Hell Is a Lot of Fun in Lorna Goodison’s Update of Dante’s Inferno

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” read the gate to hell in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. The line has been applied to everything from concentration camps to office spaces, and it is so recognizable one might forget that it dates to the fourteenth century. Rather, the Italian does—the translation is from 1805, when Henry Francis Cary transformed Dante’s terza rima into good old Shakespearean iambic pentameter.

Lorna Goodison’s new version, nominated for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, moves in a different direction. “I am the way into the city of deep downpression,” Canto III begins. “Let go off of all hope, all who come in here so.” “Downpression,” for those not in the know, is a Rastafarian term, and such Caribbean vocabulary permeates Goodison’s thrilling new version of the medieval masterpiece. Inferno, which charts Dante’s journey through the nine circles of hell, is one of those classics with popular resonance, inspiring films, graphic novels, and even a 2010 video game.

As the first third of The Divine Comedy, which continues on to Purgatorio and Paradiso, the epic poem has been translated into English dozens of times, including by established authors like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Ciardi, and Robert Pinsky. All have confronted the dilemma of whether to conserve Dante’s interlocking rhyme scheme, which stretches the capacity of a rhyme-poor language like English. Goodison opts for free verse, but that choice seems trivial next to her most inspired decision. The Florentine wrote in Tuscan dialect back when Latin was the norm. Goodison, likewise, drops so-called “standard” English in favour of Jamaican vernacular.

The result is an original and often brilliant reimagining of Inferno. Goodison follows Dante’s text line by line but adapts his cultural and geographic references: slave revolts replace ancient wars, and Reggae stars stand in for celebrated Greeks. If inserting the sprinter Usain Bolt into a poem on theology sounds like a gimmick, it’s not. Goodison, now based in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections and an acclaimed volume of essays. A former poet laureate of Jamaica and recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, she also taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto.

Goodison combines this aesthetic and intellectual clout to thread an especially tricky needle: she challenges Eurocentric norms that dismiss Caribbean peoples and their speech patterns as marginal even as she remains loyal to a canonical European author. Dante proves surprisingly ripe for recruitment to this postcolonial cause. Writing too early to be entangled in the conquest of the Americas or the transatlantic slave trade, the medieval poet models a commitment to the local.

Yet, while merging Dante’s politics of representation with the Caribbean is clever, Goodison’s version of Inferno also works for a simpler reason: hell is a lot of fun.

Daring translations seem to be in vogue. In 2017, Emily Wilson caused a stir as the first woman to render The Odyssey into English, presenting Odysseus as “a complicated man.” Wilson’s cachet came from the presumed friction with her source material, given the sexist double standard that sees Penelope wait chastely at home for two decades while her shipwrecked husband cavorts with goddesses.

Goodison, by contrast, presents Dante as an ally. At a 2021 talk hosted by the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, she thanked him for giving “poets worldwide his imprimatur to write in the tongues of their people.” In his essay “De vulgari eloquentia,” written between 1303 and 1305, Dante insisted on using the everyday speech of everyday people as opposed to Latin. By penning poetry in his Tuscan dialect, he sought to elevate a low-prestige language and make his work accessible to a broader audience. Ironically, his Florentine phrases later became the language of power. The Divine Comedy, and later work by Petrarch and Boccaccio, were used as reference points to standardize Italian, contributing to the stigmatization of many of the peninsula’s other dialects.

Rendering Dante’s verse in Jamaican-inflected English is thus a renewal of the original ethos behind his aesthetics. Of course, “English” may not entirely be the appropriate word. In the influential 1979 lecture “History of the Voice,” Barbadian poet and academic Kamau Brathwaite argued against considering Caribbean vernaculars dialects of English, given that characterization’s “pejorative overtones.” Instead, he labelled them as part of a “nation language” marked by African inflections. Brathwaite encouraged poets to draw on the rhythm of these vernaculars, famously declaring, “The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” He also cited Dante as precedent.

Goodison’s translation expands on this sense of a common cause. Her verses travel between registers, with phrases like “Gwey! You wutliss crow-bait” using phonetic spelling to evoke Jamaican patois, which some linguists argue should be considered a language in its own right.

The effect goes well beyond that of an intellectual exercise. Goodison’s The Inferno is dynamic, punchy, and often funny. The circle of sinners condemned for lust, for example, features “horny hotbloods with no form of self control.” One of them is an “empress of slackness” who was “the one-time female ruler of dancehall,” a music genre turned subculture that has caused the same kind of pearl clutching as rap and hip-hop. By her side is “Miss Klio,” a colloquial Cleopatra who “take her life when she couldn’t get / fi have sex.”

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The gossipy tone reinforces one of Inferno’s central pleasures: finding out which famous people are being tortured. Dante’s poem could be considered highbrow fan fiction, as he imagines all kinds of historical and mythological figures in hell, crafting punishments to suit their earthly misdeeds. He also takes revenge on political enemies. Filippo Argenti, from a rival Florentine faction, is found swimming in the mud of the River Styx, while Pope Boniface VIII has a place waiting for him in the eighth circle, where some frauds are buried upside down with their feet set on fire.

