Skip navigation
London Review of Books London Review Bookshop

Articles marked subscriber-only content are available to registered subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books. For information about subscribing to the LRB, click here. If you are already a subscriber and you wish to register for online access, click here.

Matthew Reynolds

Matthew Reynolds’s last book was The Realms of Verse; he is now reading a lot of literary translations.

Originally published 8 May 2003

Jamming up the Flax Machine

  • The ‘Inferno’ of Dante Alighieri a new translation by Ciaran Carson

“The great merit of his translation is that it employs a language as mulitple and fragmented as Dante’s Italian – perhaps more so. It sounds less like an epic and more like The Canterbury Tales. Everyday insults – ‘up yours’, ‘you little squit’ – jostle grandiose phrases such as ‘convocation of melodic air’; markedly Irish and Scottish words (’stirabout’, ‘tawse’) come up against venerable poeticisms (’the bosky chase’) and Sloaney exclamations (’O such an awful nook!’).” [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • Designs for a Happy Home (2009)
  • Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, C.1560-1643 (2005)
  • Realms of Verse 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building (2001)

Search the web for Matthew Reynolds: Google · Yahoo! · AltaVista · Wikipedia

In the LRB archive

subscriber-only content His and Hers · 9 October 2008

  • The Poems of Robert Browning, Vol. III: 1847-61 edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan  Buy this book

Most Himself · 19 July 2007

  • The Poems of John Dryden: Vol. V 1697-1700 edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins  Buy this book
  • Dryden: Selected Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Play Again? · 3 August 2006

  • JPod by Douglas Coupland

Someone Else’s · 6 October 2005

subscriber-only content So Much More Handsome · 4 March 2004

subscriber-only content Nicely Combed · 4 December 2003

  • Selected Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Andrew Frisardi

Jamming up the Flax Machine · 8 May 2003

  • The ‘Inferno’ of Dante Alighieri a new translation by Ciaran Carson