Dante in English

"They’re concerned with Dante’s impact on the English-speaking world, giving us a substantial sampling of translation and imitation in English poetry from the Middle Ages through to the present. It does have its limitations. The long introduction is incisive but somewhat idiosyncratic, it doesn’t go into much detail with the texts in the anthology, nor very much with wider issues of reception over the centuries – but the whole volume is a very well edited and indispensable selection. Yes, there is a risk when accepting the Griffiths and Reynolds collection, excellent as it is, as the dominant model for Dante in English. The risk is that it could limit awareness of Dante’s impact mostly to white Anglo-Saxon (and Celtic) poets. Although they do include one Caribbean author, Derek Walcott. Walcott – following the precedent of T S Eliot , who had already made great claims for Dante in relation to modernism – began by writing work that in some ways imitated Dante by looking, for example, at one of the most popular episodes in the Commedia , the story of the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, in Canto Five of the Inferno . But he moved on, in his later writing, and in particular in Omeros (1990), to looking at the idea of the journey and of seeing his own country and its problems in terms that might be regarded as drawing on the language of Dante’s Inferno . Walcott is someone who absorbs Dante in various ways and indeed in a later work, The Bounty , from 1997, he drew on the language of Paradiso , too – he’s a writer who grows into Dante and is not simply confined to a dialogue with the Inferno . One might argue that several other Caribbean writers have conducted their own dialogues with Dante, too – the Jamaican Lorna Goodison for example, or the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, who reinvented Paradiso in his novel called Carnival from 1985. So the influence really is global."