Stephen Collis

“When I read Black’s translation […], I noticed how much Purgatory is a poem of displacement, migration, and the search for refuge: everyone is in motion (Dante sometimes has to run alongside the shades in order to speak to them), everyone striving for the shore or the heights of the mountain above them, everyone remembering the home they are now separated from. In heaven and hell, everyone is fixed in place for all eternity, but in Purgatory […] , everything is fluid, and so much still seems possible. “