Description of translating Dante
Bang’s description of translating Dante, Dec 28, 2009
Bang describes her approach to translating Inferno, describing the long history of English translations and the choices each translator must make. She explains that none of the more than 700 existing versions felt both “contemporary in its language and yet poetic in its music,” which led her to create a version that feels more colloquial to to twenty‑first‑century readers. Bang replaces Dante’s terza rima with the “music of contemporary American poetry—alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme” and replaces some archaic references with more contemporary ones. She frames translation as both homage and transformation, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea that a translation participates in the original’s “afterlife.”