\n<\/p>\n
The Divine Comedy<\/span> is more than 14,000 lines long and is divided into three parts, but it\u2019s the first part, the Inferno, that gets all the attention. For centuries, readers have preferred the horrors of hell to the perfection of heaven. Gustave Dor\u00e9, the celebrated French illustrator, did elaborate engravings for the three canticles in the mid-19th century and devoted 99 out of 135 of them to Dante Alighieri\u2019s darkest scenes.<\/p>\n Who can blame Dante\u2019s admirers when hell is filled with so many beautifully flawed characters: Francesca da Rimini, the eloquent adulteress; Farinata, the proud heretic; Ulysses, the defiant king; Ugolino, the father turned cannibal who ate his own sons? And then there are the infernal workers who make sure that Lucifer\u2019s realm runs smoothly, among them farting devils, giants in chains, and a flying monster with the body of a serpent and the face of an honest man. Most readers see little reason to continue with the poem once Dante, guided by Virgil, has safely exited \u201cto once again catch sight of the stars.\u201d<\/p>\n Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p>\n View More<\/p>\n But Dante\u2019s journey has just begun. In Purgatorio, he must summit a massive mountain. Success in that struggle leaves him facing, along with other sinners, a wall of flames that inflict purifying pain but not death. Only then does Paradise await\u2014and it\u2019s not just around the corner. He must travel past the planets and fixed stars to a rose-shaped empyrean. Tackling this culminating challenge in the company of his beloved Beatrice, who inspired the poem, Dante must trasumanar, a magnificent word that he invents to describe the experience of passing beyond what\u2019s human.<\/p>\n Dante volunteers to guide us on this last leg, warning in Paradiso\u2019s Canto II that \u201cif you lose sight of me, you\u2019ll be totally lost. \/\/ The waters I\u2019m sailing have never been crossed.\u201d Many readers certainly do struggle with the epic\u2019s final part, which has its share of dense theological disquisitions. It is filled with vivid scenes, too, which stretch the human imagination about as far as it can go. At one point, Dante\u2019s ears are unable to make out divine music, because of his \u201cmortal hearing.\u201d But later, when his ears are opened, he comes upon a legion of angels resembling a \u201cswarm of bees,\u201d moving back and forth from flower to hive, singing \u201cthe glory\u201d of God. Beatrice\u2019s beauty only increases as they ascend, her \u201choly\u201d smile indescribable even if he had \u201call that eloquence\u201d of the ancient Greek muse of poetry to assist him.<\/p>\n Upon witnessing the Ascension of Jesus Christ surrounded by all of the souls he has redeemed, Dante marvels at how his mind \u201cwas released from itself.\u201d Put another way, his mind was blown. After that, in a reversal of chronology signaling that we are in a place where sequential time doesn\u2019t matter, he watches the Annunciation unfold as \u201ca crown-shaped circular form\u201d haloed the Virgin Mary, \u201cthen whirled around her.\u201d As if that weren\u2019t enough, Dante envisions an eagle in the sky made up of souls that change shape in mid-air, and he identifies a point in the universe that is both center and circumference; that\u2019s where God resides. \u201cNowhere in poetry,\u201d T. S. Eliot wrote about this last scene, \u201chas experience so remote from ordinary experience been expressed so concretely.\u201d<\/p>\n The earthly <\/span>experience<\/span> of personal grief and privation that inspired such transcendent beauty is mind-bending in its own way. During the years that Dante worked on the Divine Comedy\u20141307 to 1321, the last decade and a half of his life\u2014he was exiled from his faction-ridden hometown of Florence. Dante, who vehemently opposed the papacy\u2019s desire for secular power, had been charged with financial corruption, a politically motivated accusation, and the threat of being burned at the stake if he returned hung over him. A party of one, as he later called himself, he wandered from court to court, living off the generosity of a few patrons. He never set foot in Florence again.<\/p>\n Roughly half a millennium after Dante\u2019s death, his poem received an ecstatic welcome in the United States, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow embarked on the first American translation of all three parts in the early 1860s, as the Civil War raged. A poet and a retired professor of modern languages at Harvard, he made his way through Paradiso, publishing three of its cantos in The Atlantic, and then turned to the Inferno, finishing up with a revision of Purgatorio.<\/p>\n Italian nationalists had recently laid claim to Dante\u2019s epic as an expression of shared cultural identity for the country\u2019s warring city-states. Longfellow was a supporter of the so-called Risorgimento and of Dante, whose optimistic message he was keen to mobilize against the tragic events in his own country. Dante\u2019s \u201cmedieval miracle of song,\u201d as Longfellow called it, could be reimagined as an allegory for the cleansing of the original sin of slavery and the restoration of a broken democratic union.