He may have died 700 years ago this week but Dante remains our contemporary. Everybody has his Dante and sometimes he comes knocking when you least expect it.

All the anniversary accolades mention T.S. Eliot’s praise, who was predisposed to champion a poet with a universal Christian vision. But the bleak Samuel Beckett, author of funny atheistic tragedies, loved Dante too, identifying with Belacqua, a minor character in the Purgatorio.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote short stories because writing novels bored him but he said the 14,000 verses of the Divine Comedy are a model of concision, saying more in a few lines than entire novels. In Dante he found a model.

My Dante knocked one summer’s day, over 40 years ago. I was around nine, trussed and steaming on the car’s backseat as my mother was pulling out. The village doctor, her childhood friend, came rushing up, bursting with a question.

The previous evening, the meandering, moonlit conversation with his neighbour had paused on Dante and a puzzle. Dr Ellul wanted to know: how had my mother’s father (Erin Serracino-Inglott) translated into Maltese that passage where the devil farted?

Fart? I sat up, though, strangely, my mother didn’t. She seemed to be in on it, too. “You mean Canto 21? I’ll check.”

Later at home, I quietly took my grandfather’s hardbound L-Infern off the shelf. It was the copy inscribed to my father: “To Renzo, because I know he will understand me.”

I paused briefly to ponder this coded message and then rapidly flicked the pages to Canto 21, which offered up its prize only in its very last verse: “u dak minn tintu kien għamel żummara.”

The devil Malacoda (Stinky Tail), captain of a legion, gave marching orders by passing wind instead of blowing a trumpet: “Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.”

In a footnote, my grandfather punctiliously explained that while a żummara (reed pipe) was not a trumpet, it better captured Dante’s deliberate vulgarity.

But what I admiringly noted was that, in both versions, the music of the words told you what kind of wind it was: a teasing soft start with a triumphant burst at the end. I returned the tome to the shelves with the reverence owed to a book of magic spells.

In translating Dante, my grandfather had been under a different spell. Italianate in culture, schooled in French and English, it was with effort that he had come to recognise, already a man, the resources and aesthetic power of Maltese. He had tried to prove the contrary and instead underwent a Damascene conversion.

Reading Dante aloud is like singing a song, revealing more of our temperament and mood than we knew- Ranier Fsadni

To demonstrate his new conviction that Maltese could convey the deepest, most universal sentiment, he chose what for him was the ultimate test. He began to prepare himself by trying his hand at easier translations (such as the popular novels of Gaston Leroux, who gave him carte blanche).

He also began to compile a lexicon, which eventually took on a life of its own, Il-Miklem Malti.

The Italians regard Dante as the father of their language but, in a roundabout way, Malta also owes him its first scientific etymological dictionary. My grandfather’s Dante gave him a vision of the sea of language, its capacity to take all the flotsam of human sentiment and raise it to the sublime.

We speak of reading Dante. But can he be read silently? Yes, of course, but reading him aloud is like singing a song, revealing more of our temperament and mood than we knew.

It’s easiest to see this in public readings of Dante. One of the great tests of a public reader is Canto 5 of the Inferno – where Dante enters the circle of hell reserved for adulterers and witnesses the doomed couple, Piero and Francesca of Rimini, murdered by her husband, condemned to circle each other in a whirlwind, so close and yet so far.

It’s a tricky reading. The canto is at odds with our sensibility. Hell for people driven by passion?

Dante treats adultery leniently, as weakness of the will, but even that seems too much for modern culture, which sees passion as the strength to be authentic.

The test for the public reader is how to move us while conveying what Dante thinks and feels.

Roberto Benigni succeeds – for a 21st-century ear – because he lets his tears well up with a pity that understands both the love and, with deeper sadness, the evasive self-justification still to be heard in Francesca’s voice.

Carmelo Bene succeeds the opposite way, by making Francesca speak through half-clenched teeth, as though suffering from emotional hypothermia. He makes whirlwind romance sound cold precisely because it surrenders willpower and reason.

Dante in street art near the Roma Termini in Via Giolitti. The mural, by artist Mauro Sgarbi, is one of five on the dialogue between different cultures.

You have to wonder: do we read Dante? Or does Dante read us, his verses revealing a universe, in our voices and faces, that our manners hide?

In the Paradiso, he compares a blush of modesty to the sun breaking through the clouds. Dante can use pink the way Caravaggio uses red.

Dante still comes knocking on my car window, although these days it’s usually when I’m circling down a desolate underground car park, built on a scene of environmental devastation.

I go down and down, vainly looking for my place. Ah, minus 2: the adulterers. Minus 5: the wrathful and the sullen – or, as we call them nowadays, the trolls.

Deeper yet, the corrupt have one of the most finely divided circles, a place for flatterers, hypocrites, panderers, corrupt politicians, fraudsters, thieves, evil counsellors and advisers.

I sometimes wonder whether, if I declaimed Dante in such a car park, I would feel at home.