Goodison has her own fantasies of retribution. She entombs Pope Alexander VI in a cesspit for sanctioning the colonization of the Americas and envisions “T. May,” the former British prime minister Theresa May, boiling in a river of blood. Her crime? She “broke the hearts of Windrush / citizens,” a reference to a scandal that came to light in 2018 after at least 164 people, who had legally moved to the United Kingdom while the Caribbean was part of the British Empire, were wrongly detained or deported. Likewise in hell is “Elon the Geek,” roasting next to a Bitcoin aficionado.

Goodison’s approach combines fidelity and invention. Most of her lines mirror the originals, though with alterations that update the images and distance them from clichés. Tears thereby become the “eyewater,” shades are “duppies,” and a creature whose speed Dante compared to an arrow now “took off like a shot fired from a glock.” The semantic density of her poetic practice is also on display here, such that some lines both reward and require rereading. Indeed, the most pleasurable way to engage with her Inferno may be with the Italian or a more straightforward translation nearby, to best appreciate when she is riffing and when she is faithful.

The largest variations come at the level of characters. Goodison takes over Dante’s role as narrator and protagonist while Virgil, his guide to the underworld, is replaced by Louise Bennett-Coverley, the charismatic poet and performer who began chronicling Jamaican life in patois ballads in the 1940s. (Bennett has her own Canadian connection: she eventually moved to Scarborough, and many of her papers are archived at McMaster University.)

Affectionately dubbed “Miss Lou,” Bennett injects a feminist strain into the translation, with the poem now revolving around two Jamaican women. Goodison also honours Bennett as her most revered predecessor: “You were my model and mentor, and it is from your / example I have crafted this hybrid style for which / people worldwide give me speak.”

Other Caribbean figures receive cameos in Canto IV, which takes place in limbo. Where Dante marvelled at the spirit of Homer, Goodison includes the Nobel Prize–winning Derek Walcott. Nanny of the Maroons, a leader of escaped slaves who led rebellions against colonial powers, stands in for Electra, with her allies like Cudjoe replacing the defenders of Troy. In the role of Aristotle, Goodison places Marcus Garvey, an advocate of Black pride who founded and led the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

This vision enacts the twentieth-century trope of the Caribbean Mediterranean, used by Walcott among others to present the region’s cultural and linguistic diversity as a rough analogue to ancient Greece. Less clear is the governing theological vision. Dante’s Christianity forced him to condemn the Greeks as heathens, even if he gave them the nicest corner of limbo. What’s the justification for kicking the sculptor Edna Manley or the scholar and choreographer Rex Nettleford out of paradise?

Here, perhaps, is a limitation of Goodison’s method as compared with Walcott’s equally ambitious Omeros, which recast The Iliad on the island of St. Lucia. Where Walcott treated Homer as a loose source of inspiration, Goodison inhabits The Inferno line by line. The results can be a compelling crafting of parallels. For instance, in describing the city of Cesena, Dante couples its geography and politics: “just as it lies between the plain and mountain, / [the city] lives somewhere between tyranny and freedom.” Goodison does the same with Jamaica’s capital: “As for Kingston facing the wide blue Caribbean / wide too is the gap between its poor / and rich citizens. Wide and ever widening.”

At times, she chafes against the restraints, most notably when Dante places the Prophet Muhammad in the eighth circle of hell, with his body split open from chin to groin. Goodison pauses to “rebuke the Italian poet, stern as a Rastafarian / elder,” and it is the one moment where she openly doubts her project. “Am I in over my head, is this ambitious overreach? // Am I being unwise by tackling this Commedia Divine?”

One wonders whether Goodison will continue with the rest of the poem. She has published cantos from Purgatorio, but she’ll need to figure out whom to feature as saints with so many luminaries down below. She provides ample opportunity to re-experience the poem’s Gothic weirdness, including the trees inhabited by the souls of people who committed suicide that bleed and speak out of their broken branches. Also delightfully bizarre is the description of a six-legged snake that wraps itself around a man until the two start to merge, so that the “features of each ran into and joined up into one / face, where the two lose themselves in one another.”

These bravura moments are matched by the integrity of her project. Goodison’s commitment to Jamaica’s linguistic particularities coincides with a pride in her people’s accomplishments and a deep concern for their future. She uses hell as leverage to critique the misdeeds of “politricks,” comparing one fiery stream to “the acid red mud lakes left by bauxite mining / or the colour of our politicians’ eyes who sell out / our natural resources from Cockpit to Blue Mountain.” And she challenges conventional understandings of centre and periphery by insisting that her homeland has the right to the same careful representation as Dante’s Florence.

In The Inferno’s closing lines, Goodison and her guide climb toward the surface. They see “an unbroken circle opening up before us” and finally “come out once again and see the stars dem.” Ending with a pronoun that ignorant grammarians would deem redundant and misspelled, and with an unstressed syllable that fights against iambics, Goodison plants her flag in the territory of world literature.