This applies nicely to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Its garden is the poem’s otherworld ... an early champion of writing in the vernacular. Many in Dante’s time thought it was a mistake to write an epic ...

The challenge to approaching a translation of Dante's original Italian this way is that it means you can't concentrate on three lines at a time – you have to take larger chunks into consideration.

The poet Dante Aligheri’s “Commedia” — it picked up “Divine” somewhere along the way — may seem an unlikely contender for relevance. Written 800 years ago, it can feel watermarked by the Middle Ages.