I realized we hadn’t done any poetry for a while. So after I heard poet Mary Jo Bang on the radio show Studio 360, I thought I would share an unusual thing she has done. She has created a modern version of Dante’s Inferno — relying on poetic license and others’ translations to make it more accessible.
Studio 360’s host calls Bang a “poet’s poet, one whose books regularly make year-end best-of lists. Her latest book of poetry is called The Last Two Seconds, and it couldn’t be farther from the stereotypical pretty nature poetry. The collection is full of a sense of impending environmental collapse: natural disaster, extinction, climate change, and cataclysmic violence. …
“The book’s title is also connected to Bang’s sense of her own mortality. ‘Once you get into your 60s you know you have x amount of time. …’
“Bang also recently produced a new translation of Dante’s Inferno — a feat she accomplished without knowing Italian. She worked from previous translations, she explains, comparing the work of other scholarly translators to get an idea of the literal meaning of the original. ‘I could see what was going on; I could see the liberties that each of these translators had taken,’ she says. ‘That gave me permission to come up with my own way of saying it, but it established the borders.’
“Bang also updated Dante’s hell to include [more-recent fiends, including] South Park’s Eric Cartman, who is condemned for the sin of gluttony. ‘Dante wrote the Inferno in the vernacular. He wanted everyone to be able to read it. I wanted to do the equivalent,’ she explains.
“Bang teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, and she says her students appreciate the contemporary references. ‘They tell me things like, “I always wanted to read this and I tried several times and I couldn’t.” That’s exactly the person for whom I wrote this, because I was one of those people, too.’ ”
Maybe me, too.
Hear Bang read her work at Studio 360, here.
Photo: Matt Valentine
Poet Mary Jo Bang. (Does this woman look like she hit 60?)
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