Published posthumously, the last of three Dante translations reveals Gray’s powers of insight and invention
Alasdair Gray, the great Scottish novelist and artist, died a year ago, in December 2019. In his biography of Gray, A Secretary’s Biography (2008) – the closest thing we have to a contemporary Boswell’s life of Johnson– Rodge Glass concluded: “Alasdair will only be appreciated when he’s dead, and even then it won’t be what he deserves.” None of us gets what we deserve, but Gray made a final bid for serious appreciation with his late translations of Dante: Hell (2018); Purgatory (2019); and now – appropriately posthumously – Paradise.
As worthy, bold and brilliant an enterprise as it undoubtedly is, it should be said that Gray’s decision to translate Dante was hardly innovative or original. Everyone who’s anyone has had a go at Dante at some time in their life, and often towards the very end – Clive James being the most obvious recent example. It has become a final rite of passage.
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