<\/p>\n Thankfully, Longfellow avoided trying to reproduce Dante\u2019s original terza-rima scheme (in which the last word in the second line of a tercet provides the first and third rhyme of the next tercet). Instead he chose the more forgiving blank verse, which works much better in English, a rhyme-poor language without Italian\u2019s abundance of vowel sounds at the end of words. His translation, published in 1867, was wildly popular.<\/p>\n Since then, about 50 other American renditions of the entire poem have appeared. None is as provocative as the one that Mary Jo Bang, a poet, has been working on for the better part of two decades. And none is as attuned to Longfellow\u2019s democratic urge to spread Dante\u2019s message of unity either. Following on her Inferno (2012) and Purgatorio (2021), Bang\u2019s Paradiso has arrived at a moment of national turmoil, and sets out to make a vision of hope and humility accessible to all in an unusual way.<\/p>\n Bang\u2019s unconventional approach was inspired by an encounter with a medley of 47 different English translations of the Inferno\u2019s famous first three lines assembled by the poet Caroline Bergvall. Never having studied Italian, Bang saw a chance to try her hand by relying on those variations, along with Charles S. Singleton\u2019s translation (already on her shelf). The 47 variations mostly struck her as formal and \u201celevated,\u201d and she was curious to discover how contemporary English would sound. In the process, she arrived at something fresh. \u201cStopped mid-motion in the middle \/ Of what we call our life,\u201d her tercet began, conveying an abrupt jolt, as if a roller coaster was kicking into gear, and then went on: \u201cI looked up and saw no sky\u2014 \/ Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.\u201d<\/p>\n By Dante Alighieri, translated by Mary Jo Bang<\/p>\n Her experience with these three lines was enough to convince Bang that she wanted to carry on at least with the Inferno. She now gathered an array of esteemed English translators to keep her company. (To Singleton and Longfellow, she added William Warren Vernon, John D. Sinclair, and Robert and Jean Hollander, among others.) Whether she would make it through Paradiso, which she had until now found \u201cunreadable,\u201d was still up in the air.<\/p>\n Her perspective shifted mid-motion, as it were, when the pandemic hit. Colloquially rich translations of the other two canticles behind her, and with the world in lockdown, the time was right to contemplate the afterlife\u2014and undertake the extra challenge of rescuing this last part from unreadability by making it, as she\u2019d done with the preceding canticles, more readily intelligible to 21st-century American readers. \u201cWhile translating the poem,\u201d she said in an interview, \u201cI would ask myself how Dante might say something if he were speaking American English at this moment in time. And, additionally, how would he say it if he knew everything that I know.\u201d<\/p>\n By deciding to use a living language, the kind that real people use, she was following Dante\u2019s lead. He had chosen his native Tuscan dialect over literary Latin because it was sensory, ever-evolving, and intimate in the way that it could speak to readers. Phrases such as \u201cI was a sad sack\u201d and \u201clove-struck\u201d are plentiful in Bang\u2019s Inferno, and when Dante meets his great-great-grandfather in Paradiso, they use words such as shout-out and lowlife. Dante incorporated cultural allusions familiar to his audience. So does Bang, in both her text and her notes. In the Inferno, you\u2019ll even find the obese Eric Cartman, from South Park, substituted for Ciacco, the gluttonous Florentine whose name means \u201clittle piggy.\u201d<\/p>\n In Paradiso, she takes fewer liberties with the text. But in her notes, instead of limiting herself to the dense scholarly glosses on obscure words and the thousands of literary and historical references that are the standard apparatus of translated editions of the Divine Comedy, Bang mixes in nods to the more contemporaneous references she\u2019s used. An image of reflecting light that \u201cbounces up, \/ Like a rocket man who longs to come back\u201d is accompanied, for example, by a citation to both a 1951 Ray Bradbury short story and the Elton John song \u201cRocket Man.\u201d Commenting on the line \u201cDon\u2019t be like a feather in each wind\u201d as a metaphor for inconstancy, she refers to an echo not just in Shakespeare\u2019s The Winter\u2019s Tale but also in Led Zeppelin\u2019s \u201cAll My Love.\u201d This poem, she conveys, isn\u2019t frozen in time; even updated references will lose their cultural currency and need identifying.<\/p>\n To purists who fantasize about the fullest possible immersion in the original text, creative adaptation of this sort sounds like heresy. These same purists would likely be even more horrified to discover something else: By the time Bang was working on Purgatorio, she had begun using Google Translate to render lines in the original, getting \u201ca basic scaffold\u201d as she made her way along. She also sometimes consulted Wiktionary, the collaboratively edited multi-language dictionary. With her English editions of Dante still by her side, Bang was at work on an artistic venture very much of the digital age. But for her, translation remained an act of working through and against multiple interpretations and responding by reordering, amending, and substituting, all guided by poetic decisions\u2014weighing what struck her ear, eye, and mind as most suitable.