About Session

In this presentation, Simone Marchesi *02 COM, professor of French and Italian, takes his experience of teaching Dante’s “Divine Comedy” at Princeton and his research on medieval theories of translation as an opportunity to reflect on what it means to mediate a medieval literary work to an audience that does not necessarily speak or read the original language. The practice of translating such a text is no less historically legitimate, since it aligns with the crucial choice that many European medieval vernacular writers, Dante among them, made to open their works to new interpretations, and it is just as importantly politically engaged, since it systematically undermines nativist cultural claims of exclusivity in readership.

Simone Marchesi*02 COM, Professor of French and Italian, Princeton University