Poets can't help themselves from translating Dante, even if they are only going to do small chunks, as Byron did, having a stab at Francesca of Rimini's speech from the fifth canto of the "Inferno." He approached it the most difficult way, rendering "verse for verse the episode in the same metre ... I have sacrificed all ornament to fidelity."
I won't take up space by quoting it here, but it's remarkably good and you can see why he stopped after 50 lines. For, as Clive James notes in his excellent introduction to his translation, "for an Italian poet, it's not rhyming that's hard." The terza rima, Dante's basic unit for the poem, transfers naturally enough to English iambic pentameter, which is not strange to our ears. The point is, as James says, to make the poem flow in English as it did in Italian.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.