"Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state." So begins Lorna Goodison's astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as "uncompromising as an old testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder."

For the last two decades, Goodison has translated and reimagined Dante's cantos, setting the original poem into her native Jamaica and employing Jamaican expressions and sayings. In doing so, she has attempted to do for Caribbean vernacular what Dante did for his Italian language in the fourteenth century-endow it with an entirely new vocal music and power. In recreating the journey through the "unpaved and rocky road" of Dante's Hell for a contemporary audience, Goodison has given us a dazzling and profound new narrative of spiritual yearning for our era.

Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica in 1947. She has published several collections of poetry, including Tamarind Season (1980), I am Becoming My Mother (1986), Heartease (1989), To Us All Flowers Are Roses and Selected Poems. She has been writer in residence at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. She currently divides her time between Michigan and Jamaica. Her volume of short stories, Baby Mother and the King of Swords, was published in 1990.

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Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence and is considered Italy's greatest poet. It is believed that The Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of world literature, was written between 1308 and 1320. He died in Ravenna in 1321.

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