The Pidgin Inferno: Dante For Karaoke Lovers
The Pidgin Inferno is a complete retelling of all 34 cantos of Dante’s Inferno as reimagined in Hawai‘i by author Jeffrey Higa. Last week's Canto, Number 27, was on University of Hawai‘i football and June Jones. This week, Higa tops himself by doing Canto 2 on video like one TikTok, taking on the scene where an abashed Dante needs encouragement before descending into the Underworld.
If you're like, cool, whatevs, let's go to Hell, say no more. But if you're hesitating, here's our Lex Brodie kine guarantee: What you are about to witness, besides Rap Reiplinger as Virgil to the kinda panty Dante, and Loyal Garner as da kine Beatrice, is lights-out ka-boom mic-dropping showroom magic. —D.W.
Image by Jeffrey Higa.
Jeffrey J. Higa
Jeffrey J. Higa is an award-winning fiction writer, essayist, and playwright and the author of Calabash Stories, a collection of short stories. He discovered Dante’s Divine Comedy as an undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic University and has been obsessed with it ever since. In 2019, he visited Dante’s birthplace of Florence, Italy, and deepened his knowledge of Dante’s life and work. He undertook the task of transcribing a pidgin version of the Inferno while under quarantine in 2020. He completed the work in 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s passing.
