of the poem, "Inferno"), purgatory, where
>saved souls cleanse themselves of the memory of their former sins (precisely
>3.5 days spent on the mountain of Purgatory, situated at what we would call
>the South Pole), and paradise, visiting the nine "starry spheres" above the
>earth and culminating in the Empyrean, beyond space and time, where God and
>all the blessed souls exist in continual bliss (approximately 1.25 days--the
>time-telling function is much reduced in this part of the poem).
>
>This week we are going to look at some words from "Inferno," drawn from a new
>English verse translation done by my wife, the poet Jean Hollander, and me
>and published three weeks ago by Doubleday. These words are not "key words"
>in Dante's text, for these are generally words in common use, for instance,
>"justice," which I would argue is as important as any other word in the
>poem, but, like all the words collected by Anu for AWAD in recent years,
>words that we are less likely to recognize. They all appear in an excerpt
>from our translation, to give the reader some sense of their context and of
>Dante's way of writing. -Robert Hollander, [log in to unmask]
>
>(This week's guest wordsmiths: Robert is a professor of European Literature
>at Princeton University, and his wife Jean is director of The Annual Writers'
>Conferences at The College of New Jersey. They will appear in an online chat
>on Jan 16, 2001. Details at http://wordsmith.org/chat/hollanders.html -Anu)
>
>............................................................................
>A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. -Ralph Waldo
>Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
>
>You too can be a Guest Wordsmith at AWAD! To know more about how to be a
>Guest Wordsmith, please see http://wordsmith.org/awad/guidelines.html
>If you do not have Web access, send email to [log in to unmask] with
>"Guest Wordsmith" as the Subject Line to get the guidelines.
>
>Pronunciation:
>http://wordsmith.org/words/quartan.wav
>http://wordsmith.org/words/quartan.ram
>