Dante for children

Virginia Jewiss is an American Italianist and Dantist. She received her PhD in Italian literature from Yale University and taught at Dartmouth College and Trinity College’s Rome campus before returning to Yale, where she is currently Lecturer in the Humanities and Director of the Yale Humanities program in Rome. She has translated the work of numerous Italian authors and film directors, including Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Melania Mazzucco’s Vita, and screenplays for Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriele Salvatores. In 2008 she published in Italian, for the Mandragora [...]

Daniele Aristarco was born in Naples in 1977. He is the author of short stories and informative essays aimed at children, published both in Italy and in France. He taught literature in middle school and now devotes himself to children's books and writing for film and radio. Playwright and theater director, he has won numerous awards. He also deals with creative writing workshops for childhood at schools, libraries and cultural associations. His reduction of the Divine Comedy for children, The first step into the dark [...]

John Agard is a British poet born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1949, living now in England. In 2009 he published The Young Inferno, a transformative translation of Dante's Inferno for a teenage audience. This version, illustrated by the Japanese artist Satoshi Kitamura, features a young protagonist (a Dante-boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the letters Hell emblazoned on it) who travels to the underworld with fable master Aesop instead of Vergil as his guide. Even in Agard's version, as well as in the contemporary version of [...]