Dante's Inferno: Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison on her new Jamaican translation of Dante

I wanted to go for a sea-bath after I signed off on the final edits to my adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. Working away in that subterranean world where lost souls wallow in boiling blood and excrement, are seared by flame and fiery rain, buffeted by foul polluted winds, covered in nasty sores, lashed by venomous snakes, and frozen-up in ice made me yearn for full immersion in the clear blue Caribbean sea.

I would have hot-footed it to my favourite beach on the North Coast, there to cleanse and clear my mind in the warm salt water, had I been in Jamaica. But here on the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia, by the azure and still chill and wintery sea, the season for sea-baths is not yet; so Ted and I headed into the town of Sechelt to our local fish shop, with the intention of buying some type of seafood caught fresh from the Salish Sea for dinner.

The fish shop is situated across from a small art gallery in town, and I always check to see what paintings are on display in the main window. Today what I saw hanging in pride of place almost caused me to faint, for it was a reproduction of Henry Holiday’s painting of Dante and Beatrice. It was the very same image I’d first seen when I was a teenager at school in Jamaica over sixty years ago, the image that had provoked such a strong reaction in me then that I almost fainted.

And seeing it again this time, I began to feel a kind of shifting begin to take place under my feet, but this was not like the forceful trying-to-fling-me-down movement I’d felt the first time. This time it felt as if a benign wave was easing me gently forward. A good-natured wave that courteously slowed right down before it came to a stop, easy, easy. I chose to take this movement as a sign-a token, as my mother would say – that I’d arrived at the end of a journey that took well over half a century from start to finish.

The award-winning poet and scholar Jason Allen-Paisant once did an interview with me about my efforts to write a Jamaican version of the Inferno for the ICI Berlin, and in it he questioned whether my poet’s voice would not be more suited to that of the Virgil figure in the poem (presumably because of my considerable age!). I must confess that I did not have a reasonable answer for him then, and I still do not have one now. And I have no explanation for why it has taken me a such long time to complete a project that started when I first saw Henry Holiday’s image of the Italian Poet looking completely undone by the sight of the all-consuming love of his life stepping past him, giving him the side-eye. She is in the company of her two girl friends (attendants) and deliberately, extravagantly ignoring him. In the painting, Dante is clutching at his heart. He looks like he is about to faint.

I might have first seen that image in a chapter on the Italian Renaissance in one of the history books I studied at school in Jamaica, because when I went to school we were taught – almost exclusively – British and European history. But I also may have seen it in the Art History course that I took as part of my A-level Art exams. That class was taught by a young Scots artist and educator named Moira Small, and there were only two students in it, me and my dear friend Helen MacLean. Moira, as we came to call her because she was only four or so years older than we were, would show us slides she’d insert into a wheel shaped ‘carousel’. She’d then project them onto a white screen rolled down over the blackboard and talk to us about them. She’d describe how Van Gogh’s brushstrokes intensified as his mental health deteriorated, how his impasto reflected the violently stirred-up state of his mind and then she’d enjoin us to be grateful for the overwhelming beauty that his hellish suffering produced. She taught us about the play of light and dark – chiaroscuro, in art – she showed us Goya’s nightmarish images and urged us not to look away. She might have shown us Henry Holiday’s painting of Dante and Beatrice. If she did, I remember feeling as if I was going to faint, and if she did, she would have told us that if we were serious about becoming artists we would more than likely have to become accustomed to upheaval and uncertainty – to physical and spiritual dread as Rastafarians call it – if we wanted to produce work of real importance. Back then, I did not want to hear that.

After my first near-fainting experience with Dante brought on by seeing Henry Holiday’s painting, I began to encounter regular references to the Divine Comedy especially in the form of illustrations by Gustave Doré. His image of Bertran De Born swinging his own head like a tilly lamp, I might have even seen on a calendar hanging up in somebody’s house! And Paola and Francesca floating in lust weightlessness, levitated up from a book of stories I was reading and entered into my dreams, no matter how I tried to block that image out. Jamaicans often say to people who are overly inquisitive about matters of the occult, ‘You going walk wid yu head tun behind yu!’ What an image. Dante again.

In 1968, after spending a year at the Jamaica School of Art I travelled to New York to take classes at the School of the Art Student’s League. In my first week in the great city I went with my friend the American painter Seymour Leichman, to see Picasso’s Guernica which was then on display in the Museum of Modern Art. As I stood there in trying to penetrate (as Rastafarians would say) what is one of the greatest depictions of the horror of war ever created, Seymour described Picasso’s great painting as Dantean and with that I guess I was on my way.

At the Art Student’s League I took a class with the amazing African American painter, Jacob Lawrence who taught me that every day I needed get up and ‘do the work’. Not to engage in overly long and complicated discussions about the work, not to argue about the work, not to theorize ad infinitum about the work, but to just DO THE WORK. His Migration series depicting the movement of millions of African Americans fleeing the rural south to the promised land of the Industrial north could be called Dantean.

I can cite numerous examples of how images from the Divine Comedy became part of my consciousness, and this is where I might have found an answer to Jason Allen-Paisant’s question as to why I could not write in the mannered and highly educated voice of Virgil. It has taken me lo these many years to stop standing outside and viewing Dante, to get up the courage and come in through the tradesperson’s entrance – as my dear friend Philip Sherlock would say – and write Dante.

And though I began the journey with my friend and mentor Derek Walcott as my guide, I became increasingly aware that the true guide I needed to accompany me could only be Louise Bennett, aka Miss Lou. And thus it was that she and I set off down the road pocked with pit, pot and sinkhole.

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This week's article is by Lorna Goodison, author of Dante’s Inferno: A new translation, which is published this month! Remember to use the code APRILBOOKS for 10% off and free UK P&P.