12 The New York Reviewunderstanding of the causes of human
wrongdoing.These new translations all do justice
to the tone, semantics, and forward-
moving rhythm of Purgatorio. Accu-
rate, lyrical, and unmarred by literary
overreaching, Black’s version succeeds
in conveying “the movement of Dan-
te’s thought,” as he defines his aim in
his introduction. His version is also the
only bilingual edition of the three (an
important consideration for those of us
who teach The Divine Comedy at the
college level).
It is not easy to lighten Dante’s poem
in English, which lacks the musical so-
norities of Italian, yet Bang brings to
her translation a remarkable lightness
of spirit that I find refreshing and at
times delightful. As with her transla-
tion of Inferno, she deploys a number
of contemporary references (“the next
realm... /is here where the human
spirit gets purified /and made fit for the
stairway to Heaven”). In her more jar-
ring “contemporizing moments,” she
uses phrases like “every Tom, Dick,
Harry, Moll, Nell, and Sue,” or inserts
a phrase from “America the Beau-
tiful” into the speech of a character.
These anachronisms have the simul-
taneous effect of familiarizing as well
as defamiliarizing Dante’s poem, yet
without mutilating it. Her vibrant and
often playful rendition remains faithful
to the spirit if not always the letter of
Dante’s poem.
For the most part, the sixteen con-
tributors to After Dante also ably ne-
gotiate the demands of accuracy on the
one hand and poetic lift on the other.Some, like Bernard O’Donoghue, An-
gela Leighton, and Steve Ellis, translate
multiple cantos, while others, like Jon-
athan Galassi with his exquisite version
of Purgatorio 18, contribute only one.
Where liberal license is taken with the
original—as in John Kinsella’s trans-
lation of Purgatorio 32—the poetic
achievement more than compensates.
If there was ever a good time to bring
out inspired new translations of Pur-
gatorio it is now, when the inveterate
vices of human civilization are disfig-
uring our planetary body and body
politic. The world stands in need of
this canticle’s message of rehabilita-
tion, reconciliation, and regeneration.
The rapture of Paradise is beyond us,
and the despair of Hell would spell the
end of the modern world’s promise of
freedom. It’s the middle region of Pur-
gatory that speaks most directly to the
self- inflicted wounds of our present
condition, whose deeper causes Dante
diagnosed with moral clarity seven
hundred years ago. I for one would not
quarrel with his claim that most of the
world’s woes are due to human cupidity,
or with his insistence that only robust
social and political institutions—and
the proper enforcement of just laws—
can restrain our worst impulses.Among all the new Dante com-
mentaries, conferences, festivals, and
translations of 2021, one publication in
particular stands out as truly momen-
tous: Rachel Owen’s Illustrations for
Dante’s “Inferno.” Not since Salvador
Dalí’s one hundred watercolors of The
Divine Comedy (1951–1960) and Rob-
ert Rauschenberg’s equally extraor-dinary transfer drawings of Inferno
(1958–1960) has an artwork reimag-
ined Dante’s netherworld with such
novelty and originality. Owen’s volume
contains thirty- four illustrations of In-
ferno and six of Purgatorio, along with
essays by her friend and fellow artist
Fiona Winehouse and the Dante schol-
ars David Bowe and Peter Hainsworth,
as well as translations of two cantos of
Inferno by Jamie McKendrick and Ber-
nard O’Donoghue.
Once these illustrations begin to
circulate, Rachel Owen will become a
much better known artist. After major-
ing in Italian and fine art at the Uni-
versity of Exeter, she studied art at the
Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence,
where her lifelong love affair with
Dante began. She wrote a Ph.D. thesis
entitled “Illuminated Manuscripts of
Dante’s Commedia (1330 –1490)” and
went on to teach art history and medi-
eval Italian literature as a lecturer at
Pembroke and other Oxford colleges.
Even before finishing her doctorate in
2001 Owen had produced three series
of prints inspired in part by Dante’s
poem. She planned to illustrate the en-
tire Divine Comedy much earlier, yet
did not begin the project until 2012,
four years before her untimely death
from cancer at age forty- eight.
Owen’s photographic prints are
mixed with found materials and col-
oring markers of various sorts. Wine-
house explains in her accompanying
essay how the images derived from col-
lages of cut- up and glued photographs,
photocopies of text, and tracing paper,
to which Owen applied acrylic paint,
different pen inks, chalk, colored pen-
cils, white- out corrector fluid, and gold
and silver paint. Some of the images
contain written texts. The original col-
lages—not intended for exhibition—
were photographed, reduced in size
(thus rendering the contrasts and col-
ors more vivid), and then printed.
