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 d...