On “Inferno”

The first translation of Dante I loved was Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno (Graywolf Press, 2012). In a vernacular collage that still attends to nuances of the Italian, Bang balances the multiple truths of the original to create something both faithful and new. Encountering this work in graduate school at the University of New Orleans inspired me not only to read every translation of Inferno I could find, but also to think about what translation can do to excavate canonical texts with all their baggage and damning politics. Without Bang’s example, I never would have attempted my own translation, let alone make the practice of translation central to my current research in Anthropocene aesthetics.

Bang renders the last line of Canto IV as, “And I come to a place where there is no daybreak, ever.” While there is no “ever” as such in the Italian, the gesture is implied with what the reader learns about Hell in Canto III: it is the place before causation that “endures eternally.” Yes, Hell has temporality and it’s an immanent one. This in mind, I translate the last line of Canto IV similarly as, “I come to the place where nothing shines, ever.” I consider this rendering as much an homage to Bang as it is a recognition of the correctness of her “ever.” In Dante’s Hell, Limbo remains a specialized space for the virtuous pagans for whom the poet had so much sympathy. Beyond this, though, is where the truly damned reside: a place always and already truncated from the light of God and the light of reason.