John McEwen
John McEwen is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail.
Ned Denny’s B (After Dante)
By John McEwenThe coincidence of the publication of the 2019 Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize winner Ned Dennys translation B (After Dante) of Dantes Divina Commedia, and the 700th year since the poets death in the autumn of 1321, proves suitably momentous. Coincidental, because Denny embarked on his long labour when he was 40, nel mezzo del cammin (di nostra vita), six years ago, with no thought of the anniversary; and long before the appropriately medieval and infernal plague conditions in which it has been published, Dante having died of malaria.
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