Mary Jo Bang’s interpretation updates this 14th-century poem for 20th-century readers. Bang makes no attempt to pass herself off as a scholar of medieval Italian, and defends her unfamiliarity with ...

“This mountain’s of such sort that climbing it is hardest at the start; but as we rise, the slope grows less unkind.” The speaker is the Roman poet Virgil, Dante’s companion and guide, in scaling the ...

Mary Jo Bang joins Kevin Young to to discuss her translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, excerpts of which are featured on newyorker.com. Bang is a poet who has received the National Book Critics Circle ...

In 2012, the poet Mary Jo Bang published her rendition of Dante’s Inferno, a poem that’s more than seven hundred years old but still resonates today, if only because we’ve all been to what Zora Neale ...