The Inferno: Translated by Lorna Goodison

“Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.” So begins Lorna Goodison’s astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as “uncompromising as an old testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder.”

For the last two decades, Goodison has translated and reimagined Dante’s cantos, setting the original poem into her native Jamaica and employing Jamaican expressions and sayings. In doing so, she has attempted to do fo...