The Divine Comedy is more than 14,000 lines long and is divided into three parts, but it’s 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 Doré, 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’s darkest scenes.
Who can blame Dante’s 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’s 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 “to once again catch sight of the stars.”
But Dante’s 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—and it’s 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’s human.
Dante volunteers to guide us on this last leg, warning in Paradiso’s Canto II that “if you lose sight of me, you’ll be totally lost. // The waters I’m sailing have never been crossed.” Many readers certainly do struggle with the epic’s 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’s ears are unable to make out divine music, because of his “mortal hearing.” But later, when his ears are opened, he comes upon a legion of angels resembling a “swarm of bees,” moving back and forth from flower to hive, singing “the glory” of God. Beatrice’s beauty only increases as they ascend, her “holy” smile indescribable even if he had “all that eloquence” of the ancient Greek muse of poetry to assist him.
Upon witnessing the Ascension of Jesus Christ surrounded by all of the souls he has redeemed, Dante marvels at how his mind “was released from itself.” 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’t matter, he watches the Annunciation unfold as “a crown-shaped circular form” haloed the Virgin Mary, “then whirled around her.” As if that weren’t 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’s where God resides. “Nowhere in poetry,” T. S. Eliot wrote about this last scene, “has experience so remote from ordinary experience been expressed so concretely.”
The earthly experience 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—1307 to 1321, the last decade and a half of his life—he was exiled from his faction-ridden hometown of Florence. Dante, who vehemently opposed the papacy’s 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.
Roughly half a millennium after Dante’s 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.
Italian nationalists had recently laid claim to Dante’s epic as an expression of shared cultural identity for the country’s 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’s “medieval miracle of song,” 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.
Thankfully, Longfellow avoided trying to reproduce Dante’s 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’s abundance of vowel sounds at the end of words. His translation, published in 1867, was wildly popular.
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’s democratic urge to spread Dante’s message of unity either. Following on her Inferno (2012) and Purgatorio (2021), Bang’s 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.
Bang’s unconventional approach was inspired by an encounter with a medley of 47 different English translations of the Inferno’s 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’s translation (already on her shelf). The 47 variations mostly struck her as formal and “elevated,” and she was curious to discover how contemporary English would sound. In the process, she arrived at something fresh. “Stopped mid-motion in the middle / Of what we call our life,” her tercet began, conveying an abrupt jolt, as if a roller coaster was kicking into gear, and then went on: “I looked up and saw no sky— / Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.”
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 “unreadable,” was still up in the air.
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—and undertake the extra challenge of rescuing this last part from unreadability by making it, as she’d done with the preceding canticles, more readily intelligible to 21st-century American readers. “While translating the poem,” she said in an interview, “I 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.”
By deciding to use a living language, the kind that real people use, she was following Dante’s 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 “I was a sad sack” and “love-struck” are plentiful in Bang’s 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’ll even find the obese Eric Cartman, from South Park, substituted for Ciacco, the gluttonous Florentine whose name means “little piggy.”
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’s used. An image of reflecting light that “bounces up, / Like a rocket man who longs to come back” is accompanied, for example, by a citation to both a 1951 Ray Bradbury short story and the Elton John song “Rocket Man.” Commenting on the line “Don’t be like a feather in each wind” as a metaphor for inconstancy, she refers to an echo not just in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale but also in Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love.” This poem, she conveys, isn’t frozen in time; even updated references will lose their cultural currency and need identifying.
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 “a basic scaffold” 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—weighing what struck her ear, eye, and mind as most suitable.
A great deal of Dante’s 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’s feats, here is Bang’s rendition of the tercet from Paradiso’s final canto, in which he is now face-to-face with God: “O Eternal Light, You who alone exist within / Yourself, who alone know Yourself, and self-known / And knowing, love and smile on Yourself!” It flows, but what Dante does can’t 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, “you,” which is directed toward God. He is everywhere, present in the very language being employed to address him at this moment.
Still, readers needn’t be aware of Dante’s 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. “That single instant is more a blank to me,” is how Bang phrases it, “than / The twenty-five centuries since the feat that made / Neptune marvel at the shadow of the Argo.”
The contemporary ring of “a blank to me” 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—an event that seems so small compared with what Dante has just witnessed in heaven.
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:
Since the time I’d looked before,
I saw that I’d moved through the entire arc
That the first zone makes from its middle to its end,
So that I could now see the mad path of Ulysses
On the far side of Cadiz, and on the near,
The shore where sweet Europa was carried off.
I would have recognized more of that
Little patch of land, except that beneath my feet
The sun was setting a sign or more away.
That last tercet, though, also conveys a different perspective: For all its marvels, Earth doesn’t look like much from such an immense distance. Bang calls it “that little patch of land.” Other translators have opted for the phrase “threshing floor,” which has archaic biblical overtones, but Bang’s choice is, I think, the best. It both captures the earthiness and emphasizes the disorienting scale of Dante’s 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.
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 “the middle of what we call our life.”
Dante’s 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.
This article appears in the February 2026 print edition with the headline “What Dante Is Trying to Tell Us.”
