We start with Dante’s Commedia itself. Why have you chosen Inferno over Purgatorio or Paradiso?

Well, it’s mainly through Inferno that what you might call the ‘shock and awe’ of Dante’s impact is felt. Inferno is, of course, where almost all readers start and where many of them indeed stop, which is a pity because Purgatorio is, in many senses, the ‘of this world’ part of the Commedia. It’s largely because of Inferno’s greater accessibility and vividness and indeed the violence. That’s what has always been the attraction. Plus of course it is the way into the Commedia, you can’t reach the higher places until you’ve travelled the lower regions.

You’ve specifically chosen the Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez translation over others.

The OUP edition is not the most easily accessible, nor the most attractive in style. Indeed Durling acknowledged that the style of translation is ‘literal’ and ‘craggy’. Yet it is a close and reliable translation, it gives you the original text on the facing page and it also has excellent notes. It’s very difficult to decide with the profusion of Dante translations that there are at the moment (including a number of good verse translations) what to recommend.

And this edition is suitable for readers approaching Dante for the first time?

It’s the one that students frequently use before they go on to the Italian editions. The notes are thorough and very accessible. Which edition to recommend for the new reader also raises several other questions about how to render Dante’s verse into English, and how much explanation is needed – both in the translation itself and in the form of commentary.

Peter Hawkins’s Dante: A Brief Biography explores Dante’s impact on artists and scholars alike. Does this make for a good introduction?

I think this work stands out as the strongest short introduction for probably three reasons. The first is that it’s lively and accessible without oversimplifying major issues concerning Dante’s politics, religion, poetics and sexuality. It’s also based on his own long study of Dante which resulted in one of the best critical accounts – his 1999 book on Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination. And thirdly it derives from a long experience of teaching the subject. For instance, chapter three begins with the wonderful sentence: ‘There comes a time in every Dante class where someone blows the whistle on Beatrice.’ [Dante’s inamorata and guide.] Then it goes into a dramatisation of conversations between students about Dante’s relationship with Beatrice. That is some indication of its accessibility.

How does Hawkins lay out the history of Dante’s impact?

One way in which he contextualises Dante is to focus initially on his life and another way of historicising the subject is through an important concluding chapter which he calls ‘Dante’s Afterlife’– dealing with the presence of Dante from the Middle Ages onwards and indeed into modern and contemporary culture.

Does Hawkins touch on the preference for Inferno over the other two canticles in popular culture?

He does indicate the prominence of Inferno as what most people associate with Dante. I think he recognises, like anyone who deals with the reception of Dante, that Inferno has this kind of priority for readers. In a sense that was the case from the Middle Ages onwards. For instance, the first mention of Dante by an English writer, Chaucer, identifies him as an expert on hell. In Dante in English Griffiths and Reynolds present the influence of Dante through other artists’ work. What’s their focus?

They’re concerned with Dante’s impact on the English-speaking world, giving us a substantial sampling of translation and imitation in English poetry from the Middle Ages through to the present. It does have its limitations. The long introduction is incisive but somewhat idiosyncratic, it doesn’t go into much detail with the texts in the anthology, nor very much with wider issues of reception over the centuries – but the whole volume is a very well edited and indispensable selection.

The selection does seem to focus on the canonical writers.

Yes, there is a risk when accepting the Griffiths and Reynolds collection, excellent as it is, as the dominant model for Dante in English. The risk is that it could limit awareness of Dante’s impact mostly to white Anglo-Saxon (and Celtic) poets. Although of course they do include one Caribbean author, Derek Walcott. Do Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè present a wider scope of influence in Dante on View?

They provide a perspective of impact that goes in several important further directions. The essays deal with what the editors call ‘intermedial cultural practices’. They’re not only concerned with illustrations and paintings on Dantean subjects from the Middle Ages through to Salvador Dalí, they’re also interested in the traditions of bringing the Inferno and the Commedia to life by embodying Dante’s poem in performance, in recitation, in theatrical, cinematic and even televisual adaptation.

So focusing on the mainstream then?

The structuring of the collection leads to the more popular and contemporary media, so part three focuses on Dante in the cinema and multimedia. They deal with Dante in performance, which of course implies wider accessibility. I think they’re also chiefly concerned in the way in which, as they put it, the literary text is first ‘read as part of the media culture in which it was conceived and then reinscribed within the contemporary and subsequent media cultures and practices of its readers’. They then quote a line from the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso: ‘Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda’ – ‘A great flame follows a little spark’. So what they’re aiming to do is to show how that vitality of Dante transmits itself into modern culture.

Much like Dante writing in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin. Contemporary appropriation seems to follow that trend of accessibility.

I think that’s right. That’s certainly a feature that several of the contributors in the anthology focus upon. For example the essay by Amilcare Iannucci focuses on the importance of the popularisation of the Commedia. I think another quite striking instance of the continuing vitality of Inferno particularly is that last April in London alone there were three different forms of Dante performance. There was the avant-garde Italian theatre-company staging an approach to all three parts of the Commedia at the Barbican, there was also Roberto Benigni’s one man show at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and there was also a showing at the Barbican cinema of the 1911 silent film of the Inferno. I think in any case that Dante continues to be a very vigorous presence outside the academy.

Do Braida and Calè touch on Dante’s impact on political or social structures?

One example is the connection between Dante and Italian nationalism and this is particularly evident in Antonella Braida’s essay, when she makes some interesting suggestions about the relationship between Dante and Italian nationalism after the unification of Italy and before the First World War.

Does this resonate in present day politics?

Perhaps there have been some signs under the Berlusconi regime in Italy. A recent proposal was put forward by some members of the Florence city council to revoke Dante’s exile, which looks awfully like appropriating Dante to further a right-wing agenda. Last is Gloria Naylor’s novel, Linden Hills, a fairly on-the-nose use of Dante as social commentary.

The reason I’ve chosen this is that a form of Dante’s impact that tends to be underrated is his presence in the novel. I think that the contemporary African-American novelist, Gloria Naylor, has been the most successful of those who have attempted to assimilate the structure of Dante’s work into their own narratives and to relate it to their own culture. As Naylor herself acknowledged in a conversation she had with Toni Morrison, her sense of the structure of the Inferno is itself derived from the ‘Great Books’ course she took as a student in Brooklyn.

Rather than a nod or homage to Dante, Naylor seems to appropriate wholesale Inferno’s structure and themes.

Yes, this is an ambitious project. Other writers such as Eliot or Heaney may appropriate episodes or lines in a way that focuses upon them as part of the agenda of their own poems. But what Naylor is doing is quite striking, as a placing of that structure in the culture of the African-American experience. Through the journey of the two central characters, the two black poets, it explores their experience of dispossession and loss of identity in a way that creates its own novelistic energies whilst drawing upon the Dantean structure.

Dante’s wandering poet seems almost be a proto-detective of the Philip Marlowe ilk – flawed and lost. Does that influence contemporary authors such as Naylor?

Although Linden Hills is not a crime novel it has the unfolding of a crime at its core and as such it shows affinity with some recent crime fiction in which the murders have some kind of Dantean resonance – for example, Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club. I think this does suggest some degree of connection between the Inferno and crime. After all, something of the appeal of the journey through Dante’s hell for modern readers is that of following a kind of criminal investigator at work, pursuing wrongdoers and getting them to confess. And, like many detectives, Dante’s pilgrim is a dysfunctional figure.