Goodison brings Caribbean heat to ‘Dante’s Inferno’

The PJ Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy, housed at The University of the West Indies, Mona, will officially launch Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation by Jamaica’s former Poet Laureate, Professor Lorna Goodison, on May 6 in the Multifunctional Room, Main Library, UWI Mona.

The launch celebrates one of the most audacious feats of Caribbean literary production in recent memory – a more than two-decade project in which Goodison renders Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century masterpiece into a vibrant, Jamaican-inflected English that honours both the original’s revolutionary spirit and the living speech of the Caribbean.

Already hailed internationally as “career-defining” and “epoch-making” by poet Kit Fan, and nominated for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, Goodison’s Inferno is the first full-length reimagining of Dante’s epic in the voice of a Caribbean master. Where earlier translators – from Henry Francis Cary and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to John Ciardi and Robert Pinsky – bent Dante’s terza rima into the rhythms of Anglo-European verse, Goodison takes a radically different path. Her gate of hell does not thunder in Shakespearean pentameter; it declares, “ I am the way into the city of deep downpression… Let go off of all hope, all who come in here so.”

PLANTING JAMAICAN NATION LANGUAGE

That single word, ‘downpression’, drawn from Rastafarian speech, signals the project’s ambition: to plant Jamaican nation language, as Kamau Brathwaite called it, firmly within the territory of world literature. Slave revolts replace ancient wars. Reggae stars stand in for celebrated Greeks. Usain Bolt runs through theology. Cleopatra becomes ‘Miss Klio’. The “empress of slackness” presides over the circle of lust. And the acid-red streams of Dante’s hell mirror, unmistakably, the “red mud lakes left by bauxite mining” and “the colour of our politicians’ eyes who sell out our natural resources from Cockpit to Blue Mountain”.

Critics have responded with near-unanimous acclaim.

The Montreal Review of Books called the translation “a fascinating work… one that would appeal to those interested in Dante, the Caribbean, world literature, or translation”.

Writing in the Literary Review of Canada, Randy Boyagoda observed that Goodison chooses the beloved Louise Bennett-Coverley – ‘Miss Lou’ – as her Virgil, guiding her narrator through Jamaican culture and history before, during and after colonisation. Quill & Quire concluded that “Lorna Goodison’s retelling of Dante’s Inferno is a celestial reckoning of epic proportions”.

Born in Kingston on Emancipation Day 1947, Goodison served as Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2017 to 2020 and is Professor Emerita of English and African-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the Order of Distinction, with a body of work spanning more than a dozen poetry collections, acclaimed essays and a celebrated family memoir. Few living writers are better positioned to have both the Caribbean and the global canon lean in and listen.

Copies of the book will be available at the event, which gets under way at 5:30 p.m., to members of the public. Goodison will be present for readings, remarks and signings.