“Into the City of Deep Downpression”

For many years—in fact, for much of her poetic career—Lorna Goodison has been engaged in an unsuspected dialogue with the fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy she has called “the poem that has had the greatest impact on my adult life.”¹ Her relationship with Dante began visually: the young Goodison saw Henry Holiday’s painting Dante and Beatrice (1882–84) in a textbook in school, and she immediately felt an inexplicable kinship with this young man, so overwhelmed by the sight of his beloved on the street that he has to stop and catch his breath.² But their relationship has developed over time, from the occasional allusion or intertextual resonance to authoring selected cantos of Dante’s poem in a hybrid English-Jamaican Creole version. Following the publication of these selected cantos, Goodison embarked on a full rendering of the Inferno in her hybrid translation, with some crucial changes, as I will address below. The complete translation project, which she began in 2022, was released by Carcanet (UK) and Véhicule Press (Canada) in April 2025.

This is of course not Goodison’s only foray into intertextual dialogue: she often speaks and writes of her indebtedness to the English canon, particularly the Romantics (John Keats, William Wordsworth, W. B. Yeats) and modernists (T. S. Eliot) who become interlocutors throughout her corpus, both in amicable and in conflictual ways.³ But her conversations with Dante are of a different order than these occasional exchanges: they are a sustained dialogue, over the course of years (two years, in this case—she began the full translation shortly after the Dante Society of America hosted her as the keynote speaker of its 2022 symposium, in conversation with Professor Dennis Looney). In such a sustained translation project, the translator can’t be selective about what she sees or records; she can’t turn her eyes away from a passage simply because it doesn’t suit her interests or needs. She must persist in following the poet wherever he leads her, in this case passing through the nine circles of hell, beyond the bellies of both Lucifer and the earth itself, to emerge once again to see the stars. 

The resonance between Goodison’s poetic projects and Dante’s might not be immediately apparent. Why would a poet of Goodison’s penetrative emotive force and acute sensibility to the local and the immediate be drawn to a translation project in the first place—much less a translation of a medieval Italian epic that appears so far removed from her own lyrical and historical-political engagements?

In her plenary session at the 2022 symposium, Goodison referred to Dante’s poem as a “container” of all things, a text that, she said, she could read for the rest of her life, forsaking all others.⁴ In Dante’s poem, Goodison discovered a biting critique of local crimes and corruptions and a penetrating exposition of human psychology. She also discovered a poet with a unique sensitivity to human suffering and a rigorous commitment not to the justice that will come in the hereafter but to the justice to be sought in the here and now, a poet invested in righting historical wrongs that “[bring] down grief upon the world / downpressing the good and exalting the worthless.”⁵ Although she would insist up and down that she is no Dante scholar, Goodison is extraordinarily attuned to the spirit of Dante’s works. She and Dante share a theory of language: that the mother-tongue is a (if not the) structuring principle of identity. Both resolutely bind themselves to the project of elevating their local vernaculars to the status of the canonical languages their literatures are dominated by.⁶ The themes of her poetry are precisely those that are central to any dantista: love and justice, home and exile, emancipation and redemption, generational heritage, the power of vernacular language. These are not always the themes that are associated with Dante, whose work is all too commonly interpreted in the key of punishment, violence, the bondage of sin and the wrath of an angry and unforgiving God. Goodison herself will tell you that Dante is a master of dread. But she also recognizes that he is equally a master of hope, redemption, and liberation, as is Goodison herself. 

Much as Dante’s Florence becomes the matrix through which he understands the realms of the afterlife his pilgrim visits, Goodison’s Jamaica is the ground on which her verses are situated and through which her words resonate. As an illustration, consider Goodison’s adaptation of the tyrants in the first subcircle of the seventh circle of Dante’s hell, the river of boiling blood that punishes violence against others. Dante’s centaur-guide Nessus names a number of Italian lords notorious for leveling indiscriminate violence against their own peoples to maintain power. Goodison’s “halfahorseman,” by contrast, details the Kingstonians they find boiling in the blood river:⁷

Dem a murderer who make duppy through rob and kill!

The eyewater dem shed is payment for wickedness.
See Merciless there and the other cruel
shottas who have the island under fear and distress.

And that one there with the want-wash hair matt
up on him head is Killa, the next one, the rusty locs
one, is Teklife who, and this is the God’s truth, that

him kill him owna son right up there so in your land.⁸

Inveighing against the gang violence that afflicts the streets of her native city, Goodison envisions those who “make duppy through rob and kill,” paying for their crimes with their tears, mixing their “eyewater” with the boiling blood in which the violent sink up to their eyelids. Among the “cruel / shottas,” murderers, and thieves identified here Goodison appears to allude to Earl “Tek Life” Wadley, a sometime associate of Bob Marley and prominent member of the People’s National Party during the late 1970s, years marked by political violence across Jamaica. But the names she selects—Merciless, Killa, Teklife—are as much allegories of their violence as they are possible historical personages. 

