Dante

A Freewheeling Translation of Dante’s Purgatorio

Mary Jo Bang’s interpretation updates this 14th-century poem for 21st-century readers.

Nolan Kelly
November 3, 2021

In 2006, the poet Mary Jo Bang came across Caroline Bergvall’s “VIA (48 Dante Variations),” a pastiche poem containing every translation of the first stanza of Dante’s Inferno Bergvall could find in the British Library. The famous opening lines — which are about Dante being lost, midway through life, in a dark wood — are simple and decorous in the original Tuscan dialect. Yet no two translations sound exactly the same. Bang liked the piece so much that she thought she would try her own hand at the stanza, and see what she made out of Dante’s Italian. The exercise led her to spend the next seven years translating all of Inferno, before continuing to work on the rest of his Divine Comedy. Now, her take on Dante’s Purgatorio, the lesser-known yet much-loved second canticle of his epic poem, has hit the shelves — just in time for the 700th anniversary of the great poet’s death.