Satire is often conflated with topical humour or comedy. In what way is Infernas like the modern conception of satire, and how is it more in line with the Middle Ages definition?
One of the oldest definitions of Satire is something that Virgil contemplates towards the end of the novel: “…did you know, once satire simply meant poetic medley? Like a dream or forgotten lines merged, forming a different song entirely from their own loss, their absence …”This is, in a way, the fulcrum of the text. If we’ve stopped taking everything seriously as a society, how do we know what’s genuine anymore in terms of what we feel, how we feel, and why we feel that way? Conversely, how is the flippant attitude behind Satire something that’s been adapted by queer writers and artists for centuries into a positive skill? A suit of armor and a way to lay the truth bare all at once?
In essence, I took all my years of study in Italian Literature and Italian-American Literature and wanted to make sense of it because there was never a way to turn that into a major. That always felt like a terrible shame. So much of the rhetoric of Italy’s rich literary history is rooted in fighting for equality. As for the form, ancient Satire has three main ones; Menippean, Juvenalian, and Horatian. Horatian is my favorite because it often is considered the “lighter” of the satire’s. Someone might read what I wrote and go “that’s dark, you’ve condemned the entire living world to hell and framed it as a road trip gone catastrophically wrong,” but the mainstays of the form are “indulgence, tolerance, amusement, and wit.” If we as scholars, readers, and all-around people confuse those terms with lightheartedness, then it’s the fault of the definition, not the writer.
Was using blank verse important for Infernas? How does it amplify the narrative?
Translation is such a tricky field. Everyone wants to say they’re discovering something new—but what is new? What is old? What’s your perspective? What’s the more “correct” word in terms of emotion, politics, landscape, history, and present? Is there even one? Words have so many different meanings when we translate them—what’s lost, what’s saved, what’s chosen, and what’s a decision that’s left up to your own personal taste and then distributed? In this way, who have we chosen to curate our understanding of literature and history—and why? Is it always the best fit? Can it ever be changed or rewritten, given back to the original diversity of voices that once were when the powers that stand are still oppressive?
Should Infernas be read as a response or a sequel to The Divine Comedy?
It should be read as an epitaph… and also a love letter.
Bodily autonomy appears to be an issue at the centre of Infernas, often appearing side-by-side with issues of gender identity and trans experience.
The word-play on “body” in the text and how the physical body and a body of work are always connected is vital to understanding the meaning of the text. Bodily autonomy and identity have always been inexplicably intertwined. So much of the rhetoric of today around being trans and any other form of queerness is awful. What also resonates with the discussion of these identities is timelessness; what makes a man? What makes you you? What makes you human? The way exile is written about by authors and historians alike has always resonated with queer audiences who experience this on a personal level— If you could leave exile would you be welcomed back? If you could change yourself, could you be more you than you already are?
Why aren’t they speaking Italian?
To highlight the conscious disconnect between Italian heritage and culture. It’s really, really weird the way Italy is treated in the US as a time capsule of ‘old country,’ to put it colloquially, even though Italy is moving through the same time we are. It’s frozen in time and there’s no modern conception of it at all in the U.S. It’s a postcard destination, a queer wet dream where the men are pretty and the gelato flows when people are literally dying over there. The way a Spaghetti Western is an Italian perception of the mythical American frontier, Infernas is my American perception of the mythical Italian country idyll/city grit dichotomy. They’re speaking English, but maybe it’s a dub.
Virgil thinks of his body so differently because he’s from a time that predates Dante. There were no tomatoes. There was also this idea that when someone died the body had to be cleansed because it was “tainted and wrong” and that everyone who came in contact with it had to be, too. This process was only finished with a meal about twenty days later. It was a process that weirdly echoed modern dysphoria—how it can range generationally and the cross-context it has with body image and eating disorders as a metaphor. Also, because the book is written from the perspective of Dante, who, despite Virgil’s perspective, sees him as a masculine ideal, often defaults to using he/him pronouns when it’s explicitly stated they use he and they. This is a play on perspective and how we see people. It’s intentional.
This doesn’t rhyme and it’s a novel-length story— how is it still poetry?
Infernas is written in ‘terza rima’, the original format in which Dante wrote The Divine Comedy. Nothing translated ever rhymed for The Divine Comedy, either. I wanted to stay true to that choice and yet also have fun with it. I drafted a lot of different works in the form beforehand and took about a year just to practice that. Then, I wrote the first draft of Infernas. For the modern setting of Infernas it felt right to juxtapose with an older form the current chaos of the hellscape I was trying to portray. Dante’s work lives on— but his Hell changes. It’s a bit of a Washington Irving; the world’s moved on without you and everything is beautiful and brand new… and yet it never changed at all. It’s the same misery. The same problems. The same fight for what’s never attained.
