Deep explorations of literary translation — choices, challenges, and the art of bringing Dante and other classics across languages.
Lucy Bamboo · June 28, 2026We’ve been taught to ask whether God is loving. The ruder question — the one Dante actually stages, in granular architectural detail, for every reader who has ever cracked open the Inferno — is whether a God who designed Hell could possibly be. Not Hell as vague backdrop to a morality tale, but Hell as … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 28, 2026
Faith, in the version most people inherit, is the assumption you start from — the floor you stand on before any of the hard questions begin. Dante’s poem says something harder: faith is what’s left over after thinking has gone as far as it can and discovers it isn’t far enough. That’s not comfort. That’s … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 25, 2026Ask what a poem gave the world and you usually get a reading list. Dante’s case is stranger. He didn’t just influence writers — he handed eighty million people the language they currently think in. That’s the concrete version. The more unsettling versions go deeper: a picture of the afterlife that quietly overwrote scripture in … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 24, 2026
Nobody plans to end up in the dark wood. That’s what makes it a wood and not a road. You look up one ordinary afternoon and the path you were sure you were on is simply gone. Dante’s first line announces this quietly, almost without ceremony: nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — midway … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 23, 2026
Most readers remember “Abandon all hope” — the last line of the inscription on Hell’s gate in Canto III. Few stop on the line that precedes it, the one that is, in some ways, the most philosophically and theologically dense of the nine: Dinanzi a me non fur cose create se non etterne, e io … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 23, 2026
If you want to understand the Divine Comedy, you need to understand Florentine politics in the late thirteenth century. Not because the poem is political propaganda — it is far more than that — but because Dante’s exile drove him to write the Commedia, and that exile was the direct consequence of a factional defeat … Read more