Much as William Blake’s drawings
did two centuries ago, Owen’s pho-
tographic prints reveal just how un-
bounded Dante’s afterlife is when
imaginative artists reenvision it. Ow-
en’s are the only illustrations of the
Comedy in which the figure of Dante
never appears (occasionally we see his
garment or a body part); rather, we
see what the wayfarer himself sees; or
better, we see what the artist who puts
herself inside Dante’s eyes sees as she
moves from canto to canto. Tom Phil-
lips writes in his blurb that Owen’s
images “create what seem like daring
stills from a film noir of Dante’s jour-
ney.” This puts it well, for the images
have an extraordinary kinetic quality
as the viewer progresses from one to
the next. There is a distinctly flowing
effect as one turns the pages. It is not
by chance that Owen introduces the
presence of water—above all flowing
water—in scenes where Dante’s poem
has none, almost as if it’s the fluid in the
artist’s eye that does the flowing.
Just as Dante introduced a number
of autobiographical elements into his
poem, Owen personalizes her journey
by inserting into his infernal landscapes
images and shadow cutouts of family
members and friends, as well as of her-
self. Superimposed on the image of a
sarcophagus in the cemetery of the her-
etics, for example, a photo of her young,
slender, and long- haired son stands,
incongruously, for the supercilious no-
bleman Farinata degli Uberti. The son’s
silhouette also figures the three usurerswhom Dante encounters in Inferno 17.
Owen’s daughter makes several ap-
pearances, one of them as a toddler in
the arms of her mother, in a photo that
Owen inserted tenderly into a scene
of Dante’s lake of ice at the bottom of
Hell. Winehouse figures in profile as
the beautiful Francesca of Inferno 5.
In an evocative, overexposed photo
of her own face, Owen herself gazes out
at us from a lower corner of her illustra-
tion of Inferno 2. She most likely rep-
resents Beatrice, yet the self- portrait
almost certainly also alludes to the bib-
lical Rachel, who sits next to Beatrice
in heaven, as Beatrice informs Virgil in
that canto. Some of the other illustra-
tions feature cutouts of Owen’s shadow
and outline.
Winehouse mentions that the water-
fall in Owen’s illustration of Inferno 16,
which flows from the circle of violence
into the abyss of Malebolge (the circle
of fraud), contains a photograph of Ow-
en’s “estranged husband,” to which she
added the feet of a lion (see illustration
on page 10). The photo of his face is so
faint and discreet as to be practically
invisible. Deliberately so, one must as-
sume. No one reading the essays in this
edition would know that Owen was the
longtime partner of Thom Yorke, the
singer and bandleader of Radiohead
and father of her two children. The
discretion is admirable, yet I believe
their relationship has some pertinence.
Yorke and Owen met at the University
of Exeter as undergraduates in the early
1990s and separated in 2015, a year be-
fore Owen died. In light of Winehouse’s
c r y pt ic rem a rk t h at s ome of O wen’s s el f-
portraits in the collection “are difficult
to look at, reflecting as they do her own
painful, inconvenient and infuriating
situation,” one wonders to what extent
Yorke may hover like a mostly invisible
ghost over the personal testament that
informs the collection as a whole.
That Owen did not live to finish il-
lustrating the entire Divine Comedy
represents a great loss. Winehouse puts
it best when she describes how she and
Owen’s parents found six folded col-
lages in a box high on a bookshelf after
Owen died:We unfolded them and saw that
they corresponded to the first
six cantos of the Purgatorio. The
images are full of love, laughter
and colour reflecting the changed
atmosphere of the verse, which
leaves behind the poetry of the
damned. Seeing the images for the
first time was a deeply emotional
experience. I had come to believe
that the end of Rachel’s life had
somehow mirrored parts of Dan-
te’s Inferno, but these images of-
fered a different narrative.Those images leave little doubt that Ow-
en’s reenvisionings of Dante’s second
and third realms would have been al-
together luminous, thought- provoking,
and even ecstatic. We are fortunate to
have illustrations of the first six can-
tos of Dante’s middle canticle, for they
make it abundantly evident that the
love that moved the translators of these
new versions of Purgatorio also moved
Owen to become a companion on Dan-
te’s journey to redemption. Those six
post- infernal images offer a narrative
very different from the ones of the
damned. There are just enough of them
to show that we’re all on this mountaintogether. (^) Q
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
On the Basis of Art
150 Years of Women at Yale
With an introduction by Elisabeth Hodermarsky and essays by
Helen A. Cooper, Linda Konheim Kramer, and Marta Kuzma
Published to accompany the exhibition on view at the
Yale University Art Gallery through January 9, 2022
Available in bookstores and through online booksellers
Hardcover, $
artgallery.yale.edu/publications
Harrison 08 13 .indd 12 11 / 18 / 21 1 : 17 PM