Lorna Goodison, Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation (2025)

“I wanted to go for a sea-bath after I signed off on the final edits to my adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. Working away in that subterranean world where lost souls wallow in boiling blood and excrement, are seared by flame and fiery rain, buffeted by foul polluted winds, covered in nasty sores, lashed by venomous snakes, and frozen-up in ice made me yearn for full immersion in the clear blue Caribbean sea.

“I would have hot-footed it to my favourite beach on the North Coast, there to cleanse and clear my mind in the warm salt water, had I been in Jamaica. But here on the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia, by the azure and still chill and wintery sea, the season for sea-baths is not yet; so Ted and I headed into the town of Sechelt to our local fish shop, with the intention of buying some type of seafood caught fresh from the Salish Sea for dinner.

“The fish shop is situated across from a small art gallery in town, and I always check to see what paintings are on display in the main window. Today what I saw hanging in pride of place almost caused me to faint, for it was a reproduction of Henry Holiday’s painting of Dante and Beatrice. It was the very same image I’d first seen when I was a teenager at school in Jamaica over sixty years ago, the image that had provoked such a strong reaction in me then that I almost fainted. […]”    —Lorna Goodison on her translation of Dante’s Inferno, Carcanet Press Substack

“‘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’.

“This Jamaican Dante, a quarter-century in the making, is as much transformation as it is translation: the poet’s narrator, its Dante figure, is now guided through an underworld by Goodison’s great Jamaican predecessor Louise Bennett, ‘Miss Lou’ in the book. Goodison draws on the entire continuum of Jamaican speech yet securely grounds the action in Dante’s formal architecture, bringing an entire world to life: we encounter other poets, including Goodison’s friend Derek Walcott, as well as Caribbean politicians, reggae innovators and other public figures. Here, she recreates the journey through the ‘unpaved and rocky road’ of Dante’s Hell for a contemporary audience and attempts 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.”    —Carcanet Press