You made your way through hell and you climbed up and out of purgatory. Don’t deny yourself the peace and rest Mary Jo Bang depicts in her excellent translation of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso.
As in her equally great translations of Inferno and Purgatorio, Bang translates Paradiso in lively, contemporary language. Yes, those are funny, unobtrusive references in her translation to The Simpsons, T.S. Eliot, and Roberta Flack. Writing in a modern voice with subtle, modern references, Bang follows Dante’s lead—he wrote his Commedia in Tuscan dialect, not austere Latin, and he loaded his poem with references to current events and controversies.
But I’m not enrolled in Sunday school, you think, so why read a poem about heaven? How could a poem called Paradiso be anything but pedantic and dull? Try out the following stanzas where Dante’s love Beatrice, who died years earlier, explains to Dante why those he loves, or thinks he loves, shine for him in such brilliant light:
If I blaze to you in the heat of love
Beyond any measure seen on earth—
So much so that I overwhelm your sight—
Don’t be surprised; this is a function of
My perfect sight, which, as soon as it perceives,
Steps toward the perceived good.
I can easily see how in your mind, the Eternal
Light is already shining. Once seen, it,
All on its own, always lights up love—
And if something else seduces your love,
It’s nothing more than a misidentified vestige
Of the Eternal, which still shines through.
In the above stanzas and throughout Paradiso, Dante’s guides explain with passion how the objects of our love reflect and direct us toward the love that moves all things. Paradiso, then, is not an abstract treatise; it is a passionate and deeply humane meditation on what moves us in our best selves and what peace we can imagine in our best hopes.
Famously, however, Paradiso is everyone’s least favorite part of the Commedia. (My ranking: 1. Purgatorio, 2. Inferno, 3. Paradiso). But to say Paradiso is the third best part of the Commedia is like saying George Harrison is the third best Beatle. It’s true, but we’re still talking about the Fucking Beatles/ Commedia! Third best (and, yes, fourth best, Ringo!) is still better than almost all the rest.
Not only is Paradiso great on its own merits, it’s also crucial to your understanding of Inferno and Purgatorio, both of which are crucial to your understanding of Paradiso. You can’t really understand the emptiness and painful striving in Inferno and Purgatorio unless you can compare it to the peace and rest depicted in Paradiso. And you can’t really appreciate the perfection of the heavenly spheres of Paradiso unless you can picture the awful, degraded copies of the heavenly spheres in the circles of the Inferno.
But what if you don’t know much about Dante’s life and times and are unsure you can make sense of the big picture and all the details in the poem? At the end of each of the poem’s 33 cantos, Bang presents rich and fascinating notes on Dante’s and her own references. She is not only a great poet—she really knows her philosophy, theology, mythology, history, and Simpsons episodes and she knows how to explain them in ways that shed light on Dante’s poem. Also, as an introduction, Bang presents a short and lively prose version of the poem highlighting its key moments and ideas.
I also recommend Jennifer Frey’s and Matthew Rothaus Moser’s three-part conversation on the Commedia on Frey’s excellent literature, philosophy, and theology podcast Sacred and Profane Love. Those three episodes can greatly enrich a reading of Bang’s translations of Dante’s poem.
Bang’s translation of Paradiso is a major achievement and a wonderful finale to her work on Dante’s Commedia.
POETRY
Paradiso
By Dante Alighieri
Translated by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press
Published July 8, 2025
