When I first published a version of Dante’s Inferno in 2014 set at the University of Essex, more than one reviewer pointed out the connection to Joyce. As with Ulysses, I wasn’t so much translating Dante as reinventing his work for purposes of my own and for new readers.
This was an act of “trans-shifting”, as poet Alice Oswald has put it, and it is an approach that Joyce himself alludes to in Ulysses in the phrase “agenbite of inwit” – this is a prick of the conscience, like that which Stephen sees in the overtures towards himself from the Englishman Haines, but behind Joyce’s phrase too is punningly concealed the idea of “again biting” a work of “in wit”, or a chewing over again of the classics.
One reason I set Dante’s Inferno at Essex was architectural: the walled cities of the Italian city-states in the middle ages, typified by Montereggione with its 14 high towers, to which Dante makes allusion in the Inferno, also, by a happy coincidence, underpin the architecture of Essex University, where a number of towers surround a central campus, divided up into squares modelled on Italian campi (the origin of our modern word “campus”).
[ Straight to Hell: Elliot Murphy’s sonic journey through Dante’s InfernoOpens in new window ]
Another was the strange synchronicity between Essex and Dante’s poem – Dante’s Hell has a river of blood, the Phlegethon, Colchester has the river Colne which local myth claims had once literally run with blood, when the Roman city was sacked by Boudicca; and Dante’s suicides, whose souls are reborn as the seeds of trees, later to be preyed on by harpies, are distantly echoed by the trees which today are planted at Essex University to commemorate untimely student deaths.
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The work quickly made a name for itself and was talked about as an Essex Dante, but one thing reviewers mostly missed was its Irishness, both in theme and tone – it was good craic as Seamus Heaney had said about a previous collection I’d sent him. And Heaney was equally enthusiastic when I sent him a selection of cantos from Dante’s Inferno. “The lineation,” he said, “speeds along at a nice articulated pace, the Dantesque pitch is right and propulsive, the cast of villains is energising, the balance between language and lingo, the allusive and the obscene just right… Berrigan the perfect shambling guide.”
Just as Dante was exiled from Florence while he was writing the Comedy, I was part of the generation whose families had quit Belfast at the height of the Troubles in the early 1970s and moved to England, in my case Essex. Essex, in a word, wasn’t my home, and I always felt uprooted there and still do today. I remember my first geography lesson at secondary school in Colchester, when I was asked where I lived. Without thinking, I said Belfast, and was immediately ridiculed as an idiot by the teacher. I cried, and I think I took the next day off school with a “sore throat”, a trick I’d learned from my sister who was also finding it difficult to adjust to life in England.
Like Dante, then, and like thousands of Irish people before me who’d been forced to leave Ireland through the Famine or the prospect of a better life overseas, I was living in exile, and like Dante I made my true home the subject of much of the writing: cantos XXXII-XXXIII of the Inferno, which deal with the starvation of Count Ugolino in prison – and which Heaney had been drawn to translate in Field Work – I reinvented as an account of Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers, where rather than Dante’s Ugolino gnawing at the brain of his persecutor Archbishop Ruggieri, we see Bobby Sands taking a bite out of the head of Margaret Thatcher:
Raising his mouth from that horrible snack,
This blood-soaked shade wiped his lips clean on the
Squashed thatch of that head he had chewed up behind
Then spoke: “You’ve got a cheek, wee man, asking
Me to rake over the coals of a grief so desperate
That the very thought of it freezes my bones…”
Dante’s Purgatorio, the sequel, came out on October 31st from Carcanet, exactly 10 years after its predecessor. And similarly, perhaps even more so, it takes Ireland as its theme in many places. In Canto XIV Dante discourses on the river Arno, getting some anti-Tuscan feelings off his chest. I took the occasion to write about the Lagan, which I lived only a stone’s throw away from as a child, and some of the doleful places it passes on its route to the sea, including Donaghcloney, where loyalist paramilitaries colluded with rogue police officers, and the Maze Prison.
Here we encounter two representatives of the Dublin fashion scene, bemoaning the gentrification of Dublin and the disappearance of the artists, while elsewhere we meet George Clancy, murdered by the Black and Tans in his home in Grange, Co Limerick, and Archbishop Connell, primate of Ireland, embroiled in the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
Unusually, I didn’t dedicate the book to anybody, but I now see writing these words who I ought to have dedicated it to
In Canto XVI, which takes place in clouds of smoke in Dante, and here takes place in clouds of tear gas, the pilgrims encounter raised voices heatedly discussing the peace process, and talk as they walk to Martin McGuinness. The peace process, McGuinness explains, “Has its critics, I know that as well as anybody, But it still got bitter enemies talking”. These bitter enemies, of course, are the opposing sides in the Troubles, who replace Dante’s warring factions of Florence, the Guelphs (or nobles) and the Ghibellines (or merchants). Elsewhere we encounter James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, Harold Wilson, who sent the troops into the North, Charles Stewart Parnell, Samuel Beckett, Seán O’Casey, JM Synge, and in the closing cantos Shane MacGowan is brought back from the dead on an Arts Council “exceptional talent” scheme to do a gig on the earthly paradise at the top of the mount of Purgatory:
Then it was The Pogues. We knew the Essex
Alp had magical powers, but to see
MacGowan up and running again at
Full throttle was a sight for sore eyes.
As they powered into their opening number
“The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” the crowd went berserk.
As well as this cast of characters from Irish history, I found my imagination returning to places I’d known in my childhood – Drumbeg, where we used to go mossing at weekends, Tollymore Forest Park where we’d go for walks, Slieve Donard, Skellig Michael – and the poem too draws many of its similes and reference points from Ireland.
[ Bringing Dante to the streets of DublinOpens in new window ]
When the poets start to scale the Essex Alp which stretches up to the sky as far as they can see, the comparisons that spring to mind are Irish peaks: “Maum Turk Mountains you can scale, edge up | Mount Gable, climb to Dunluce Castle, ascend Errigal. | Feet will do there, but here you must scramble on hands || And knees.”
I’d wanted to write about Ireland for many years, but something, perhaps distance, perhaps my feeling, like many Irish relocated to Britain, that I no longer felt fully Irish, had prevented me from doing so. Working through Dante unleashed my imagination, which through this indirect approach was able to fully engage with Ireland, both in its history and in its present. It’s something I can’t quite explain, but it is in the spirit of Dante, that subjects only come to life if approached obliquely.
Dante himself, in the Inferno, wants to make the direct approach, hiking straight up the mountain of Purgatory towards his goal, but he is chased back by wild beasts – a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf – and can only proceed by taking the circuitous and winding tracks that lead him spiralling thorough Hell.
That’s how I ended up writing a Dante for Ireland – and despite the poem’s engagement with some of the darkest moments of the Troubles, it ends on an optimistic note, where in a vision the Liffey and the Lagan are seen to flow together as if joining hands.
[ Cosmology of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy a celestial revelationOpens in new window ]
Unusually, I didn’t dedicate the book to anybody, but I now see writing these words who I ought to have dedicated it to, and I dedicate it to them now: all those who have left Ireland for one reason or another over the centuries and into the present – to find a better life, to find employment, to flee hunger or social restrictions or shame, to find literary freedom, to make their mark on the world – all those from writers like Joyce and Beckett to the Irish sheep farmers who found a new life in Patagonia in the 19th century, and whose lives today are celebrated in Epic, the Irish Emigration Museum, in Dublin.
Dante’s Purgatorio by Philip Terry is published by Carcanet Press
