Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno. A Missile for Capturing Dante’s Future(s)

The multitude of appropriations, transformations, reinterpretations, and rewritings of Dante’s Comedy through a variety of media and cultural productions testifies Dante’s hold on modern imagination. Due to its plurilingualism, visual vividness, meticulous graphic descriptions, and polyphonic auditory allusions, this universally acclaimed masterwork has been made accessible to all ages and cultures. One recent example of controversial rewriting is Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno (2012), which includes references to contemporary (popular) culture and figures: from Mick Jagger to Freud, from Stephen Colbert to the Addams Family, from Bob Dylan to Ronald Rumsfeld and Qaddafi. Bang’s version is here analyzed in the light of Edwin Gentzler’s theory of post-translation studies to reflect on the translator’s (sub)version and on the role of translation as rewriting in the age of digital revolution.