While I agree with this lucid account of James’s innovative and masterly approach (which succeeds in bringing Dante’s poema sacro to a non-scholarly readership), I would go further and say that the essence of James’s labour of love, fashioned over a fifty-year span, is that it is not a strict translation at all, but a poetic hybrid. Unlike previous scholarly translations of the poem into English, the freight of Dante’s poem rendered by James is of a different substance altogether. From the outset, Dante-pilgrim’s salvific journey in the Comedy is presented as a collective one. James’s omission of the collective pronoun nostra (our) in his rendering of the first verse ‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ (part way through the journey of our lives) is an important signal to the reader that this version of Dante’s otherworldly journey is like no other. In fact, it is an inventive and erudite rendering by a fellow poet in exile who infuses the famous verses with very personal choices. Thus, as poet–translator, James’s deliberate employment of the first-person pronoun, ‘At the midpoint of the path through life, I found / Myself lost in a wood’ (Inf. 1, 1-2), informs us that he is crafting his own unique cammin. As a very talented poet and parodist in his own right, James is crossing boundaries in this volume and mapping out a hybrid poetic landscape. Viewed in this light, his Dantean offering to his wife, distinguished Dante scholar Prue Shaw, may be perceived as a fitting tribute to Dante’s own metamorphic quest in exile, which, sparked by both Ovidian and Virgilian sensibilities, reveals Dante’s poetic matter as an audacious, totalising vision; a mindset with strong appeal for the no less daring James.

Dante (portrait by Gustave Doré)

In the Comedy, the protagonist Dante undertakes a journey of self-discovery through the three realms of the afterlife. Under the guidance and protection of Virgil, a resident of Limbo, the protagonist commences his journey with a degree of trepidation and uncertainty. As the only living being in the poem, he must overcome despair and self-doubt, and cleanse and purify himself in order to reach the celestial goal where he will be granted a vision of the Divine Creator. Thus the journey through Hell is arduous and Dante-protagonist often seems out of his depth and has many lessons to learn in the company of his guide. In Purgatory, his burden is progressively lightened as he climbs the terraces of the mountain of Purgatory, is cleansed of sin, and finally reaches the Terrestrial Paradise at its summit. There he is reunited with Beatrice, who replaces Virgil as guide and teacher and accompanies a ‘transhumanised’ Dante through the heavenly spheres.

In the Comedy, Dante sets a new literary standard by formulating his own hybrid mix, which in an age of summae is drawing on a host of literary precursors, liturgical texts, biblical stories, vernacular dramatisations, popular culture, local events, and more. By the end of the poem, the once-pusillanimous protagonist is utterly transformed, and his divinely ordained mission has challenged the otherworldly experiences of Aeneas and Saint Paul, with whom he compares himself at the outset.

James believes that Dante’s poem looks forward to the modern age: ‘His poem stands at the dawn of modern science, and therefore of the times we live in now.’ One is reminded of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who, in his Conversation about Dante, recognised the futuristic quality of Dante’s poetic invention: ‘It is inconceivable to read Dante’s cantos without directing them toward contemporaneity. They were created for that purpose. They are missiles for capturing the future.’ In his poem in terza rima entitled ‘To Prue Shaw: A Letter from Cambridge’, James recalls his awakening, under her tutelage, to the lyric intensity of Dante when they read Inferno 5 together:

But comprehension started to arrive
At last. I saw the lovers ride the storm
And felt the pulse which brought the
dead alive.
For sheer intensity of lyric form
I’d never read that stretch of verse’s peer.
You said such things, with Dante,
were the norm.

As an undergraduate, Shaw studied Italian at the University of Sydney where her father, Robert Shaw, was head of the Department of Italian. Prue was its first Honours student. Although it has taken many years for James’s Dantean project to come to fruition, true to form he has done it in his own inimitable style. Quite apart from the use of quatrains, he includes a glossatory scheme within the verses in order to explain points of history or literary background for the reader. This mechanism can, at times, unnecessarily expand the economy of Dante’s verses: for example, the reference to Dido in Inferno 5: ‘L’altra è colei che s’ancise amorosa’ (61) compared with James’s version: ‘The next is Dido, Queen of Carthage, cruel / To the ashes of her husband when she slew / Herself because of love: not love for him, / But for Aeneas.’ Similarly, Dante’s loss of consciousness at the end of the canto ‘e caddi come corpo morto cade’ (5, 142) takes an unexpected turn: ‘And I? I fainted dead away, / And went down as if going down to stay.’

‘James believes that Dante’s poem looks forward to the modern age’

Curious, too, is the translation of the inscription at the gates of Hell: ‘To enter the lost city, go through me’ (Inf. 3, 1). James does not make explicit the edition in Italian from which he has crafted his opus, nor does he dwell on the commentary tradition that may have informed his incorporated glosses. This tradition, commencing soon after the poet’s death, includes exegeses by Dante’s own sons, Jacopo and Pietro, Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, and Jacopo della Lana. However, as the poet–translator’s journey to the depths of Hell progresses, James’s momentum gathers apace, shedding the former weightiness of the glosses and finding his own powerful voice.

In the final analysis, the intensity of James’s evocation, especially of Lower Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, propels the reader forward with force and conviction. The episode at the steps of Purgatory is particularly memorable and beautifully evoked, as is James’s unerring portrayal of the cosmological ordering devised by Dante in the final canticle. The potency of Dante’s overall vision captured by James is impressive and, ultimately, the breadth and impact of his poetic undertaking grant the reader a deeply satisfying experience.