A fresh trip round the circle lines

Dante Alighieri may have died in 1321, but two new translations of the Inferno show that he's still thriving as a poet. So Bill Greenwell asked him for the hot news from Hell

I arrange to meet Dante Alighieri at a Starbuck's on the Strand. Unfortunately, my directions aren't very precise, and he gets lost on the Circle Line. And then it took him ages to find the right Starbuck's. The experience reminds him of a trench he was once in with Virgil: people going up and down escalators, and then forced to drink sickly cappuccino.

"I once met T S Eliot near here," he admits. "I didn't like the way his poems sounded:/ too drab, too much misogyny, too drear,/ and most of his conclusions were unfounded./"

He takes his laurel leaves off, and hangs them on the back of his chair. He's a stern bloke, with a long, beak-like schnozzle. Funnily enough, he was baptised Durante, but I decide not to push my luck. We've met to discuss two new translations of his Inferno, one by Ciaran Carson (Granta, £14.99), the other by Michael Palma (W W Norton, £28). I wonder how he feels about translators.

"They're well-intentioned, sometimes rather sickly/ – like saccharin – no need to look astounded/ – as sweet as Peter Waterman, who quickly/ obliged those wailing wannabes to suffer." Has he seen Pete Waterman recently? I hadn't expected Dante to be up to speed on Pop Idol, but he seems more than au fait with the various TV competitions. It turns out that Waterman has been seen in the Malebolge, together with Simon Cowell, Geri Halliwell and Matthew Kelly. Dante's been down to Dis only recently.

Apparently, Dante has a supersaver ticket to Hell. He can come and go as he pleases, and enjoys going backwards and forwards between past, present and future. Waterman and co are in the same pit as Richard Desmond, in the Eighth Circle. They are forced to drink green sleaze from one another's tongues, and then to say, "Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to sing 'I Should Be So Lucky'" – except for Kelly, who has to introduce himself pretending to be himself.

I tell him that Ciaran Carson's done an excellent translation, or adaptation, at any rate: full of powerful and arresting images, drawing on other translations, cannibalising intelligently. He perks up a little when I mention cannibals. "Perhaps you'll guess who eats himself, though prickly," he announces, "a dish he cannot stomach. What a duffer!/ His words are turned to thorns which must be eaten." Apparently, it's Michael Winner, whose sphincter is perpetually filled with cactus. Is there anyone with whom Winner has to chew his own fat?

Dante leans forward conspiratorially. "Come on, who else found fortune as a bluffer,/ and loved his lustful tongue, eh?" I stir my latte with nervous uncertainty. Our medieval genius snorts (this may have been a clue).

"Angus Deayton!" Dante folds his orange robe around him and leans back, adjusting his fashionable titfer. He seems to enjoy the gossip more than I would have expected. Apparently, Angus is forced to talk to Winner without an autocue, while two devils, one tall, one small, torment him with snide comments from either side, in front of an audience with its backs to him. Down there with them is Sven-Goran Eriksson, who is being coached by Roy Keane on how to run a press conference in return for telling witty, ribald jokes. Both are covered with suppurating venables.

Archimedes is there, having taken an early bath. Since Sven arrived, he's been shouting "Ulrika!" dementedly. Dante, a womaniser in his day, is a keen supporter of Nancy Dell'Olio. He'd like to meet her in una selva oscura.

I try to steer the subject back to the translations. Both are very efficient, I explain, and Michael Palma's is a great deal more faithful. But Carson's colloquial glee, drawing freely from the language he hears on Belfast streets, makes the Inferno come alive. It has spit as well as polish. Where Palma is accomplished, Carson has created something pithy and original, rather as Christopher Logue did with Homer's Iliad. Both maintain the terza rima rhyme scheme throughout. But Dante wants something to eat, so we pick a Pizza Express, and order bottles of Peroni.

He insists on a nine-cheese special (Dante is fond of the number nine) and cuts it into concentric circles with his knife. He stabs a hoop near the centre with his fork, and lofts it towards my face. He is explaining the structure of Hell. Again, he seems to revel in the Eighth Circle in particular.

