My Fight to Stop Chinese Censors Santizing Dante

My book on Dante Alighieri was due to come out in Chinese translation later this year, but first I had to consent to sizable cuts. Even by the standards of other authoritarian states the Beijing censors struck me as overzealous. It seems odd that the medieval Italian poet could cause such unease among modern-day totalitarians. A sanitized Chinese communist version of my book did not sit well with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1321, and in the end I withheld permission.