The Brooklyn Rail

Ned Denny’s B (After Dante)

The coincidence of the publication of the 2019 Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize winner Ned Denny’s translation B (After Dante) of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and the 700th year since the poet’s 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.