<\/p>\n A great <\/span>deal<\/span> of Dante\u2019s remarkable repertoire of technical tricks will get lost in translation, whatever the language and whoever the translator: the chiasmuses, the neologisms, the numerical correspondences, the wordplay, all of the dazzling rhymes necessary to keep the engine of terza rima going. To appreciate just one example of Dante\u2019s feats, here is Bang\u2019s rendition of the tercet from Paradiso\u2019s final canto, in which he is now face-to-face with God: \u201cO Eternal Light, You who alone exist within \/ Yourself, who alone know Yourself, and self-known \/ And knowing, love and smile on Yourself!\u201d It flows, but what Dante does can\u2019t be matched. The pileup of you and yourself and alone is meant to approximate something extraordinary that is happening in the Italian words: Etterna, intendi, intelletta, and intendente are infused with the pronoun te, \u201cyou,\u201d which is directed toward God. He is everywhere, present in the very language being employed to address him at this moment.<\/p>\n Still, readers needn\u2019t be aware of Dante\u2019s acrobatics to discover that the poem in English provides imaginative explosions that can stun in mid-sentence. Take the moment in Paradiso when Dante sees the unity of the universe in an instant. It is an experience that he can never fully transcribe. Yet he tries to convey the miraculous insight by emphasizing its awesome fleetingness. \u201cThat single instant is more a blank to me,\u201d is how Bang phrases it, \u201cthan \/ The twenty-five centuries since the feat that made \/ Neptune marvel at the shadow of the Argo.\u201d<\/p>\n The contemporary ring of \u201ca blank to me\u201d collides with the ancient allusion that immediately follows. And then in the concrete image itself, time and space dilate and compress simultaneously: A god deep in the sea stares upward at an extraordinary event, the mythic first sea-crossing in a boat\u2014an event that seems so small compared with what Dante has just witnessed in heaven.<\/p>\n Throughout the decades when he was barred from going home, and surrounded by chaotic political infighting, Dante kept his eye fixed on the sky above. He stared upward long enough, in fact, to imagine the reverse, looking downward. In Paradiso, his last glimpse of Earth pays tribute to all of the wonder he sees below:<\/p>\n Since the time I\u2019d looked before, So that I could now see the mad path of Ulysses I would have recognized more of that That last tercet, though, also conveys a different perspective: For all its marvels, Earth doesn\u2019t look like much from such an immense distance. Bang calls it \u201cthat little patch of land.\u201d Other translators have opted for the phrase \u201cthreshing floor,\u201d which has archaic biblical overtones, but Bang\u2019s choice is, I think, the best. It both captures the earthiness and emphasizes the disorienting scale of Dante\u2019s perception. Long before there was an image from outer space of our pale blue dot, he produced one of his own. Earth seems small, fragile, lonely, way out on the edge of the universe, a place populated by a species convinced that it is at the center of everything. Dante had suffered and seen enough to know that it was not.<\/p>\n Now is a good time to pick up Paradiso. Some readers might be looking for salvation along the way, but the message is even more universal than that. When the world feels out of control, you can still use your imagination to ascend above the noise, the havoc. Doing so, you might realize just how small you are: small, but far from alone. There are billions and billions of others just like you, trying to navigate \u201cthe middle of what we call our life.\u201d<\/p>\n Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy almost joined the ranks of the great unfinished poems in literary history. After his death, in 1321, from malaria contracted on the way back from a diplomatic mission to Venice, the last 13 cantos from Paradiso went missing. His sons Jacopo and Pietro looked everywhere but came up empty-handed. And then, so the story goes, Dante appeared to Jacopo in a dream, and led him to his room in Ravenna. Dante pointed to a hidden recess in the wall: Paradiso lost was found, moldy but intact. Seven centuries later, it has been found again.<\/p>\n This article appears in the February 2026 print edition with the headline \u201cWhat Dante Is Trying to Tell Us.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Divine Comedy is more than 14,000 lines long and is divided into three parts, but it\u2019s the first part, the Inferno, that gets all the attention. For centuries, readers have preferred the horrors of hell to the perfection of heaven. Gustave Dor\u00e9, the celebrated French illustrator, did elaborate engravings for the three canticles in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7341,21606,10675,21607,669],"class_list":{"0":"post-40047","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bang","9":"tag-dantes","10":"tag-mary","11":"tag-paradiso","12":"tag-rescued"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Explore the February 2026 Issue<\/h2>\n
I saw that I\u2019d moved through the entire arc
That the first zone makes from its middle to its end,<\/p>\n
On the far side of Cadiz, and on the near,
The shore where sweet Europa was carried off.<\/p>\n
Little patch of land, except that beneath my feet
The sun was setting a sign or more away.<\/p>\n