Dante’s allegory is such that it invites this immediacy. Unique among medieval authors, Dante chose to write an allegory in which his pilgrim does not encounter characters like Lady Lust and Lord Treachery but rather Francesca da Rimini, a noblewoman from Ravenna whose affair with her brother-in-law would result in their murder at the hands of her aggrieved and violent husband in the mid-1280s, and Ugolino della Gherardesca, imprisoned for his betrayal of the city of Pisa and left to starve with his sons in the prison that would become known as the Tower of Hunger following their demise there in 1289. Dante weaves history together with his allegory so that his readers would interpret the habits and patterns of everyday encounters in light of a divinely ordered extension of meaning. He excavates the contingent, local, and particular histories of his small peninsula to uncover their allegorical significance. The figures in his poem, then, are not arbitrary symbols or metaphors but metonymies of what he sees as universalizing truths, still possessing all their particulars. In narrating his sliver of the world in this way, he invites his readers to imitate his example, revealing a “Francesca” or an “Ugolino” among our own histories and our own experiences. 

Goodison has taken this proposition seriously. In describing the process of translating the selected cantos she began with, which she calls a “most delicious experience,” she says, “It just fit right into Jamaica, I never had to reach for anything to make it into Jamaica.”⁹ Since these selected cantos, her full rendering of Inferno reads contemporary Jamaica as replete with figures who reveal the poem’s allegorical workings in a new space and century. Goodison’s Inferno seeks to read the contingent, local, particular histories of her small island to narrate the allegorical extension of their specific signifying. 

In a conversation we had several months ago, Goodison asked me a deceptively simple question—did I think she was justified in calling her project a translation? The question is more complex than meets the eye. Dante’s original is immediately legible in Goodison’s verses. But Goodison’s translation project is not a simple Italian-to-English (or Italian-to-English-to-English/patois hybrid) rendering of the poem. For one, Goodison herself doesn’t read Italian. And her translation isn’t a word-by-word representation of the original text. Goodison’s translations of Dante’s cantos emerge from a specifically Jamaican ground, populated by Jamaican figures and resounding with Jamaican sensibilities. Her first-person pilgrim-narrator is a Black Jamaican woman, as is her guide figure, Louise Bennett Coverley, who replaces Dante’s Virgil on the journey. Jamaican toponyms dot the map of her hell: the Blue Mountains, Rock Hall, Bog Walk, Lover’s Leap, the Ugly River. Her most profound engagement with Dante is in language: a commitment to the Jamaican vernacular and its particular idiom, as well as a sustained reflection on how the mother tongue shapes and guides one’s understanding of the world and of one’s place in it. Goodison infuses Dante’s underworld with Jamaican sights, smells, and above all sounds that would re-patriate the poetry of the exiled Dante to a new national and linguistic context.

Recognizable as the text may be, Dante’s messaging, his concerns and ideologies, takes a backseat to Goodison’s own. She does not hesitate to call out the exclusiveness and bigotry of his Heaven, governed as it is by “the straw boss on dem high seat who rule this place.”¹⁰ Nor does she give him the last word in doling out punishments, questioning his judgment of the virtuous pagans in Limbo, for example (“they do not belong here in the Inferno”).¹¹ The most striking example of Goodison’s resistance to Dante’s authority comes in canto 28, when she interrupts the poem to address the reader directly as she denounces Dante’s “appalling” placement of Muhammad among the schismatics.¹² Her outrage at the medieval poet’s injustice is such that it makes her question the endeavor altogether:

And here, to whoever is reading this, I must lament
as I rebuke the Italian poet, stern as a Rastafarian
elder: I believe he showed appalling judgement

by portraying Prophet Mohammed in this way.
No, he does not deserve to be split so his insides
spill out along with his beating heart and all his vitals.

As I stare at these words now I myself feel divided.
I am conflicted. Should I continue?
Am I in over my head, is this ambitious overreach?

Am I being unwise by tackling this Commedia Divine?¹³

In this confessional moment, concluding as it does with a question answered only by her decision to see the project through to its completion, Goodison lays bare the animating force behind her project. Her interest in this translation is not to bring Dante to new, contemporary audiences separated from the original by the chasms of time, space, experience, and language. Rather, Goodison still sees in Dante a kindred spirit, much as she had when she first encountered him as a schoolgirl. In Goodison’s project, Dante is not her esteemed predecessor but her equal and interlocutor. She is not transmitting his words to new masses but instead transforming them, adapting them to her purposes. The verses of the Inferno become the container, to use her word, that gives shape to her vision of contemporary Jamaica.

