The Redemption Song of Lorna Goodison’s Inferno A Jamaican English Adaptation of Dante’s Canticle

This article is about Lorna Goodison’s recent version of Dante’s Inferno. It first frames Goodison’s hell by siting it within the long-established Dantesque terrain of the Caribbean literary tradition, founded in the 1950s in concomitance with the forging and formalization of the characterizing traits of Caribbean English and culture. The article then looks at one specific feature of Goodison’s Inferno: the way it largely departs from Dante’s text by construing a transcultural space that anachronistically evokes the sufferance of enslavement years, as well as by depicting episodes from Jamaican-Caribbean colonial history and contemporary times that replace those set in Dante’s medieval society, yet maintaining all along an opaque liaison with Dante’s Inferno that sporadically makes the Jamaican version seem incongruous. The article concludes with a note on the tradaptive nature of Goodison’s text and on interlinguistic translation “proper.”