Take a look at the Birk and Sandow translation, it is exactly what you are looking for.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
7 points (81.8% liked)
Books
8082 readers
80 users here now
A community for all things related to Books.
Rules
- Be Nice. No personal attacks or hate speech.
- No spam. All posts should be related to discussion or reviews related to books. (Please avoid posts that are just a link to the book and a generic summary)
- No self promotion.
Official Bingo Posts:
Related Communities
- !books@piefed.world (Piefed Sibling Community)
- !comicbooks@lemmy.world
- !fantasy@lemmy.ml
Community icon by IconsBox (from freepik.com)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I think there may be a dearth of people today who have the ability to write epic length poetry in 14th century Tuscan that is even vaguely readable.
Also why does everybody always stop with Infernio? There's two more books in the Divine Comedy.
Why don't you take a crack at it and share it with the world?
I wouldn't know ever how to write a book without sending it to a publisher and they sell it and not pay me. I have no idea how a copyright would work in this situation or show how I was the author.
Just start writing and upload chapters as lemmy posts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_fiction
It's also possible to transition to an actual book if you want. Huh, the wikipedia page mentions that the martian by andy weir started out as web fiction. Cool.
Luckily you're on the internet and only a few searches away from all of this information 🖖
You can literally self-publish on Amazon and the like super easy. It would just be digital only.
It's not so much hard as it is time consuming.
Traditional publishing, you'd usually start with a book written, find an agent, and let them shop the book around. Once you get some sales under your belt, you can actually sometimes just give your agent a summary of what you want to write, and let them sell the idea. Or just do the same with your publisher and let the agent get their cut. But you have to be a pretty reliable name for that.
Self publishing is easier, but also harder work if you want sales. You just find whatever platform you want to sell on, then put it there. But you'd have to do all the marketing yourself, and that takes a ton of time and effort. That's why agents and publishers still exist tbh
As far as adapting a public domain work (and that's what a rewrite of the inferno would be), it's totally legit. I have a retelling off Cinderella I've been fucking with for years.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/inferno-larry-niven/7103060
From science fiction team Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
I finished it, but it wasn't particularly memorable.
[off topic]
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dante-club-a-novel-matthew-pearl/8f39a0592e17ef17
A much more enjoyable novel where Oliver Wendell Holmes and Longfellow are hunting a murderer while translating The Devine Comedy
I've never actually read the original Dante, but my dad was really big into science fiction novels when he was younger and had a copy of this. I was bored one night and decided the cover looked interesting, and it was about hell so that sounded pretty cool as a teenager. I thought it was pretty neat, although I don't remember much of it or the ending, but remember thinking it was so cool. I bought a copy used later but never actually reread it. Maybe I should bust it out and see if I just have rose colored glasses on from the nostalgia factor. Granted, I'm not well versed in much of the other author's work either. I know my dad has a shit ton of Niven still in the basement along with a bunch of other authors of sci-fi. I'm sure there's probably better work out there by both of them. Come to think of it as he's getting older. He's been talking about what he's going to do with all his science fiction novels. He doesn't want to leave a whole bunch of shit around after he goes for his family to have to clean up. Maybe I should pick up the reading hobby I used to have that kind of fell away, and find out for myself.
Enjoy.
One thing I enjoy with the old science fiction novels is when the author misses some piece of technology. "Starship Troopers" has a guy who regularly travels faster than light gushing over a portable piano.
I think I remember landline phones in "Ringworld" but I could be wrong.
If it was rewritten today it’d probably be one of those zombie edits. Dante’s Inferno of Zombies or something.
I mean... which one do you put the "Future Trump Circle" sign on?
