This panel explores the issue of multilingualism in Dante’s works in the medieval context, as well as in contemporary afterlives of the Comedy. The first paper articulates ways in which language may be used both to forge intimate connections, or to signal alterity. Related questions are raised by the session’s final three papers, which focus on contemporary multi-lingual and multi-media adaptations of Dante’s Comedy, including: how do Dante’s text and its adaptations engender participation by the view/reader? Do adaptations use the tools of multi-media to make the reader/viewer feel more closely connected to the original by somewhat paradoxically reproducing the text less ‘faithfully’? Could more intimate languages or modes of adaptation be less precise but more powerful, less scholarly but more authoritative?

Singer’s paper asks: what languages do mothers speak or sing to their children when no one else is listening? Is “babytalk” a language unto itself? Situating the question of the “mother tongue” within a discourse of lullabies, she argues that the nursery is a multilingual space. Building upon Robert Hollander’s study of babytalk in Dante and Boccaccio, Gary Cestaro’s examination of maternity as a site of linguistic development in Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, and sociolinguistic insights into “motherese,” she explores the feminine and infantile “foreignness” at the heart of the domestic sphere. She brings Dante’s idea of the “mother tongue” into conversation with the poems of two French-language writers with Italian mothers (Christine de Pizan and Charles d’Orléans), both of whom use Italian-inflected babytalk as a figure for alienation; and Giovanni Gioviano Pontano’s Naeniae, whose neo-Latin lullabies emphasize the alterity of the “mother tongue”. These readings demonstrate the “extreme domesticity” (in Susan Fraiman’s formulation) of “native speech,” and the continuous, iterative generation and regeneration of the multifarious “mother tongue.”

Sowell asks: how do we choose which of the myriad commentaries and translations to show our students, and what do we hope they will take away from adaptations of the Comedy? Building on an essay he published in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy (2020), he provides a closer examination of three versions of Dante’s poem. The first is a translation by Clive James, who eschewed traditional tercets in favor of rhymed quatrains. The second is an adaptation by the visual American artist Sandow Birk, who relocated the action in urban American cities and ghettos. Third, the postmodern poet Mary Jo Bang created a “re-envisioning” of the Inferno, which replaces medieval and classical allusions with references to Pink Floyd, South Park, Donald Rumsfeld, Star Trek, and literary references with tributes to Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare and Milton. How can today’s teachers make good use of these versions without altogether abandoning Dante’s original intent in composing his epic?

Coggeshall explores the surprising staying power of the “Dante brand” in the 21^st-century globalized marketplace. In our contemporary media ecology, Hell is a franchise. She asks: what makes Dante’s Hell so susceptible to this kind of market takeover? Employing the binary of “spreadability” and “stickiness” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2014), she examines the marketability inherent in Dante’s works, considering both how and why they have been hijacked and co-opted by developers across a variety of media: in advertising, blogs, corporate mentorship guides, and social media outlets. She argues that the Commedia’s desire for itself to become a “sticky” product is undone by its own intrinsic participatory mechanisms, leading to its limitless “spreadability” across a variety of platforms.

Mads Larsen’s talk borrows a concept developed by Katherine Powlesland, which articulates how Dante’s work invites presence and first-person participation. Presence occurs when a work engages readers/audiences/players to such an extent that they experience “a perceptual illusion of realistic embodied interaction in a virtual world, not simply as spectator but as agential participant.” Larsen analyzes how nine remediations of Inferno utilize moving-image media to facilitate first-person participation, including: a range of silent and sound films, a video game, an animation film, and a virtual reality ride. These adaptations attest to how storytellers are often driven to utilize any means a new media affords in order to enhance presence. Yet, technologically driven immersion, while adding presence, must not equate to enhancing a work’s capacity for inspiring meaningful transformation. Dante’s original remains unrivaled in this respect.

To observe the time constraints, each panelist will speak for 13 minutes; the organizer will act as timekeeper. We chose four presentations because of the overwhelming response to the CFP and high quality of submissions.