Green Apple Books on the Park and Center for the Art of Translation welcome Mary Jo Bang to read from her new translation of Dante’s Paradiso with Tess Taylor.
Newly published by Graywolf Press, Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Paradiso completes her groundbreaking new version of Dante’s masterpiece, begun with Inferno and continued with Purgatorio. Bang’s translation is a revelation in its artistry, readability, and faithfulness to Dante’s ambition for an epic poem that dares to employ language and references recognizable to its readers. In her lyric style and her illuminating and generous notes, Bang has made The Divine Comedy for the twenty-first century.
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Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio, and Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz. She is also the co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. Her translation of Paradiso is forthcoming in 2025. She’s received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Tess Taylor’s work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning. She’s published five poetry collections, including Rift Zone, one of the Boston Globe’s best books of 2020, and Work & Days, one of the NY Times’s best poetry books of 2016. A staged adaptation of her book Last West–about the life of photographer Dorothea Lange–launches at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in November 2025. Her next book of poems, Come Bite, is out from Milkweed Press in 2027. She translates from French and Latin and a current translation of Ovid’s Tristia–or exile letters–is up at Ancient Exchanges. She lives and gardens outside Berkeley, California.