There is an irony here, he suggests. Someone who made the trains run on time – one of his own countrymen, Benito Mussolini – is banged up with someone who couldn't make the trains run at all. His hands gyrate expressively. "He took a tumble with his rinse-and-spinner," comments Dante, thoughtfully, "and didn't seem to know when he was beaten." Stephen Byers! He and Jo Moore are tied together in a barrel of hot water, and every time one of them pops up, the other one drags the first down. Every so often, a load of manure is deposited on them by a devil who tells them it's a good day to bury bad news. Sometimes he is dragged out to pull faces with Michael Jackson.

Not that Dante lacks sympathy for the victims he comes across. He was a victim himself. In 1301, he was expelled from Florence, the beloved city of his birth. After failing to answer a charge of poor administration of public funds, he was sentenced to death in his absence – rather like Byers. Dante went into an exile that was to last the rest of his life, although the music of his poetry was hugely admired in his own time. So he also sympathises with Tony Blackburn.

Blackburn is apparently part of a pressure group in Hell, which ceaselessly plays a game called "I'm A Non-Entity, Get Me Out Of Here". "Of course," confesses Dante, "he could be leaner, fitter, thinner./ His discs have slipped. But he's a great survivor."

"Ibiza loves him," adds Dante. "Bea would cook him dinner." Bea is the radiant Beatrice, whom Dante has loved from afar for the whole of eternity. She looks like Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, but is a little less talkative. Tara herself is quite near to Tony Blackburn in Hell, working as a check-out girl while hordes of demons shop till they drop in front of her. Torture.

Hell has also been better run since Anne Robinson got there, Dante admits. She went for the idea of people in a circle in a big way, dressed in even darker black, and has a job in the Ninth Circle understudying Lucifer. Her catchphrase has been changed to "You are the weakest link. Hello." Who's a greyer shade of pale? she asks. Which goose has cooked its gander?

Step forward, John Major and Edwina Currie. Or rather, they would step forward if they hadn't been cemented together at the haunches and covered in liquid salmonella. Hell is not other people, according to Dante. It's the same ones you met before.

Does anyone other than Dante have a rover pass to Hell? Has anyone else got out? According to Dante, Paul Burrell nearly had to go in, and would have been required to write out inventories, eat them, and then write them out again an infinite number of times. But the Queen came through for him from the Purgatorio.

"But there was a fellow, looked a proper skiver," muses Dante. The curious thing was, Dante is sure he'd seen this fellow on every level of Hell. He had been with the cowards, the unsanctified, the randy, the greedy, the spendthrifts, the bad-tempered, the heretics, the money-lenders, the flatterers, even the traitors.

Has Dante been mistaken? While everyone else was being flayed, flogged, made to swallow each other's excrement, forced to calculate Lotto odds at Connolly Castle, gutted, stuffed, made to negotiate with John Prescott, buried upside down in snakes and spiders, or hung up by the testicles in the Big Brother house, this individual had joined Dante on the way to the exit. Dante had bought some fava beans and a nice chianti from him at a rock bottom price.

"He followed me, and spoke of his departure./ Paid Charon with a very dodgy fiver," puzzles Dante, munching mascarpone with fresh peaches, into which he dunks a careless florentine. "And Cerberus three biscuits." Dante remembers. "Jeffrey Archer."

Dante Alighieri - biography

Born in Florence in 1265, Dante Alighieri belonged to the white guelf (papal) faction. His family were modest landowners. Aged eight, he fell in love with Bice Portinari, known in his writings as Beatrice, although he married Gemma Donati in 1285 and had four children. He learned to write Latin verse, and Italian vernacular rhymes, through contact with Brunetto Latini. When Beatrice died in 1290, he studied philosophy, and developed his poetry. As a soldier, he had fought the imperialists. When the papal faction split in about 1300, the guelfs (mainly merchants) were crushed in Florence. Dante then led an itinerant life in exile, mainly in Verona and Ravenna, where he died in 1321. His Vita Nuova (1294) comprised 31 love poems. Three Latin works, two unfinished, precede the Commedia, of which the Inferno is the first part of three. The closing cantos were found after his death. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri is translated by Michael Palma, with the original Italian text, for W W Norton; Ciaran Carson's The Inferno is published by Granta Books.