The term I eventually proposed in response to Goodison’s question was tradaptation, a neologism created by the Québécois playwright Michel Garneau, who coined the term to describe his translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays into Québécois French in the 1970s and 1980s, the tumultuous decades of Quebec’s sovereignty movement. Following the term’s coinage, tradaptation has come to identify a certain kind of literary-political practice. In a recent essay describing a roundtable at the 2022 Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting on Shakespeare and the politics of tradaptation, Katherine Gillen and Kathryn Vomero Santos argue that tradaptation plays a key role in literary resistance to colonial rule. They claim that what distinguishes tradaptation from translation is that it “remains especially relevant in places where linguistic difference—as it is experienced in everyday life and represented in performance and literature—is bound up with national, colonial, and racial politics.”¹⁴ Tradaptation, in their view, represents a form of resistance to what they call “linguistic oppression” because tradaptive works “cross and unsettle the boundaries of both the nation-state and canonical authority, thereby exposing fantasies of textual fidelity and of linguistic and racial purity.”¹⁵ 

Like the Shakespeare tradaptations described in the MLA session, Goodison’s tradaptations of Dante’s cantos are inherently political, grounded in a politics of place and language that adheres more closely to Dante’s project than other, more traditionally “faithful” English translations do. Goodison’s use of setting, character, history, myth, and above all language creates a hybrid subculture, emerging from very specific local environments and genealogies to participate in the Dantean project of excavating the local to reveal its allegorical extension. Unlike many of the Shakespeare tradaptations considered in Gillen and Santos’s essay, Goodison’s tradaptation doesn’t seek to destabilize Dante’s cultural supremacy or global legacy. Instead, her poem participates in that legacy in a way Dante’s poem invites, inheriting the medieval poet’s vatic mantle to craft new meanings for new generations.

Elizabeth Coggeshall is an associate professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. She specializes in the literature of the Italian medieval period, with a particular focus on Dante. She is the author of On Amistà: Negotiating Friendships in Dante’s Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2023). She is also the co-editor (with Arielle Saiber) of the site Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture, a digital archive cataloguing Dante’s sustained presence in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. She currently serves as the director of education and outreach for the Dante Society of America.

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[1] Lorna Goodison, “Some Poems That Made Me,” in Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures (Oxford: Myriad, 2018), 29.

[2] As Kelly Baker Josephs observed in our correspondence about this essay, Goodison’s way of describing this kinship recalls her account of her parents’ first meeting in the celebrated poem “For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)”: 

he appeared, her fate disguised,
as a sunday player in a cricket match . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My father stopped to speak to her sister,
till he looked and saw her by the oleander,
sure in the kingdom of my blue-eyed grandmother.
He never played the cricket match that day. 

“For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength),” in I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1995), 71.  

[3] On Goodison’s dialogues with these English poets, see, among others, Manuela Coppola, “‘We swap duppy stories’: Lorna Goodison and Cultural Dislocations,” Textus 22 (2009): 681–96; Michael Malouf, “Duppy Poetics: Yeats, Memory, and Place in Lorna Goodison’s ‘Country, Sligoville,’” in Brian G. Caraher and Robert Mahony, eds., Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Denis Donoghue (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 191–204; Jahan Ramazani, “Lorna Goodison: Poet of Crossings,” Caribbean Quarterly 64, nos. 3–4 (2018): 560–80; and Jahan Ramazani, Poetry in a Global Age (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2020), 105–8.

[4] Lorna Goodison, in conversation with Dennis Looney, “Dante, Between Dread and Hope: A Conversation with Lorna Goodison” (keynote address, Dante Society of America Symposium and New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, New College, Sarasota, Florida, 5 March 2022).

[5] Lorna Goodison, Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation (Manchester: Carcanet, 2025), 19.104–5.

[6] On the political power of the vernacular in both Dante’s and Goodison’s projects, see Jason Allen-Paisant, “Dante in Caribbean Poetics: Language, Power, Race,” in Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dante (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 668–85.

[7] Goodison, Dante’s Inferno 12.55. 

[8] Goodison, Dante’s Inferno 12.105–12.

[9] Goodison, “Dante, Between Dread and Hope.” 

[10] Goodison, Dante’s Inferno 1.120. See also Allen-Paisant, “Dante in Caribbean Poetics,” 681.

[11] Goodison, Dante’s Inferno 4.144.

[12] Goodison, Dante’s Inferno 28.27.

[13] Goodison, Dante’s Inferno 28.25–34.

[14] Katherine Gillen and Kathryn Vomero Santos, “Shakespeare and the Politics of Tradaptation,” PMLA 138, no. 3 (2023): 716.

[15] Gillen and Santos, “Shakespeare,” 716, 717.