Purgatorio Re-placed is a re-write of Dante’s Purgatorio, the second book of his Divine Comedy. Using Dorothy Sayers’ translation as a guide, Alex Selenitsch keeps Dante’s overall and detail structure of 33 Cantos or chapters but rewrites the epic in modern Australian English. Dante’s medieval list of sins, his characters and events are replaced with Australian ones, while the mountain is flattened out to encompass the continent of Australia. Over this geography, the new poem deals with issues of art and creativity, and the development of a poetic voice.
