“AI will give up hope, you who enter here.” Read The Gates to Hell by Dante Alighieri. Inferno. The line has been applied to everything from concentration camps to office spaces, and is so recognizable that one might forget that it dates from the fourteenth century. Rather, it is done by an Italian – the translation dates back to 1805, when Henry Francis Carey turned Dante's terza Rima into good old Shakespearean iambic pentameter.
Nominated for the 2025 Governor General's Literary Prize for Poetry, Lorna Goodison's new version goes in a different direction. “I am the way to the city of deep depression,” Canto III begins. “Let all hopes go, everyone who came here like this.” “Depression”, for those not in the know, is a Rastafarian term, and such Caribbean vocabulary permeates Goodison's exciting new version of Medieval masterpiece. Infernowhich chronicles Dante's journey through the nine circles of hell, is one of those classics that has enjoyed a popular resonance, inspirational films, graphic novels and even a 2010 video game.
In the first third Divine Comedywhich continues until Purgatory And ParadisoThe epic poem has been translated into English dozens of times, including by such famous authors as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Ciardi and Robert Pinsky. Everyone faced the dilemma of whether to preserve Dante's interlocking rhyme scheme, which enhances the possibilities of a rhyme-poor language like English. Goodison chooses free verse, but the choice seems trivial compared to her most inspired choice. The Florentines wrote in the Tuscan dialect back when Latin was the norm. Goodison also abandons so-called “standard” English in favor of Jamaican vernacular.
The result is an original and often brilliant reimagining Inferno. Goodison follows Dante's text line by line, but adapts his cultural and geographical references: slave revolts replace ancient wars, and reggae stars replace famous Greeks. If inserting sprinter Usain Bolt into a theology poem sounds like a gimmick, it's not. Goodison, now based in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and an acclaimed volume of essays. A former Jamaican Poet Laureate and winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, she has also taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto.
Goodison combines these aesthetic and intellectual influences to thread a particularly difficult needle: she challenges Eurocentric norms that view Caribbean peoples and their speech patterns as marginal, even as she remains faithful to the canonical European author. Dante is surprisingly ripe for recruitment into this post-colonial cause. Writing too early to be involved in the conquest of America or the transatlantic slave trade, the medieval poet demonstrates a commitment to the local people.
However, while it is reasonable to conflate Dante's politics of representation with the Caribbean, Goodison's version Inferno also works for a simpler reason: Hell is a lot of fun.
Dseems like a lot of translations be in fashion. In 2017, Emily Wilson made waves as the first woman to render. Odyssey into English, presenting Odysseus as a “complex man”. Wilson's reputation arose from perceived differences with her source material, given the sexist double standard that saw Penelope wait chastely at home for two decades while her shipwrecked husband cavorted with goddesses.
Goodison, on the other hand, presents Dante as an ally. At a 2021 talk organized by the Berlin Institute for Cultural Research ICI, she thanked him for giving “poets around the world permission to write in the languages of their people.” In his essay De vulgari eloquentia, written between 1303 and 1305, Dante insisted on using the everyday speech of ordinary people rather than Latin. By writing poetry in his Tuscan dialect, he sought to elevate the low-prestige language and make his works accessible to a wider audience. Ironically, his Florentine phrases later became the language of power. Divine Comedy and the later works of Petrarch and Boccaccio were used as a guide for the standardization of the Italian language, which contributed to the stigmatization of many other dialects of the peninsula.
The rendering of Dante's poems into Jamaican English is thus a renewal of the original ideal underlying his aesthetic. Of course, “English” may not be the right word. In an influential 1979 lecture on “The History of Voice”, the Barbadian poet and academic Kamau Brathwaite argued against considering Caribbean dialects of English, given the “pejorative connotations” of the characterization. Instead, he called them part of a “national language” marked by African inflections. Brathwaite encouraged poets to exploit the rhythm of these spoken words, famously declaring, “A hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” He also cited Dante as a precedent.
Goodison's translation expands on this sense of common cause. Her poems move between registers, and phrases like “Gwee!
The effect goes far beyond an intellectual exercise. Goodison Inferno dynamic, energetic and often funny. For example, the circle of sinners condemned for lust includes “excited, hot-tempered people who cannot control themselves.” One of them is the “Empress of Relaxation,” who was the “former female ruler of dancehall,” a music genre-turned-subculture that has generated the same amount of pearl-clutching as rap and hip-hop. Next to her is “Miss Clio”, a colloquial Cleopatra who “committed suicide when she couldn't have sex.”
This gossiping tone intensifies one of Infernomain pleasure: finding out which famous people are tortured. Dante's poem can be considered highbrow fan fiction as he imagines all sorts of historical and mythological characters in hell, creating punishments according to their earthly misdeeds. He also takes revenge on political enemies. Filippo Argenti, a representative of the rival Florentine faction, is found bathing in the mud of the River Styx, and Pope Boniface VIII awaits a place in the eighth circle, where some crooks are buried upside down with their feet set on fire.
