Translation, Adaptation, Tradaptation: On Lorna Goodison’s Jamaican Inferno

When we see contemporary creatives engage with old texts, we might imagine that they do so with one of two divergent approaches in mind: either they translate it, maintaining its original form but migrating it from one cultural context to another, or they adapt it, transferring the text from one medium to the next—poetry to painting, novel to film. We might praise translation for its accuracy, faithfulness, straightforwardness, and rigor. Or we might favor adaptation, commending its creativity, originality, and modernity. But is the difference so cut and dried? What exactly distinguishes a translation from an adaptation? Are the two processes really so divergent, or are they interrelated, sometimes indistinguishable?

To approach these questions, this talk with Prof. Elizabeth Coggeshall (Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University) in the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies will consider the “tradaptation” of Dante’s Inferno by the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison. Much like Dante’s, Goodison’s cantos turn a keen eye onto human experiences. In shaping her cantos, she does not strive to access something universal about the human condition; instead, she narrates life through an emphatically local lens. Her most profound engagement with Dante is in language: a commitment to the Jamaican vernacular and its particular idiom, and a sustained reflection on how the mother tongue shapes and guides one’s understanding and experience of the world and one’s place in it.

Organized in collaboration with the Italian Student Association, the lecture will be accompanied by a curated exhibition of books from the Dante Collection housed at the Kelly Library. 

Everyone is welcome and admission is free.