In her new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, translator Mary Jo Bang has brought to bear an eagle-eyed focus on the power of lyric poetry. This book is the last of the three that form Dante’s The Divine Comedy—the most widely read of the three being Inferno, where the punishment of the sinners in Hell mirrors the nature of the sins committed in their lifetimes. The same process is at work in Purgatorio, although there, punishment is structured instead as restorative penance, which, once completed, enables the souls to enter the blissful realm of the tenth heaven. In Paradiso, then, Dante travels through the nine spheres of the solar system until he arrives at the Empyrean, where he finds the saved basking in the Eternal Light of God’s mind. Speaking to those he meets along the way, Dante becomes aware that bliss isn’t the same for everyone; one’s ability to feel God’s love in the afterlife depends on the qualities of their time spent on earth.
By translating Dante’s language into modern American English and adopting a matter-of-fact authorial tone, Bang retains the elegance of the original diction. Throughout, she adopts a loose iambic structure and preserves the three-line stanza to echo Dante’s terza rima, an arrangement he devised to gesture to the Holy Trinity. All of these measures combine to honor the imagery and meaning of Dante’s original vernacular Italian, while also acknowledging the fundamental differences between the two languages.
Curious to learn more, I spoke with Bang about the act of “carrying” poetry across from one language to another, the nuts and bolts of her translation process, and how Heaven is different for each person lucky enough to have made it there.
Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation for you? And has your view of the possibilities of translation shifted over time?
Mary Jo Bang (MJB): The best definition of translation I’ve encountered comes from tracing the term back to the Latin translationem (nominative translatio), which means “a carrying across.” When applied to a text, the suggestion is that you are carrying a text in one language over into a second language. The Greeks used the word for the work of metaphor, which, like the translation of a text from one language to another, is rooted in equivalency and substitution. In the Old French, translation also referred to carrying the bones of saints from one place to another, as relics. It makes sense to me that the preciousness of such bones would have gotten linguistically intertwined with the precious religious texts copied by clerical scribes. The scribes carried a text from book to book, and sometimes also from one language to another. There have been other uses of the word, from the sacred meaning of being transported (translated) to Heaven, to the secular meaning of moving plantings from one place to another.
When I began translating the Comedy, I knew little to nothing about translation. I had taken two translation workshops when I was an MFA student at Columbia in the early nineties, working on translating a French novel, but after I finished my degree and moved to St. Louis to begin teaching, the novel stayed in the cardboard box it arrived in. I don’t know that I would have ever gone back to translation except that I read Caroline Bergvall’s “Via (48 Dante Variations),” and marveled at the fact that in forty-seven translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno, no two were identical. This felt like a demonstration of the fact that there is no single “right” way to translate one language into another; that might be obvious to some but for me, it was a decisive revelation and one that has been at the forefront of my mind in all of the translations I’ve worked on since.
TT: You write in your translator’s note about having found Philip H. Wicksteed’s translation of Paradiso impossible to read: “Any translation of Paradiso that sounds labored or overly formal, even those not as highly stylized as Wicksteed’s, undermines the way the poem speaks to the psychological complexity of human behavior.” What was it about his translation that made it feel unreadable to you, and how did that experience influence how you translated Paradiso all these years later?
MJB: Philip Henry Wicksteed was a Unitarian minister who was, quite naturally, very familiar with the King James Bible. When he translated Paradiso into English in 1899, he elevated Dante’s medieval Tuscan Italian to the register of the King James Bible by using the archaic present-tense verb ending -eth, which was common in the 1600s when the King James Bible was translated. The result is that in Wicksteed’s version, Dante’s vernacular no longer sounds anything like the vernacular but instead sounds consistently biblical: God’s glory “regloweth,” a heaven “receiveth,” our intellect “sinketh,” etc. Wicksteed additionally used twelfth-century terms like “nathless” for “nevertheless.” I assume the good reverend felt he was ennobling the language, but as a first-time reader of Paradiso, I found his translation confusing and alienating. Everything I had loved about Inferno and Purgatorio—which was, of course, Dante’s language—was overlaid with something that felt like ostentation.
I wanted my translation to honor Dante’s decision to write the poem in the vernacular instead of in literary Latin. My reasons were his: he wanted the language to have the warmth of spoken language; he wanted the language to be one that everyone could read without any special erudition; he wanted to avoid Latin’s overwhelming sense of sublime, which he felt would risk diminishing the impact of what he was saying; and he wanted the language to change over time.
TT: Did the way in which you translate (in terms of diction, syntax, word choice, etc.) change across your translations of The Divine Comedy’s three books?
