I love writing narrative verse.
So why not, I recently said to myself, why not write an anapestic version of a bit of Dante's Commedia? And why not try a version in heroic couplets?
So that's what I'll be doing on this blog.
Of course, I'm not attempting a line-by-line translation. I'm just writing a paraphrase of a few translations that I have here with me, primarily Steve Ellis's, John Ciardi's, and Dorothy Sayers'.
And I'm making no attempt to maintain Dante's stanza form or rhyme scheme. One of my versions will be in anapestic tetrameter couplets and the other will be accentual four-stress iambic pentameter couplets.
Now I know you think that anapestic verse is pretty goofy stuff -- Dr. Seuss and all that. But take a look anyway.
