Perhaps no other work of literature has aroused so much admiration in so many countries and so many readers as The Divine Comedy. A single listening will reveal its universality as well as Dante’s visual imagination and power to make the spiritual visible. The story is an allegory, representing “mankind, as by its merits or demerits, it exposes itself to the rewards or the punishments of Justice.”
This is the Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed translation: Specifically Inferno translated by John Aitken Carlyle; Purgatorio by Thomas Okey, and Paradiso by Philip H. Wicksteed.