'Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.' So begins Lorna Goodison's astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as 'uncompromising as an Old Testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder'. This Jamaican Dante, a quarter-century in the making, is as much transformation as it is translation: the poet's narrator, its Dante figure, is now guided through an underworld by Goodison's great Jamaican predecessor Louise Bennett, 'Miss Lou' in the book. Goodison draws on the entire continuum of Jamaican speech yet securely grounds the action in Dante's formal architecture, bringing an entire world to life: we encounter other poets, including Goodison's friend Derek Walcott, as well as Caribbean politicians, reggae innovators and other public figures. Here, she recreates the journey through the 'unpaved and rocky road' of Dante's Hell for a contemporary audience and attempts to do for Caribbean vernacular what Dante did for his Italian language in the fourteenth century - endow it with an entirely new vocal music and power.

Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017. In 2018, she received a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.