Island Time: Dante’s Purgatory and Archipelagic Thought

Abstract: This essay proposes a way of reading Dante’s Purgatorio through the lens of Caribbean poetry and thought, specifically invoking Édouard Glissant’s notion of archipelagic thinking to consider issues of language, new paradigms of connecting across divides, and crafting a global, transhistorical dialogue through island poetry. Attention is also given to issues of translation and adaptation, framed through W.S. Merwin’s particular affinity for Purgatorio as inflected by his acquired island sensibility. Fundamentally, I argue that increased attention to the island aspects of Dante’s second cantica offers vital ways of connecting to poets such as Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison, and that their engagement with Dante in turn asks us to look at the Commedia with eyes more attuned to a decolonizing approach to the text.