During a visit to Adelaide in 2013 as a keynote speaker at the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies ‘Re-imagining Italian Studies’ conference, Professor Martin McLaughlin (Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies and Fellow of Magdalen College) made the following observation about Clive James’s translation of The Divine Comedy:

There are many innovations in Clive James’s version that make it stand out as being fit for purpose in our century: he is the first to incorporate information normally found in footnotes into the text itself; he is the first to use a flexible quatrain rather than blank verse or terza rima as his metre; and he is the first to pay explicit attention to poetic tempo and texture.