Lorna Goodison (Hugh Wright)

Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century narrative poem The Inferno has been praised and loved, adapted and parodied in countless translations over the centuries. For two decades, Jamaican-Canadian poet Lorna Goodison engaged with the cantos of this epic poem. 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.

Just as Dante chose not to write in the high Latin of his time, instead preferring the Florentine dialect of his people, Goodison turns to Creole, reminding us of an essential Dante as she weaves a hypnotic narrative with a Caribbean way of speech.

In popular translations, such as poet John Ciardi’s, the opening line of Canto I reads: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray.” Goodison: “Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me.” Goodison’s lyric is torqued with the disorientation and apprehension of the experience, so that the tree itself is “halfway” as Dante finds himself in a dark wood in mid-life. From the outset of Goodison’s work, it is clear that two great poets are in conversation with each other, as they are on the verso and recto of the opening spread where their gazes meet: a frontispiece portrait of Dante faces a self-portrait of Goodison.

Original sketches by Goodison punctuate each canto. In Canto VI, a person in a boat perseveres through the swamp that mirrors the poets’ journey through the third circle of hell where they encounter the Gluttons. In Canto XXIX, the poet encounters a hell of mutilated bodies; their eyes, “they did not want to stop looking even as I wept.” This canto closes with an elegant drawing of three figures, whose smooth lines and contrapposto stances only emphasize the violence of the vision.

Goodison’s translation sings in a different way when the writing shifts in Canto XXVIII from the Jamaican patois of previous cantos – “Gwey! You wutliss crow-bait, gnaw pon / yu own tripe with yu raw-chaw rage. / Forward to the pit! / This is not no idle stroll we on.” – to standard English. In this canto, Goodison calls out imperialism as did Dante, scaling it to reckon with the violent histories of the Caribbean:

Who, even when employing the clearest prose style,
could ever fully describe all that blood and carnage
that I saw before me, no matter how much they try?

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

If a one could gather up all of the murdered ones
who toiled in the blood and sugar soil of the Caribbean,
whose lives were sacrificed from the time slavery began.

Goodison stories the violence of colonization, echoing Dante’s own denunciation of the imperial ambitions of Florence, even as she questions the violence of Dante’s judgments against the Prophet Muhammad. Goodison questions her engagement with the Italian poet, whom she rebukes, until her guide, Ali, the prophet’s cousin and trusted guide, “signals” that she must continue.

This Inferno is cosmic, deeply imagined, and memorable. Goodison’s vision, like Dante’s, merges the divine and the earthly with uncanny beauty and wit. Her version reimagines the emotion and lyricism of many previous translations; here is a poet who speaks to and through troubled history, emerging unscathed from the many circles of hell, keeping intact a propulsive heart that beats to Caribbean rhythms. Lorna Goodison’s retelling of Dante’s Inferno is a celestial reckoning of epic proportions.