Do you ascribe to any spiritualism or religion like Dante did? Is this a Catholic text?
This is a Catholic text in the way a Park Chan-Wook film is about Catholicism. As for myself, I’ll tell you what I told a friend of mine in undergrad: I believe in everything as a writer and nothing as a person; so, it all evens out— I’m extremely balanced that way!
When did you start writing? What does a typical day of writing look like for you?
As a result of being autistic and disabled, I have a lot of fine motor problems. So, I wrote a lot when I was young but it was painstaking and I was the only one who could decipher it. When I finally received a computer, it changed my life. I felt like I could keep up with my brain more. I felt like everything I saw, heard, felt, and dreamed—all of that sensory and mnemonic richness, finally could begin to be sculpted.
In a way, it’s still a lot like sculpting. The shaping, the importance of absence, the physicality of it all. I find if I don’t write in a day, I feel really, really off. I’m missing from myself if I don’t take that time. I’ve disappeared and anyone else has kind of disappeared if I don’t.
A lot of my poetry doesn’t look like this. It’s rhyming, free verse, only a few pages in terms of length, etc. Though, I do love the epic poem and think longer verse poetry in different forms is something I’m so excited to try, especially along the lines of Keats and Shelley’s longer works.
The difficult part is that I always want to put something down that’s, at essence, ephemeral in nature. And, of course, so, so much bigger than me! I’m searching for the feeling. Feeling is a journey that transcends. Placing emphasis on emotion rather than esoterics is an act of resistance of modern poetry. Can I make you feel a wave without it crashing over you? Can I make you feel my hand without reaching out and touching it? Can I relay to you that you’re looking up at stars, older, and more foreign than anything else in our lives, and help you to glean some of that same mystery in them, too? I don’t want my writing to be something recited at an open mic or a slam for rote or applause. Nor something that gets a ton of hits on social media. It’s not meant for that. It’s not part of that formula.
How does music and modern lyric writing influence Infernas? Is there a kind of music you recommend listening to while reading?
I recommend Rachmaninoff, Billie Holiday, Michelle Zauner, or anything by Dave Malloy for show tunes. Also, Rufus Wainwright when he’s channeling Judy Garland. But again, I think it’s really personal and also really surprising at times. I was listening to Now That I’m Older by Sufjan Stevens one evening while reading and found myself crying my eyes out with this strange, overwhelming euphoria all of a sudden due to the context of what I was reading while listening to it. That connection evolved into its own new literary experience, while shifting the perception of the two ancillary texts over in some way as well.
You’ve chosen an epic poem that’s somewhat associated with the establishment, and used it to explore themes of disenfranchisement. Is this juxtaposition intentional?
As much as this is a love letter, it’s also a burn book. Academia was and continues to be Draconian, and based in ableist rhetoric. How and why things should be done need to be dismantled so that nothing is gatekept. Research is gatekept. Funds are gatekept. Who and how you can access literary and historical documents are gatekept. How and what versions of books are distributed are gatekept. These things seem arbitrary or pointless, but they matter. When we change the translation, we change the meaning. When we keep original documents locked up, push certain versions of novels, certain authors’ works and not others, we create the canon we talk about destroying. It’s an ouroboros. All of it.
How is The Divine Comedy Queer?
I’m sure I’ll eventually write a critical essay on that, but this project took precedence; to honor queerness is not to only be formulaic, to try and merely prove, but to evolve that queerness and give it new flight. In the original text, Beatrice is a faraway ideal, one that’s supplanted by the summoning of the incorporeal ghost that won’t leave him until he absolutely must. He walks with him, carries him, drags him out of perilous situations (some that Dante gets into out of spite, guilt, naive curiosity, etc.)
The reverence Dante talks about to Virgil transcends any one figure; teacher, parent, lover, friend…as for identity and body, the book does emphasize those themes heavily as well. What it means to have a body, to live in one, to die in one, and to be mercurially Somewhere in Between—an ideology that no doubt resonates with queerness. Two of my favorite lines about this are the ways shades talk about their “absent” bodies and how it mirrors the way Dante talks about his own. So much of the language of uncertainty, horror, and dread has such a marvelously eerie resonance with how we ponder and wrestle with our bodies in the modern world. The journey itself is obvious; every queer person is their own “great Exile.” And in every chance they take on love is another terrifying, resplendent step further from what they’ve ever known.