What Fresh Heaven

Sebastian Langdell interviews Mary Jo Bang about her recent translation of Dante’s “Paradiso.”

By Sebastian LangdellDecember 3, 2025

• Poetry

BY THE TIME of his death in 1321, Dante Alighieri had released the first two books of his Divine Comedy. He was heralded as a literary sensation throughout Italy, even as the final book of his trilogy, Paradiso, remained unpublished. Indeed, it was not even clear if he had finished it: his sons Pietro and Jacopo scoured their father’s papers after his death but could not find the final 13 cantos. Then, according to his biographer Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante himself intervened, from the afterlife: he appeared to Jacopo in a dream and revealed where he had hidden the manuscript—squirreled away in a secret compartment in the wall of his bedroom. Jacopo woke from the dream and sped to find the bundle of pages, ready, at last, to publish the final installment of his father’s masterpiece.

Despite this exciting origin story, the final book of Dante’s Divine Comedy has received relatively little mainstream love over the years. The first book, Inferno—with its gory tortures and just desserts—has proven so popular that it often supplants the entire trilogy; many readers assume the first book is the Divine Comedy. Still, the second book, Purgatorio—in which Dante and Virgil ascend from the infernal underground to the fresh air of Mount Purgatory, where things are less dire and the desire for God scents the air like plumeria—has, over time, become a cult favorite. By comparison, Paradiso has been historically overshadowed by the Comedy’s first two books. Yet Dante’s grand finale does not disappoint. Dante is a master of imagery and metaphor, and he saves his best language for the last rush of Paradiso (the “secret” cantos). And what a thrilling, immediate-feeling rush it is. How can it not feel modern when, after 100 cantos, the epic ends on a moment that catches fire just before it is snatched away?

Mary Jo Bang’s new translations of Dante, which culminated with the publication of Paradiso this July, revitalize the Divine Comedy for a contemporary audience. Bang states that her objective was “to make the poem in translation as radical and as intelligible as it was to Dante’s original readers—while showing utmost respect for the original text.” After all, Dante’s contemporary readers would have been astounded by the poet’s nerve: both his decision to write a sacred epic poem in his Tuscan mother tongue (rather than the expected Latin), and the presumptuousness of making himself the hero of the story. Each act was unprecedented. In other words, the Comedy has always been a poem of daring, electric possibilities. What makes Bang’s translations so innovative—and, by extension, thrilling—is her attentiveness not only to translating language but also to translating that original courageous spirit. For Bang, this means colloquializing, planting cultural seeds legible to the contemporary reader, and marrying the meaning of Dante’s 14th-century text with the tenor of our modern life.

Our discussion, conducted via email in August, revealed such an approach as necessarily American. It is also grounded in years of assiduous research and a desire to link the faraway Florentine dynamics of Dante’s world with the neural map of 20th- and 21st-century American culture. The result is a marvel: clear, direct, luminous. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, provocatively: “Dante is Italian, because, at that moment, he could most live as an Italian. At this moment, he would be born American.” Bang’s Divine Comedy shows us what a 21st-century American Dante might actually sound like. Nodding to numerous translations across time and languages, Mary Jo Bang’s Paradiso completes a contemporary American poet’s own Dantean masterpiece.

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SEBASTIAN LANGDELL: First, let me commend you on this groundbreaking translation. It must feel wonderful to have completed such an epic journey—taking on all three canticles of one of literature’s most revered works. You’ve talked to some degree about the motivation for beginning each of the books. Inferno began after your encounter with Caroline Bergvall’s “Via (48 Dante Variations),” and Purgatorio gathered steam after Nick Havely reached out to you about contributing some cantos to his After Dante: Poets in Purgatory (2021) project. Can you speak about the decision to take on Paradiso: Did it feel inevitable after Purgatorio? Were you apprehensive about it?

MARY JO BANG: Thank you, Sebastian! It does feel wonderful to have finished but also strange, given how long I was preoccupied with it. There were stretches when I worked on it seven days a week, for months on end, which is a lot of preoccupation! In terms of Paradiso, the COVID-19 pandemic is responsible for my beginning it soon after turning in the Purgatorio translation in 2020. I needed something to fill the quarantine hours that would sufficiently distract me from my anxiety about whether we were all going to survive! It’s true that I was apprehensive about translating Paradiso since I hadn’t been able to read it when I tried many years ago. It turns out the problem was the translation, not the poem itself.

It occurs to me that the period you’ve spent working on your Comedy matches up with the time Dante spent writing his original. What can you tell us about this unique experience—the span of time; the places visited; the way the poem accretes, twists, soldiers on? And what it was like to finally leave it behind?

I began translating Inferno in June 2005 and finished Paradiso in 2025. I took two two-year breaks along the way, which means the entire Comedy took me a total of 16 years. As you say, that is very similar to how long Dante spent writing the poem. It wasn’t only the translation that took time; writing the notes was also extremely time-consuming. I had to teach myself everything Dante knew, which was considerable. I read multiple commentaries to learn how others interpreted moments of narrative or linguistic ambiguity. I was surprised to discover how fluid the text still is, even after 700 years. I also read some of Dante’s other works, La Vita Nuova (1294) and Convivio (ca. 1304–07). In a sense, because I was translating word by word, my trajectory was Dante’s trajectory. I believe that’s why I never tired of the poem. Dante does what the best authors do, which is create a state of suspense where the reader wants to know “and then what happens, and then what, and then what.”