Goodison has her own revenge fantasies. She buries Pope Alexander VI in a cesspool for authorizing the colonization of America and introduces “T. May,” former British Prime Minister Theresa May, boiling in a river of blood. Her crime? She “broke the hearts of Windrush/citizens” – a reference to the scandal that erupted in 2018 after at least 164 people who had moved legally to the UK when the Caribbean was part of the British Empire were wrongly detained or deported. Likewise, in hell is “Elon the Geek,” roasting next to a Bitcoin fan.
Goodison's approach combines fidelity and ingenuity. Most of her lines reflect the originals, albeit with changes that update the images and distance them from clichés. Tears thus become “water for the eyes,” shadows become “blockheads,” and the creature whose speed Dante compared to an arrow now “takes off like a shot from a Glock.” The semantic density of her poetic practice is also evident here, so that some lines are both rewarding and demanding re-reading. Indeed, the most pleasant way to communicate with her Inferno may be next to the Italian or simpler translation to better appreciate when it is playing and when it is true.
The biggest differences occur at the character level. Goodison takes on Dante's role as narrator and protagonist, and Virgil, his guide through the underworld, is replaced by Louise Bennett-Coverley, a charismatic poet and performer who began chronicling Jamaican life in patois ballads in the 1940s. (Bennett has her own connections in Canada: she eventually moved to Scarborough, and many of her works are archived at McMaster University.)
Affectionately nicknamed “Miss Lou”, Bennett brings a feminist twist to the translation: the poem now revolves around two Jamaican women. Goodison also honors Bennett as his most revered predecessor: “You were my model and mentor, and it was through your example that I created the hybrid style that people talk to me about all over the world.”
ABOUTother Caribbean figures receive cameos in Canto IV, which takes place in limbo. If Dante admired the spirit of Homer, Goodison embraces Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Nanny of the Maroons, the leader of the runaway slaves who led the rebellion against the colonial powers, replaces Electra, and her allies such as Cudjo replace the defenders of Troy. In the role of Aristotle, Goodison casts Marcus Garvey, a champion of black pride who founded and led the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
This vision embodies the image of the twentieth-century Caribbean Mediterranean that, among other things, Walcott used to present the cultural and linguistic diversity of the region as a crude analogue of ancient Greece. Less clear is the underlying theological concept. Dante's Christianity forced him to declare the Greeks pagans, even if he gave them a better corner of uncertainty. What is the justification for banishing the sculptor Edna Manley or the scientist and choreographer Rex Nettleford from heaven?
This may be a limitation of Goodison's method compared with Walcott's equally ambitious approach. Omeroswho are remodeling Iliad on the island of Saint Lucia. Where Walcott treated Homer as a free source of inspiration, Goodison dwells Inferno line by line. The result can be compelling parallels. For example, when describing the city of Cesena, Dante connects its geography and politics: “just as it lies between the plain and the mountain, /[the city]lives somewhere between tyranny and freedom.” Goodison makes the same point about Jamaica's capital: “As for Kingston, facing the wide blue Caribbean Sea, / there is also a great gulf between its poor / and rich citizens. Wide and ever expanding.”
At times she chafes at the restrictions, especially when Dante places the Prophet Muhammad in the eighth circle of hell with his body split from chin to groin. Goodison pauses to “rebuke the Italian poet, stern as a Rastafarian/elder,” and this is the only moment she openly doubts her project. “I’m confused, is this an ambitious overkill? // Did I act unreasonably by taking on this Divine Comedy?”
I wonder if Goodison will continue with the rest of the poem? She published songs from Purgatorybut she will have to figure out who to count as saints when there are so many lights below. It provides ample opportunity to re-experience the poem's gothic oddities, including trees inhabited by the souls of people who have committed suicide, bleeding and speaking from their broken branches. Also delightfully whimsical is the description of a six-legged snake that wraps itself around a person until the two begin to merge, so that “the features of each come together and merge into one / face, where the two are lost in each other.”
These bravura moments are matched by the integrity of her project. Goodison's commitment to Jamaica's linguistic characteristics is coupled with pride in her people's achievements and deep concern for their future. She uses hell as a lever to criticize the atrocities of “politicians,” comparing one fiery stream to “the acid-red mud lakes left behind by bauxite mining / or the eye color of our politicians who sell off / our natural resources from the Cockpit to the Blue Mountain.” And she challenges conventional notions of center and periphery, insisting that her homeland deserves to be depicted as carefully as Dante's Florence.
IN InfernoIn the final stage, Goodison and her guide rise to the surface. They see “a continuous circle unfolding before us” and, finally, “they go out again and see the stars go out.” Ending with a pronoun that ignorant grammarians would consider superfluous and misspelled, and an unstressed syllable struggling with iambics, Goodison plants his flag in the territory of world literature.
Julieta Caballero is an illustrator at The Walrus.
