Pádraig Ó Tuama

speaker

1,142 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Sep

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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Poetry Unbound · Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Kimberly Campanello part 1 of 2 · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

I mean, that's what I'd like to spend a lot of time talking to you about, Kimberly, is...

your versioning of Dante's Inferno and I wonder just for some people might have read it you know since they were a teenager like yourself and other other people might need a reminder and I wonder if you'd be able to say just a couple of big broad brush strokes about Dante's Inferno.

I mean, one of the things that's striking, and I see it in your work as well as in Dante's work, where, you know, he's talking about hell, about purgatory and about heaven, but he's also talking about the economics of what was going on in Tuscany.

You know, a local mayor who he doesn't like, he has a little throwaway line about this particular mayor in one of the circles of hell or a pope who he doesn't like.

You know, he's making very secular contemporary references in the midst of this grand poem that is technically about heaven, hell and everything in between.

I think another thing to say, which is quoting you, quoting somebody else, just before we hear you speak a little bit about the opening of Inferno, as well as your own version of the opening of Inferno, you quote in a piece in Poetry Ireland Review, you quote Rachel Blue Duplessis, who says that the comedy is a kind of a poem where a quester travels through the universe of weird geography and remade space and time seeking basic principles.

What are basic principles that are being sought through Dante's comedy or any of these kinds of great epic poems?

Yeah.

I mean, the Inferno begins with some version in English of something like midway through life's journey, which you do as well in your version of Dante's Inferno.

And you've mentioned already that, you know, midway through life's journey, you got an unexpected diagnosis.

What is the conversation between you about the age that you are now and with an early onset Parkinson's diagnosis?

What is the relationship between that and what's happening in the poem?

And you're looking back through your own ancestry as well, you know, to initially that your own ancestors had left not too long ago.

Yeah.

And just to say something about how structured the Divine Comedy is, like it's, as you mentioned already, it's in three sections, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.

But then each of those is split up into cantos or chapters.

And in general, like there's an introductory canto and then there's 33 cantos in each of the sections.

And then each of those is split into three line stanzas as well.

Like it's mathematically precise in a certain sense.

You have it all together.

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