Purgatorio Re-placed
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.
Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect and is an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. He practices as an architect, sculptor, poet; writes reviews of art, craft, and design for various journals; works collaboratively in artists books and in theatre; was the Gordon Darling Fellow, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in 2001. He exhibits his work at grahame galleries + editions, Brisbane, Queensland. A survey of his work, LIFE/TEXT, was held at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, in 2015-2016. Cordite Books have recently published his LOOK!, a collection of concrete poems.
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