Dante Alighieri may be best known for authoring the “Divine Comedy,” with its vivid depictions of heaven, purgatory and hell, but he contributed much more than just one literary work — enough that there is an entire society dedicated to studying and appreciating his life, works and cultural legacy: The Dante Society of America.

And this year, Friday, May 5 through Saturday, May 6, the UO will sponsor The Dante Society of America’s annual meeting, the first time the society will meet at a university on the West Coast. The meeting is organized by English professor Warren Ginsberg and by Regina Psaki, a UO professor of romance languages, and the theme will be “Dante in Translation, Translation in Dante.”

 “Dante is the most important literary figure in Italy — he’s said to actually have invented the Italian that Italians speak today,” said Ginsberg, a member of the society. “The Divine Comedy is obviously his divine masterwork — and actually set the standard when Italian as a common language became more settled in the 19th century — but there’s a lot of other things that he wrote.”

The Dante Society was founded in 1881 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Charles Elliot Norton. It publishes an annual journal, semiannual newsletter and maintains an online version of the American Dante Bibliography. It also holds the annual meeting.

This year’s meeting will also feature a symposium, with guests from all around the country. The keynote speaker on Friday will be May Jo Bang, a poet and author of a recent poetic translation of “The Inferno” that Ginsberg called “very lively.”

“And then the next day we have two sessions of two speakers each, all of them eminent Dantisti, who will talk about various themes of translation in and of Dante,” Ginsberg said. “That will be followed by a roundtable on Sunday with people who aren’t necessarily experts in Dante, but who have been very much influenced and have Dante on the mind.”

Ginsberg said when the society’s current president, Albert Ascoli of the University of California, Berkeley, mentioned he was interested in holding the conference on the West Coast, he and Psaki leapt at the opportunity.

The meeting will be held at the UO Gerlinger Alumni Lounge in Gerlinger Hall. All events are free and open to the public, and no RSVP is necessary.

For more information, contact Ginsberg at warren@uoregon.edu or Psaki at rpsaki@uoregon.edu.

—By Noah Ripley, University Communications