The Inferno

“Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.” So begins Lorna Goodison’s astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as “uncompromising as an old testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder.”

For the last two decades, Goodison has translated and reimagined Dante’s cantos, setting the original poem into her native Jamaica and employing Jamaican expressions and sayings. In doing so, she has attempted to do for Caribbean vernacular what Dante did for his Italian language in the fourteenth century—endow it with an entirely new vocal music and power. In recreating the journey through the “unpaved and rocky road” of Dante’s Hell for a contemporary audience, Goodison has given us a dazzling and profound new narrative of spiritual yearning for our era.

Reviews:

“Caribbean vocabulary permeates Goodison’s thrilling new version of the medieval masterpiece. Inferno, which charts Dante’s journey through the nine circles of hell … an original and often brilliant reimagining of Inferno … Goodison’s approach combines fidelity and invention … she challenges conventional understandings of centre and periphery by insisting that her homeland has the right to the same careful representation as Dante’s Florence.” – Amanda Perry, The Walrus

“In this new spellbinding translation she retells the narrative of the spiritual journey in the vernacular of the Caribbean and guides us through the nine concentric circles of hell with the visionary and lyric force of the much-loved Florentine exile himself…. Lorna Goodison’s retelling of Dante’s Inferno is a celestial reckoning of epic proportions.” – Shazia Hafiz, Quill and Quire

“As a reader of Dante, I hope to follow Goodison’s speaker through Purgatorio and Paradiso, too. For now, however, this is a fascinating work: one that would appeal to those interested in Dante, the Caribbean, world literature, or translation, or simply those seeking to face the dread rising from the ground of the everyday.” -Brennan McCracken, Montreal Review of Books

“Blunt, stark, direct, and personal, the translator has no time, here or elsewhere in the thirty-four cantos, for any velvet glove treatment of the canonical work….She approaches this project as a dialogue with the Italian poet.” – Randy Boyagoda, Literary Review of Canada

“‘Spending time in hell is not my idea of something that one should do,’ says poet Lorna Goodison, yet she immersed herself there for years to create her extraordinary modern Jamaican translation of Dante’s Inferno.” -Padráig O’Tuama, Poetry Unbound

“As a translator, Goodison has hewn closely to Dante’s original, maintaining its form and structure, architecture, and topography. But as an adaptor, she has revitalized his work in a deliberate remapping of his figures onto new soil. Far from wishing to supplant the authority of her poetic predecessor, she pays homage to his legacy by tradapting it. … More than remaining faithful to Dante’s original poem, Goodison’s tradaptation fulfills the agenda of the Commedia, which calls its reader to a distinctly active engagement, reading through the poem’s concrete figures to their abstract fulfillment. Goodison takes this active readerly stance a step further, returning from abstraction to a new and different concrete reality, here trans-figured in the light of the poet’s imagination and memory.” -Elizabeth Coggeshall, Dante Studies

“Structurally faithful to the original, comparable in scale and inventiveness to Derek Walcott’s Omeros, this is an expert recasting for a different time, place and people: an epoch-making poem.” – The Guardian

Interview:

Journeying through a Jamaican Inferno for Our Time (World Literature Today Weekly)