The Heartbeat of Dante’s Comedy, with Jason Baxter

Church Life Today

Translating Dante is not a matter of rendering words in one language for words in another language. Indeed, no act of translation is so direct or basic. But as with Dante’s Comedy when the style itself is part of the art – the sound of the thing, the movement, the embodiment – the translator needs to feel as much as think, relying on sense along with knowledge. Why? Because the hope of giving us – the readers of a translation – an encounter with the great good found in the art depends on the more holistic, more full-bodied work of scholarship and personality, at once.

Jason Baxter has studied Dante for years and written on him before, including with his marvelous and illuminating book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now he is completing the work of translating the master’s poem for English readers that brings us into not just what the poem says, but what it feels like.

Follow-up Resources:

• Inferno, A New Translation by Jason M. Baxter
• Purgatorio, A New Translation by Jason M. Baxter
• A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy, by Jason M. Baxter
• Learn more about Dr. Baxter’s work at https://www.jasonmbaxter.com/

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