I am creating a new version of Dante’s Commedia that is at once highly personal and ‘universal’ in Dante’s visionary sense of ‘la forma universal di questo nodo / the universal shape of this knot’. My own subjectivity is the nexus from which this version proceeds, with threads that radiate from Elkhart, Indiana, traditional lands of the Anishinaabé/Neshnabé (Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe) to Volturara Appula and Castellana Grotte (Italy) and beyond, wrapped up in my experience of young onset Parkinson’s disease, which I’ve previously written about in Granta.
I approach my version of Dante with procedures, rituals, maps, and other voices, in and out of time. The archive is vast, and it is made of skins of long-dead animals and trees and traces of hands copying, commenting, annotating, redacting, falsifying, digitising.
Just as the Dante incunabulum Egerton MS 2085 - Unrestricted is described in the British Library’s finding aid, I begin imperfectly, and I am wanting the desired (not side) effect of translation – or is of it my Parkinson’s medication – in the face of degeneration.
The effect is the pain lifting when I carry Dante’s words over, a knot with many threads, still attached to the loom.
Extracts appearing/forthcoming in: Poetry Ireland Review, Notre Dame Review, Firmament Magazine.