You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On today's program, we're discussing our latest multimedia poetry feature on New Yorker.com.

Excerpts from a new translation of Dante Alighieri's Purgatoria. Here with me is the translator, Mary Jo Bang, whose own poetry has also appeared in our pages.

She's received the National Book Critics Circle Award, a hotter fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship.

Mary Jo, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me here.

So tell us how you decide to take on the Divine Comedy.

I know you've done The Inferno.

Why did you end up doing the whole thing? I understand that you were inspired, at least in part,

by Caroline Berg-Vals, 48 Dante Variations. Can you say a bit about that? Sure. That's what started

the Inferno, and that was a long time ago now.

And at first it was just a lark because she had a found poem made up of the first three lines of the Inferno using 47 translations.

And I thought, how interesting that there is no right way to translate three fairly simple lines.

Right, right.

And how would I do it then?

And since everyone had done kind of exhaustively had adhered to the original, what if I took the kind of translation liberties that a translator can take with a poem. And that's what

began the inferno. When I finished the inferno, and it was published in 2012, everyone kept asking

me, will you do purgatorio? And that effort had taken six years of my life.

And I thought, I'm not so sure.

I mean, it was satisfying.

It was wonderful.

I loved doing it.

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