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This course begins with a close reading of Dante’s Vita nuova. Simultaneously a profound exploration of the power of love and an elaborate experimentation with poetic form, this enigmatic work is also a meditation on translation: of life to text; of prose to verse; of the divine to human, and vice versa. Key passages in the Divine Comedy, in which the poet rewrites Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and himself, will highlight the centrality of translation to the creative process. Questions of originality, appropriation, and revision will be further explored through works by Charles Baudelaire, Robert Penn Warren, Jorge Luis Borges, Louise Gluck, Elizabeth Alexander, Allegra Goodman, and Christine and the Queens, all of whom translate Dante’s new life into something uniquely their own.