I’m so intrigued by thinking about this as a uniquely American rendering of Dante. Not all the pop-cultural references you choose are necessarily “American,” but there’s an argument to be made that the daring, the chance-taking, and certainly the colloquialisms are American. To what extent were you aiming to create a Comedy with an American voice?

My translation is a decidedly American rendering of the poem because my goal was to match Dante’s medieval Tuscan vernacular with contemporary colloquial English. Even though I lived in London for three years when I studied photography at the Polytechnic of Central London, the only English I truly know is American English. And since poetry relies on associational leaps, it’s natural that as I carried Dante’s language over into English, my mind’s neural pathways would provide me with words or references that were laid down earlier in my life. In Paradiso 5.115, for example, Justinian I, Roman emperor from 527 to 565, addresses Dante as “bene nato,” “well-born,” with “son” implied by the -o ending of nato. In English, well-born implies upper-class, and that’s not what is meant here. Justinian is referring to the fact that Dante is fortunate to have been allowed to visit heaven before he died.

As I was searching for an equivalent, I thought of “fortunate son”; that took me to the song of that title by the American rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The song was released as a single in September 1969, then appeared that October on the band’s album Willy and the Poor Boys. My note calls attention to that chance echo.

Reverberations like those create a bridge between Dante’s medieval Italy and today’s United States because language embodies concepts. The CCR song is questioning the idea of who gets to be “fortunate” in a country where who was drafted and sent to Vietnam, possibly to die there, was largely determined by class. In the Comedy, it’s not class dynamics that are being critiqued but religious privilege, which was being exploited by the church hierarchy. While Justinian isn’t making that point when he calls Dante a “fortunate son,” the idea of good fortune is woven throughout the Comedy. At the end of Canto 6, Justinian mentions someone who was deserving but underappreciated, and worse, betrayed by those who were envious of his good fortune.

Years ago, I attended a panel discussion at the New School on what makes American poetry quintessentially American. One of the panelists, and I’m afraid I don’t recall who it was, suggested that American poets, beginning with Walt Whitman, assume an “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach.” Certainly, the notes may feel that way to the reader of my translation, but there is thought behind each entry—and I hope the reader will glean that.

I certainly do! You say in your translator’s note that “The Divine Comedy is a commentary every bit as relevant today as it was in the 1300s, which is why people have continued to read the work for more than seven hundred years, and have translated it into other languages since 1416.” Can you discuss some of the ways that you find Dante relevant today—nationally and internationally?

One reason Dante continues to be relevant is that his characters demonstrate the fundamental psychological complexity of human beings. In Inferno 3, when they are just inside the gate to hell, Dante asks his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, about a long train of crying souls who continuously run after a banner that flaps first one way, then the other. Virgil explains that these people didn’t sin in any notable way, but when they had a chance to stand up for good, they chose not to. I’ve always been struck by that scene—since who hasn’t found themselves in a situation like that? Dante clearly didn’t want to create a Hell where a reader might look at the inhabitants and smugly think, “Oh, that’s not me, I’m free of that sin.” He wants us to see how each decision we make has the potential to damage not only us but also the social fabric.

The other thing that makes it relevant in our time is that the poem is addressing the impasse that arises in an extreme climate of partisan politics. Dante, exiled from Florence when his party was voted out, was a victim of a similar absolutist sectarianism: one party seeks to dominate the other, instead of both parties cooperating to solve social problems and address inequalities.

Reading your most recent collection of original poems, A Film in Which I Play Everyone (2023), in light of your Dante translations turns up some striking resonances. My eye was newly attuned to the poems written in tercets, of course. And we get deliberate nods to Dante in several poems. Can you speak to some of the ways that this monumental translation project has impacted your other poetry?

Once I began to study poetry seriously, I took to heart the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets’ complaint that lyric poems were often reductive in terms of their subjectivity. And yet, I also understood that my concerns, interiority and the expressive use of sound, were those of a lyric poet. My response was to complicate my language. What I’ve learned from Dante is that complicated ideas don’t necessarily require complicated syntax; in fact, the more complicated the idea, the more useful clarity is. Dante has made me more aware of how to draw the reader into the world of the poem.

Your translation of Inferno began in the devastating period following the loss of your son—a period you focus on in Elegy (2007). I remembered Henry Wadsworth Longfellow turning to his Dante translation—the first complete American translation—following the death of his wife. Is there something about Dante that allows one to process grief? How does time spent in the (literary) afterlife impact the grieving process?

