Personally, I came to Dante through John Ciardi and he remains my favorite. However, among newer translations I would seriously reconsider Pinsky's
Inferno and look also to Mark Musa and Jean and Robert Hollander. Pinsky captures the energy and the violence of the
Inferno, Mandelbaum conveys the classicism, and Ciardi captures the lyrical poetry. The Hollanders translation may be the most accurate... a marvelous poetic prose with unmatched notes. This edition sits a mere few inches away from my hand right now... next to my computer.
Other essential texts?
Start with:
The Bible
Aeschylus-
The Oresteia
Sophocles-
Oedipus Rex (the Oedipus trilogy)
Euripides-
Medea
Plato-
The Republic
Ovid-
The Metamorphoses
Horace-
Odes
Firdowsi-
The Shahnameh
anon.-
The Arabian Nights
anon.-
Beowulf
Petrarch-
Sonnets
Machiavelli-
The Prince
Boccaccio-
The Decameron
Rabelais-
Gargantua and
Pantagruel
Cervantes-
Don Quixote
Chaucer- [/I]Canterbury Tales[I]
Spenser-
The Faerie Queene, The Amoretti
Donne-
Poems
Moliere-
Tartuffe, The Misanthrope
Racine-
Phèdre, Athalie
Michel de Montaigne-
Essays
Jonathan Swift-
Gulliver's Travels
Rousseau-
Confessions
Milton-
Paradise Lost
Gibbons-
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Lawrence Sterne-
Tristram Shandy
Daniel Defoe-
Robinson Caruso
Goethe-
Faust, poems
Holderlin- poems
William Blake- poems
Lord Byron- Don Juan
Coleridge-
The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Kahn, Cristobel
Wordsworth- poems
Keats- poems
Shelley- poems
Jane Austen-
Pride and Prejudice
Victor Hugo-
Les Miserables
Leopardi- poems (canti)
Flaubert-
Madame Bovary
Emile Zola-
Nana
Baudelaire-
Les Fleurs du Mal
Rimbaud-
A Season in Hell and
The Illuminations
Verlaine- poems
Mallarme- poems
Poe- tales
Hawthorne- short stories
Ambrose Bierce- short stories
Guy de Maupassant- short stories
Tennyson- poetry
E.T.A. Hoffmann- short stories
Walt Whitman-
Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson- poetry
Melville-
Moby Dick
Dickens-
A Tale of Two Cities
Tolstoy-
War and Peace, short stories
Dostoevsky-
The Brothers Karamazov
Checkov- short stories
Joseph Conrad-
Heart of Darkness
Ibsen-
Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People
Oscar Wilde-
The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest
Gautier- poetry, short stories
Proust-
In Search of Lost Time
Robert Louis Stevenson- short stories
Hermann Hesse-
Steppenwolf
Kafka- short stories,
The Trial
Thomas Mann-
Doctor Faustus
James Joyce-
Ulysses
Faulkner-
As I Lay Dying
Hemingway- short stories
Yeats- poetry
T.S. Eliot-
The Wasteland and Other Poems, The Four Quartets
Wallace Stevens- poetry
Federico Garcia-Lorca- poetry
Fernando Pessoa- poetry, prose
Pablo Neruda-
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, The Captain's Verses, Residence on Earth
Camus- The Stranger
Rilke- poetry
Eugenio Montale-
Cuttlefish Bones
Boris Pasternak-
My Sister-Life
Paul Celan- poetry
Samuel Beckett-
Endgame, Waiting for Godot
J.L. Borges-
Labyrinths
Flannery O'Conner- short stories
Saul Bellow-
Sieze the Day
Italo Calvino-
Invisible Cities
Li Bo- poetry
Tu Fu- poetry
Wang Wei- poetry
I'll leave off here... this should keep you occupied for a while.