Last Wednesday, October 27, Staff Writer Ava Slocum attended the Zoom discussion “On Translating Dante: A Conversation with Mary Jo Bang ’98,” presented through the Columbia University School of the Arts.

The translator’s predicament is an interesting one. When changing the language of a literary work, how do you keep the tone and flow of the original while making it intelligible to an entirely new audience? Mary Jo Bang has tackled this challenge in her translations of modern German and Japanese poetry, and most recently, a new edition of Dante’s Purgatorio, published by Graywolf Press on July 13, 2021.

Wednesday’s Zoom meeting featured Bang in conversation with Susan Bernofsky, Associate Professor of Writing and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC). Mary Jo Bang (MFA in Creative Writing ’98) has published eight books of original poetry, as well as translations of the poems of Matthias Göritz and Shuzo Takiguchi. In 2013, Bang garnered critical acclaim for her translation of Dante’s Inferno (with illustrations by Henrik Drescher), noted by reviewers and literary journals for its incorporation of modern phrases and references to rock bands and 20th-century TV shows alongside Dante’s text.

The focus of the Zoom session, however, was Bang’s long-awaited translation of Purgatorio, the product of eight years of work after the publication of her Inferno. Bernofsky started off the conversation with the observation that much of Bang’s prior translation work has centered on still-living poets, as opposed to “long-dead” authors like Dante Alighieri. Bang suggested that there is indeed a difference when it comes to the translating process, remembering that when she worked with Matthias Göritz, “I would put [my literal translation] into what I thought was a poem that reflected what the original might be, then I would show it to him. I can’t do that with someone who is dead.”

Bang spoke with firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be translated. Reading the German versions of her own poems, she noted, helped her understand the close attention to detail that goes into creating a translated work that is both readable and accurate. Bang’s Dante translations nonetheless add something of her own interpretation. Besides including references to modern figures from Usain Bolt to Gertrude Stein in her Purgatorio, Bang has made a conscientious effort to use everyday English words “that you would expect someone to know and use,” rather than employing only very beautiful and elevated language, as some previous translators of the Divine Comedy have done. I found it particularly interesting that Bang chose to refer to angels in the text with the pronoun it where Dante uses he. (Bang pointed out that, theologically speaking, angels traditionally do not have a gender and therefore should not have gendered pronouns. She uses it instead of they in her translation to lessen ambiguity when large groups of angels are present.)

All of these updates might frustrate Dante purists. However, Bang believes her new colloquialisms to be in the spirit of Dante’s work. During the talk, she recalled Dante’s own decision to write in his medieval Italian vernacular rather than the literary Latin of the day, presumably so that his work might be accessible to a wider range of people. Bang didn’t take liberties with her translation just for the sake of it, though: “You’re not just throwing in a toaster oven and the King of Pop whenever you want to; you’re doing it for a reason.”

Bernofsky ended the discussion by asking Bang how translating Dante has influenced her own poetry, to which Bang responded that her debt to Dante is immense. “I think I’ve learned something about clarity,” she said at the end of the conversation. “Because I often feel that I’m writing about difficult or complicated subjects, I never want to be reductive. Reading Dante and seeing how he takes these very complicated subjects and is able to make them clear by exercising patience and finding a form, I think I began to appreciate that you could deal with complicated subjects in a way that’s more direct.”

Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Purgatorio was published by Graywolf Press and is available to buy online and at bookstores. Bang is currently working on a version of Paradiso, the Divine Comedy’s final installment, to be published sometime in the next few years.

Presentation Snapshot via Zoom event screenshot