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Dante in English is heavy, while in Italian he is light, fast, almost a lyric poem. Palma's version is the lightest, fastest I've found. Often you hardly notice he's rhymed in tercets--his rhymes are so modern, unforced, and his syntax is so English.
True, Dante still has a medieval mind--barratry? simony?--and writes his own back-cover puff when Homer, Ovid, Horace and the boys all toast him as the sixth of the THEIR crowd. He only apologizes when he includes his own name in an epic, a breach of decorum which he justifies by placing his name in Beatrice's mouth. Beatrice is, along with Lucia and Maria, a female trinity, and as LL Lipking has shown, almost Maria herself (especially in the earlier Vita Nuova).
Then Dante puts personal enemies--he had more than a few--in specific levels of hell, which makes this epic almost a Romantic poem, centering on "I." But you'd never know it, it's so apparently impersonal.
Should I add, I was honored to entertain Mr and Mrs Palma at the American Academy, Rome, where I walked a mile for some good inexpensive wine only to find out at dinner (in the Villa, part of the old Roman Wall) Michael drinks milk. Maybe that's what it takes to translate Dante so well.