User:Barney Jenkins/di

The Divine Comedy is a 2004 illustrated adaptation of Dante's classic poem. It consists of Marcus Sanders' translation of the poem into colloquial modern American English and illustrations by Sandow Birk. Birk's illustrations are based on the classics by Gustave Dore, but relocate them to modern urban locations. Sanders' translation often places famous contemporary people (some of them still living), within Heaven and Hell, alongside those included by Dante.

The work was published in three volumes: the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. The Inferno is set in Los Angeles, the Purgatorio in San Fransisco, and the Paradiso in New York City and other locations beyond America.

Inferno
The Inferno is set in Los Angeles. The entrance to Hell is represented as a ruined road tunnel.
 * Canto III. The limbo, in which is punished the souls of those who never took sides, includes Pope Pius XII and Thabo Mbeki.
 * Canto IV. The city of the Virtuous Pagans includes William Shakespeare, W. B. Yeats and Ernest Hemingway.
 * Canto V. The circle of the lusful, where sinners are blown about by winds, includes "Clinton, Swaggart, Baker, Hart, Romeo, Juliet".
 * Canto X. The circle of the heretics, where sinners are burned in tombs, includes Anton LaVey.
 * Canto XII. The River Phlegethon, where warmongers are drowned in boiling blood, includes Mobutu Sese Seko, Benito Mussolini, Henry Kissinger, Saddam Hussein, Charles Manson, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, General Pinochet, Adolf Hitler, along with "Reagan and Bush (both of them)".
 * Canto XV. The sodomites include Siegfried and Roy and "the priests from Boston".
 * Canto XVIII. The panders and seducers drowning in excrement include Wilt Chamberlain and Anna Nicole Smith.
 * Canto XXI. The fortune tellers in the Fourth Ditch, whose heads have been twisted backward, include Dionne Warwick.