Jean-Philippe Toussaint et Dante : pour une approche visuelle de l’Enfer

For several years, the Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Tous- saint has maintained an intense dialogue with Dante. In 2012, he created a complex multimedia work, L’Enfer, as part of the exhibition at the Louvre museum. It was on the occasion of this event that Toussaint embarked on the translation into contemporary French and free verse of The Inferno, a project that is still in the process of completion. After a brief reference to Dante in the epi- graph of his novel Nue, the presence of Dante gained new significance during the original musical reading of The Inferno, which Toussaint organized at the Théâ- tre de Bastia in 2021. This article aims to analyze the different stages of the multimedia Dantean journey that Toussaint has followed over the years. The research hypothesis we seek to demonstrate is that it is the visual dimension that dominates Toussaint’s Dantean experience, even in his interlinguistic translation, where it functions as a unifying element.