MJB: Yes, definitely! When I was translating Inferno, I took countless liberties in terms of all the elements you’re asking about. I took far fewer when translating Purgatorio. In terms of staying close to the original, Paradiso is the truest translation. For any deviation from the original, I have a rationale—which is that the departure actually brings the reader closer to the way the original worked.
If we take diction to mean “the choice and use of words,” it’s difficult to measure “sameness” between two languages; strictly speaking, the words can’t be “the same.” What I’ve done throughout is to try to take the weight of the vernacular in American English and match that to the weight of the medieval Tuscan Italian. In terms of syntax, the word order in English is not the same as in Italian; as a result, if one maintains the Italian word order in English it sounds odd, and the language didn’t sound odd to Dante’s original reader.
TT: What was the revision process like for you in terms of preserving the warmth of the Italian vernacular in modern American English?
MJB: For me, translation is always a multistep process. With Dante, the first step was translating medieval Tuscan Italian into English, which sometimes required the intermediate step of translating medieval Italian into contemporary Italian. I would look up individual words in online dictionaries, in my hardback bilingual Sansoni Dictionary, or in the online Italian Encyclopaedia of Science, Letters, and Arts known as the Trecanni. Once I had what seemed like a reasonably accurate translation, I would compare that to other translations.
For Paradiso, I primarily relied on the 1909 second edition of William Warren Vernon’s Readings on the Paradiso of Dante, Chiefly Based on the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola; the 1975 Charles S. Singleton translation and his separate volume of commentary; the 1986 Allen Mandelbaum translation; and the 2008 Robert and Jean Hollander translation. I would occasionally consult other translations, but I always returned to those four.
Because I was persistent in adhering to Dante’s stated intention, I lowered the vernacular where those translators often pitched the language above the register. There is a natural warmth in everyday language since it’s the language with which we speak to our family, friends, and loved ones. Its informality ultimately embodies aspects of our sense of self. Throughout The Divine Comedy, Dante stops and talks to those he meets. The earnestness, or arrogance, with which an individual speaks to Dante communicates how they conducted themselves when they were alive. That’s how language works, it communicates who we are.
At various points, I also focused on the expressive use of sound—on rhyme and other phonic echoes, as well as on cadence and line length. I was always asking myself: Is this how the colloquial sounds in American English? When I felt the translation was close, I showed it to Regina Psaki, a Dantist with whom I’ve become friends, who generously read the cantos as I translated them. She would give me notes to guide me back to the original meaning when she felt I had strayed too far from it, then I would go back and repeat those earlier steps.
TT: What was it like collaborating with these Dante scholars over the two decades that you spent translating The Divine Comedy? Do you feel that working with them shaped your process of translation—in selecting this or that word, various phrasings or syntaxes, or in the overall diction, especially since you were working with a dead (albeit famous) poet? Has working with them been clarifying, or do their different interpretations add additional layers to the translation process?
MJB: The Dante scholars I’ve met over these years have always been so encouraging. I’m grateful for everything they’ve taught me, and for the patience they’ve shown when I’ve occasionally naively argued for my own idiosyncratic reading of the text. Nick Havely read all of Purgatorio and caught multiple errors, and Regina Psaki read all of Paradiso—not once but twice! There were a few moments when they may have urged me to be more conservative, but their urging was always respectful and I never felt hindered. Their respect for what I was doing—translating the Comedy into colloquial English—made me want to show equal respect for the original text, a text they had devoted their adult lives to researching and teaching. I felt I was being held to a very high standard and because of that, I needed to have a strong argument for anything that may have seemed eccentric to them. That’s very different from my outlook when I was translating Inferno and had yet to meet any Dantists. I would never be as self-indulgent now as I was then—but that’s how one improves, by learning enough to regret having once been so unlearned.
TT: I’m interested hearing your thoughts on Dante’s revelation in Canto III; in his meeting with Piccarda, he writes that “in Heaven, one can love what is, even if what is isn’t the same for one and all.” This realization is, of course, the reader’s as well:
If we wanted to be more upper echelon,
Our wish would clash
With the will of the One who assigned us here.
. . .
It was clear to me then: how every place in Heaven
Is Paradise, even though the grace of the Highest
Good doesn’t rain down the same way.
MJB: I think Dante is continually trying to reconcile Catholic theology with what he knows of human behavior, and he’s working very hard throughout Paradiso to devise a working model of Heaven based on that knowledge. One of the issues he has to address is the fact that some people live more exemplary lives than others—yet all of the saved ultimately end up in the very same place. He solves this predicament by advancing the idea that while all of the blessed who achieve Heaven dwell in the Empyrean (the immaterial mind of God, His love and His light), the souls experience that blessedness more or less intensely, based on their lives on earth. I find that to be a rather brilliant workaround!
TT: For readers who may be daunted or put off by Paradiso, which lacks the gore of Ugolino, the guilt-trips, or Purgatorio’s restlessness—what can you say to them?
