I am creating a new version of Dante’s Commedia that is at once highly personal and ‘universal’ in Dante’s visionary sense of ‘la forma universal di questo nodo / the universal shape of this knot’. I approach my version of Dante with procedures, rituals, maps, and other voices, in and out of time. The archive is vast, and it is made of skins of long-dead animals and trees and traces of hands copying, commenting, annotating, redacting, falsifying, digitising.
Just as Egerton MS 2085 - Unrestricted is described in the British Library’s finding aid, I begin imperfectly, and I am wanting the desired (not side) effect of translation – or is of it my Parkinson’s medication – in the face of degeneration.
The effect is the pain lifting when I carry Dante’s words over, a knot with many threads, still attached to the loom.
Extracts appearing/forthcoming in: Poetry Ireland Review, Notre Dame Review, Firmament Magazine.