At the beginning of Inferno, Dante finds himself in a dark forest “ché [because/given that] la diritta via [the straightway/right path] era smarrita [had been lost].” The causality of the word “ché” seems essential to me now, all these years later. Dante has been pushed to the brink of what is bearable; he is in that dark wood because he has lost his way. Throughout the Comedy, the character Dante acts as a mirror that reflects the emotional knowledge possessed by the poet Dante Alighieri, and by any reader who has experienced a crushing loss. It’s a relief to encounter a poem that’s willing to show the bleakest frame of mind when that frame of mind is one you have experienced for yourself. To imagine someone surviving that pain is a form of consolation.

Can you talk us through your translation process? Did you have interlocutors who helped you along the way?

My process changed over time, largely because the internet became more sophisticated. With Inferno, I relied primarily on existing translations ranging from Longfellow’s first American translation published in 1867 to Robert and Jean Hollander’s published in 2000. I looked up individual words in the bilingual Sansoni dictionary. For all three canticles, I used William Warren Vernon’s Readings on the Inferno of Dante, Chiefly Based on the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola (1889–94) and Charles S. Singleton’s commentary. With Purgatorio and Paradiso, I was able to copy lines from the Italian text into Google Translate and, after correcting for the differences in medieval spellings using Wiktionary, look up words using the online Treccani. Afterwards, I looked at any number of existing translations to see what others had done with those words.

After Inferno, I did have expert guides. The British Dantist Nick Havely generously read and gave me notes on the entirety of Purgatorio. Regina Psaki did the same thing for Paradiso; she read each canto and its notes several times and responded to each change I made, challenging me to get closer and closer to the original. Both were incredibly patient and taught me so much about the poem and about translation.

Virgil was, of course, Dante’s guide through the first two books, and now in Paradiso, there’s this swerve wherein Beatrice takes center stage. Did you ever miss Virgil? Were you glad to embrace Beatrice as the new guide?

When Dante looks back in Purgatorio 30 and realizes Virgil is gone, his eyes fill with tears, and mine did as well. That sense of profound loss is recognizable. That said, I don’t know that I miss Virgil after that moment because Beatrice speaks, and what she says is stunning: “Dante, just because Virgil’s run off, / Don’t cry yet; save your crying; / There’s another sword coming to make you cry.” She may sound heartless, but she’s not. She has divine knowledge, so she knows that unless Dante grasps what he is there to do, he’ll return to earth and lose his way again. I instantly fell in love with Beatrice and totally understood why Virgil kept telling Dante that he (Virgil) didn’t know enough to answer his questions but that once they reached Beatrice, she would make everything clear. She is brilliant, and throughout Paradiso, her brilliance, literalized as light, is often so blinding that Dante can’t bear to look directly at her.

Has all your time in the afterlife changed your conception of it? I don’t want to ask simply “What’s your relationship to belief in the afterlife now?” but, rather, “Does the imagination reach for other images?” Does a given image or situation begin to feel truer?

I’d never envisioned an afterlife with the level of detail Dante creates. His version doesn’t get me any closer to believing in an afterlife, but I do better appreciate how the imagination can construct one.

I don’t believe Dante thinks the afterlife is like the one he’s depicting. He knows he’s writing fiction and that the key is not for the author to believe but for us, the readers, to be willing to suspend our disbelief. He has Beatrice say in Paradiso 4.40–43 that scripture condescends to give hands and feet to God because humans need that touch of material reality: with true enlightenment, literalness will no longer be necessary.

You make the point that this poem needs to be reenlivened, made colloquial, made to speak to the nowness of culture. Can you speak a bit more about that, and how it has felt to be the channel through which ancient becomes novel? How much of it is pure fun? And how do you negotiate that balance between reverence for the original and space to invent and play?

I’m most concerned that the poem is made to speak in the “nowness” of language, because Dante was explicit about his decision to write the Comedy in the vernacular instead of in literary Latin. He said Latin was too sublime—it would overwhelm what was being said. He said he wanted everyone who could read to be able to read the poem, “even women.” He also wanted the poem to have the natural warmth of the language with which we speak to our family, friends, and beloveds. Most importantly, he said he wanted the language of the poem to change over time and that Latin couldn’t change.

My translation takes Dante’s aims as my own. If I incorporate elements of contemporary culture, it’s to convince the reader that the poem is not just about a long-ago era that’s radically different from our own but is about our moment as well. We, too, get lost, find guides, encounter obstacles. We, too, if we’re to grow, must come to terms with our shortcomings. We, too, struggle with conundrums that appear unsolvable until, at the end of a long period of mental vagabondage, we may have a flash of insight.

If I introduce what seem like verbal high jinks, it’s only to try to make the reader curious enough to read the work. It’s difficult to convince someone to read a book-length poem, much less a 700-year-old poem. I do revere the poem and want the reader to share in that reverence. Any bit of fun—like having Eric Cartman [from the animated series South Park] stand in for the character Dante named Ciacco, a nickname based on the now-obsolete Italian word for “piggy” (Inferno 6.52)—is there in the service of making the poem echo the humor of Dante’s original. Nothing is “pure fun,” only fun with a higher purpose.

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Mary Jo Bang has published eight poetry collections, including A Doll for Throwing (2017) and Elegy (2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and new translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri.