My translation of Purgatorio goes all in on recreating Dante’s wonderfully complicated soundscape, this interweaving of textures, or, what I like to call, Dante’s Fugue. Imagine a gloriously complicated fugue by Bach, in which the right hand plays a series of chordal inversions, rising higher and higher, while playing, simultaneously, a pattern of chords that are descending in the left hand: the piece gets higher and lower, at the same time. This is exactly what happens in Dante’s poetry.