MJB: For readers who worry that Paradiso won’t have the drama or suspense of the previous two volumes, I can assure them that it does. The tension in this volume is linked to the question of what kind of heaven Dante is going to create for us, which is the same question that engaged us with his inventive conception of hell in Inferno, and equally inventive design of Mount Purgatory in Purgatorio. Dante is a brilliant storyteller, and this is part three of the story. Even in those moments where his erudition is on full display, Beatrice is at his side, acting not only as his guide, but also as ours. She details and demonstrates, for example, how the solar system is intertwined with the complex arrangement of the ten heavens. Meeting souls in these individual heavens enables Dante to fathom the varying degrees of grace they experience. This, she says, is why he has to meet Piccarda and the women she’s with in the heaven of the moon—the heaven closest to the secular earth and most distant from the sacred Empyrean—so he can can comprehend the reality that the heavenly bliss they experience is less profound than that of some others, this because they reneged on the vows they had taken as nuns.
They showed themselves here not because
This sphere was assigned to them, but to signify
That in the heavenly one they’re less exalted.
Your mind has to be addressed this way,
Since it only grasps through the senses
What’s later fit for the intellect.
That’s why Scripture condescends
To your faculties, giving hands and feet to God
While meaning something totally different,
TT: What are you working on now, now that you’re (finally) done with The Divine Comedy?
MJB: I’m working on a book of poems titled The Museum of Mary, which, in part, comes from translating Paradiso. Dante’s veneration of the Virgin Mary made me curious about her role in the Catholic Church, and the historical evidence of her existence. That interest led me to become curious about artworks that feature the Virgin, and, eventually, to artworks that feature any woman named Mary. In addition to the Virgin, there are now all sorts of Mary’s in the “museum”: Mary J. Blige, Mary Shelley, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Jane, even a few Mary Jo’s!
TT: What do you feel is the connection between ekphrastic poetry and literary translation? (Or more specifically, between poems inspired by Mary and translating Dante?) In your poem “The Museum of Mary,” for instance, the most striking aspects are your use of ordinary speech, the mention of religious relics, the emphasis on the visual, and a reliance on soliloquy—plus the concern with the severity of fate / destiny; these qualities are present in both your poetry and Dante’s, and there is also a similar state of mind.
MJB: Ekphrastic poetry and translation both involve a kind of hyper-attentive looking—the results of which, as you say, can represent a viewer’s state of mind. I think Dante and I are both cynics, but about different things. I’m distrustful of the way the Catholic Church represents women. I’m especially critical of how Mary is employed to argue that women should be submissive. There is no Old Testament or historical evidence that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. In the earliest Bible, the Aramaic word “almah,” found in Isaiah 7:14—which prophesies that a “virgin” will conceive and bear a son who will be called Immanuel—is usually translated as “an unmarried young woman”; the Apostles, apparently worried that the divinity of Jesus would be doubted if he were known to be “illegitimate,” claimed that Mary was a virgin.
Dante was also distrustful of the Catholic Church—the popes, the cardinals, and the priests. He had seen evidence of nepotism, the selling of indulgences, and the embezzlement of money meant for the poor, plus he was the victim of the popes’ attempts to manipulate political factions so as to extend the papal territories and exercise control over the inhabitants. He felt the Church had abandoned the ideals of the first fathers.
Both he and I create speakers who give voice to our concerns, who speak for those we feel have been wronged. Because we feel strongly, we have our speakers speak clearly, and have them talk about the consequences of the continued degradation of religion’s ideals. We rely on visual imagery because that’s the best way to reveal what’s in our minds. If you think of a poem as a movie of the poet’s mind—which is how I think of it—ekphrasis gives the poet a stage set for the movie. Translation also provides a stage set in the form of the original poem, which the translator has to animate using a new language.
TT: In closing, do you have any advice for aspiring translators?
MJB: With poetry—and I can only address translating poetry—I think it’s most useful to stay as close as possible to the original. If you deviate from how the poet patterns language, you risk muffling their distinctive voice. There are exceptions to this, of course. When an idiom or pun in the source language can’t be translated, the translator has to invent something that communicates the same idea but uses different words—it’s then useful to create an idiom or pun elsewhere so that, overall, the translated poem includes the same types of figurative language as the original. It is also essential to pitch the language at the same register as the original. Many beginning translators unwittingly choose lofty words when the language in the original isn’t at all elevated (think Wicksteed!). The basic idea is to make the translation work the same way the original works. That’s how to best capture the poet’s particular way of writing and their idiosyncratic way of thinking, because what is writing but a translation, a “carrying over,” of the author’s thoughts into language?
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in July 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. She’s a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where she teaches creative writing.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.
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