Mortal Concerns ANSLATION Of Dante

Afterlife: How Tammy Nguyen brought Dante into the 21st century

- Jesse Dorris

IN HIS 1984 TRANSLATION of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Allen Mandelbaum renders line 79 of Canto 16 in Paradise as: ‘All mankind’s institutions, of every sort/have their own death.’ A century earlier, in 1867, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated those same words as, ‘All things of yours have their mortality.’ While in 2007, Robert and Jean Hollander gave the line as, ‘All your concerns are mortal, even as are you.’ The written word endures only as long as its reproductions, yet its meanings live and die. Channelling past and present, every translation is effectively both a séance and a vibe check.

For the past two years, artist Tammy Nguyen has been translating the Divine Comedy into ‘A Comedy of Mortals’ (2023-25), a series of three exhibitions across Lehmann Maupin’s Seoul, London and New York spaces. The works reorient the poet's allegorical travels: in the second show, ‘Purgatorio’ (Purgatory), for example, Nguyen depicted a descent into Indonesia’s Grasberg Mine, among the world’s largest reserves of gold and copper.