The Afterlife Dopo Dante: Translating the Topography of Inferno and Purgatorio for the Twenty-First Century

This article explores the translation of topography in twenty-first century translations of Dante’s Divina Commedia. Extensive research has already been done on topography in the Commedia source text, cataloguing place names, examining the metaphorical significance of place, and comparing Dante’s worldview to his medieval contemporaries. However, there has been minimal close textual comparative analysis of how topography is translated into English. A corpus of four translations was selected for their inclusion of explicit references to the twenty-first century, comprised of translations by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, Mary Jo Bang, Philip Terry, and Lorna Goodison, representing a variety of Englishes from the United States, the UK, Ireland, and Jamaica. A descriptive approach was taken to assess the losses and gains of the resulting translation. The analysis found vastly different translation outcomes, determined by the cultural context of the translator. Instead of transporting readers backwards to Dante, all translators pull Dante into the modern era.