The Divine Comedy, LibriVox audio reading (Longfellow translation)

What it is

This is an audio recording of The Divine Comedy read in English. It is a LibriVox volunteer reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation, not Dante's own voice. This track covers Inferno, Cantos I to V. The recording was made recently and released into the public domain. The poem itself was written by Dante between 1308 and his death in 1321, and the record describes it as a central epic of Italian literature.

Why it matters

The Divine Comedy describes a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, and it reflects the medieval view of the afterlife. Its use of the Tuscan dialect helped shape the Italian language. Longfellow's English version, published in the nineteenth century, made the poem available to English-speaking readers, and this recording makes that translation available to listeners today.

Look closer

• Who is reading this translation, and how does a volunteer reader change the way the poem sounds compared with the printed page?
• Which characters and places appear in the first cantos, and what do they tell us about Dante's world?
• What might a listener miss that a reader of the original Italian would notice?