Descent into Hell

The opening lines of Dante’s Inferno have been, with the rest of his poem, both translated and reimagined by poets and artists for centuries: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.” When it comes to writing in English, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s stately, nineteenth-century version —“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost”— held sway until the twentieth century brought efforts by the likes of Dorothy Sayers, Charles Singleton, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, and Robert Pinsky, among many others. The past two decades have seen fresh translations by Robert and Jean Hollander, Robin Kirkpatrick, and Clive James. And, as I discovered on a recent Sunday morning, the narrative poem that ventures into the afterlife is also being adapted by artificial intelligence these days. Whatever program lurks in my Safari browser offered this along with my search results (unbidden):

Hopefully at some point artificial intelligence will learn that Dante didn’t write in English or that English itself is not “often translated into English.” In the meantime, readers looking for a bolder and more arresting reimagining of this 700-year-old piece of world literature will find ample reward in Lorna Goodison’s The Inferno, which begins:

Blunt, stark, direct, and personal, Goodison has no time, here or elsewhere in the thirty-four cantos, for any velvet glove treatment of the canonical work. Indeed, as signalled by her self-portrait placed in juxtaposition to an eighteenth-century copper engraving of Dante himself — a visual preface to the first canto — Goodison approaches this project as a dialogue with the Italian poet. Her Inferno is a plain verse, tercet-structured reflection on the choices he made on the page, her versification a sideways nod to his choice of terza rima. In the strongest passages, she engages his text with lyric elegance, analogies and metaphors sustained across stanzas, self-searching asides, and sharp dramatic dialogue. These choices are all acts of solidarity with Dante and his approach to telling the story of a poet-pilgrim’s guided descent into hell, not least Goodison’s many lines rendered in the sliding, soaring, hard-stomping English of her native “Jamekya.” After all, Dante elected to write in the vernacular Italian of Florence, rather than in Latin, the authoritative language of the church, state, and culture in the early fourteenth century.

To be sure, Goodison’s Inferno, the individual cantos of which she has been writing for some twenty years, is much more than just her conversation with Dante; it’s also an extended reflection on her own artistic formation. And just as Dante chose Virgil as his guide, she chooses Louise Bennett-Coverley, a Jamaican poet and folklorist who, like the author, eventually settled in Canada. Led by “Miss Lou,” Goodison’s narrator explores Jamaican culture and history, before and during and after colonization. In parallel to Dante’s own social and political criticism — primarily of life in the Tuscan capital, but also of Italy and Europe more broadly — Goodison engages with hyper-contemporary matters of import both within and beyond the Caribbean.

For instance, Dante wrote about a case of notorious infidelity and murder that would have been familiar to his readership: a Florentine husband found his wife and brother in bed and killed them both in the early 1280s. This tragic story became one of the best-known sequences of Inferno; in canto 5, the narrator comes upon the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, who are locked together in an eternal whirlwind. Similarly, in canto 24, Goodison gives us a woman who “will rob millions from Usain Bolt. / Lightning will flash from avenging storm clouds / when Bolt and the thieves go to fight it out in court,” evoking the Jamaican sprinter’s discovery that he had been defrauded by an investment firm in 2023 (along with the prophecy that “villains will occupy the house of representatives”). Dante infamously sent several popes to hell, including Boniface VIII, who was still alive at the time of the poem’s composition. In Goodison’s version of canto 30 — where those guilty of fraud are confined for eternity to infernal pouches — her poet-pilgrim, ever curious about who is suffering and for what reason, hears that one of the tormented sinners is “Elon the Geek.” Alongside Potiphar’s wife, who tried to tempt Joseph in the book of Genesis, he really stinks, and for good reason: “It is the fever / of lust and ambition that make them smell like death.”

I could keep doing this, for thousands of words, playing tic-tac-Inferno between versions. And no doubt many will do so in the time ahead, given both the enduring relevance of the original and Goodison’s standing as a major contemporary post-colonial writer long lauded in Jamaica, Canada, and the United States, where she has lived, taught, and published for decades. Instead, I want to focus on just one moment in this translation that points to the challenge anyone faces in trying both to interpret the work and to render it anew. In canto 28, Goodison’s poet-pilgrim “saw someone split open from front to back.” Knowing who this is — because she is travelling through Dante’s underworld while at the same time trying to make it her own — she stops the movement of the poem to address the reader:

Goodison’s self-accusation is winning in its plain honesty, even if this sequence points to the deep problem of this book. Had she made the decision to join the long line of loyal anglophone translators, she would have fulfilled this singular responsibility and represented the Prophet Mohammed as he appears in the original Italian, in a canto devoted to those damned for sowing division and schism. She could have tried to be neutral about Dante’s belief that Islam wasn’t its own religion but instead a breakaway sect from Christianity. Whereas if Goodison had decided to remake Inferno completely on her own terms — akin, say, to what Derek Walcott (who has a brief cameo) did with Homer, in Omeros — then she might not feel such divisive tension nor the need to signal the proto-Islamophobia of her outsize literary forebear to her reader. As it stands, she chooses both ways throughout, which, absent a coherent cosmology equivalent to Dante’s, creates questionable and conflicting logics. Neither a conventional representation of nor a departure from the original, her retelling can be more confusing than clear.

Nevertheless, her poet-pilgrim makes it through. In the closing lines of the final canto, as she climbs upside down out of hell, she tells us, “I spied the lovingkindness that the heavens hold from afar. // And it is just so we come out once again and see the stars dem.” There are two more canticles, Purgatorio and Paradiso, that join Inferno in making up what people for centuries have called The Divine Comedy. Goodison and Dante readers alike will now wait to see if we’ll get more such lovingkindness and stars dem.