{"id":2570,"date":"2022-06-07T11:09:46","date_gmt":"2022-06-07T11:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2570"},"modified":"2022-06-07T11:10:37","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T11:10:37","slug":"dantes-comedy-translation-and-interpretation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2570","title":{"rendered":"DANTE\u2019S COMEDY: TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three things keep drawing me back to Dante\u2019s Commedia<\/em>: the skill, inventiveness and human depth of his story-telling, his lyrical genius, and the beauty of his terza rima meter. His use of terza rima can only be enjoyed in Italian, which for me involves heavy dependence on English translations and on the notes and glosses in modern Italian given in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi\u2019s editions of the Commedia<\/em> for Zanichelli and Oscar Mondadori. In this essay I want to focus on comparing how the narrative and lyrical aspects of the poems come through in Ned Denny\u2019s freely adaptive poetic version, B: After Dante<\/em>, and in two scholarly translations, one by Robert and Jean Hollander and one by Robert M. Durling, though I will make some more mention of the terza rima form.<\/p>\n

Like all translators and imitators of works in other languages, Denny, the Hollanders and Durling have all had to balance faithfulness to the original against the need to use the natural energies of the language they\u2019re writing in and to express things in terms that resonate within their own culture. This means both interpreting and building on the original. \u2018A good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation than his carcass would be to his living body,\u2019 said Dryden. Sir John Denham wrote in 1656 that \u2018Poesie is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum [that is, a skull].\u2019 However, a main point of translation is to enlarge one culture by bringing into it energies and imaginings from another. From that point of view, too complete a naturalising of the import may dilute its value. These pulls work with different strength at different ends of the spectrum between pure translation and adaptation. The desire to carry across as much as possible of what\u2019s alien in the original will be strongest at the scholarly end, the need for naturalisation strongest at the \u2018version after\u2019 one. Broadly, I feel that translating much more closely than Denny does, Durling and the Hollanders are much more successful in transmitting the narrative and dramatic aspects of the Commedia, but that Denny triumphs in lyrical expression, not always but often enough to make his book a valuable addition to the Dante lover\u2019s shelves. There\u2019s not much room for lyricism in the Inferno<\/em>, so from this point of view he\u2019s at his strongest in the Paradiso<\/em> and the many lyrical passages in the Purgatorio.<\/em><\/p>\n

Narrative in the Commedia<\/em> works on what you might call macro and micro scales. Embracing everything else, there\u2019s the single, mythically compelling, beautifully unified and coherent story of Dante\u2019s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. For the first 64 cantos, this is also the profoundly moving story of his changing relationship with Virgil. Set within the overall frame there\u2019s a multitude of subordinate stories involving a vast range of emotions, experiences and characters. The whole work\u2019s hold on the imagination depends both on the compelling power of these subordinate narratives and on the clarity and power of the overall development. The way Dante integrates the macro scale with the inset micro narratives makes his work unique in my reading experience. I will pause to say something about the terza rima form at this point, because it seems to me that the integration of the different narrative levels is most smoothly and completely realized by means of it, when one reads the poem in Italian. Unfolding ABA BCB CDC and so on, it keeps things moving and thus keeps the longer perspective clearly in play. The poet James Merrill expresses this aspect beautifully:<\/p>\n

No verse form moves<\/em> so wonderfully. Each tercet\u2019s first and third line rhyme with the middle one of the preceding set, and encloses the new rhyme-sound of the next, the way a scull outstrips the twin, already dissolving oarstrokes that propel it.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the line and the tercet do themselves generally function as small, distinct units of perception and of narrative unfolding, producing a clear focus on the immediate detail being presented.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, terza rima in the full sense \u2013 in other words with full rhymes \u2013 is almost impossibly difficult to write in a sustained way in English. T S Eliot suggests how serious a problem this is for the Dante translator when he says,<\/p>\n

a different meter is a different mode of thought; it is a different kind of punctuation<\/em>, for the emphases and the breath pauses do not come in the same place. Dante thought<\/em> in terza rima<\/em> \u2026<\/p>\n

If the clarity of the overall narrative depends on the clear, simple topography of Dante\u2019s afterworlds and the vividness with which he presents the points of transition between its different levels, the power of individual encounters depends particularly on gifts we associate with drama. Episode after episode is made memorable not just by the situation of his characters or the stories they tell but by the intense, individual presence they\u2019re given by the very distinctive ways in which they speak. From this the encounters get their emotional and moral richness and their human depth. As sinners speak in the Inferno<\/em>, we\u2019re made to see their sins simultaneously from the point of view of the divine justice that has placed them where they are and from their own point of view as they committed them<\/em>, because none of them have truly repented. Moreover, and still more so if we\u2019re reading aloud, we\u2019re made to act out<\/em> and live through<\/em> their feelings. We find ourselves implicated, especially where emotions we may be prone to in real life are involved, and this prompts self-examination.\u00a0 Even where we find the sins and sinners in question alien or immediately repulsive, we still inhabit their minds in our imaginations, as we might inhabit the minds of a villain if were acting in a play. It\u2019s true that on one level the fates of all these different souls are object lessons but I wouldn\u2019t keep going back to the Commedia<\/em> if that were all they were. There\u2019s a multiplication of conflicting perspectives \u2013 that of the sinner, that of Dante the character in the poem at the particular stage of moral perception he\u2019s reached at that point in the story, and that of the divine justice that has placed the sinner or, in the Paradiso<\/em>, the saved soul, wherever he or she is.<\/p>\n

The first encounter that puts you strongly in the presence of a particular sinner is that with Francesca, who committed adultery with her husband\u2019s brother and was murdered by her husband. Entering the circle of the lustful, Dante and Virgil are met by a wailing, cursing confusion of souls swept through the dark on violent winds that are like perpetuations of the passion they surrendered to. Then, out of the faceless, whirling multitudes a cataract of resonant names emerges, and finally the silent Paolo and the plaintively eloquent Francesca. Contrast with what went before gives an extraordinarily naked intimacy and, I would say, pathos to her story, though different readers react to her in very different ways. I\u2019ll look at a short extract from her speech. In Dante\u2019s Italian she says,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cNoi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
\ndi Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
\nsoli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.<\/p>\n

Per pi\u00f9 f\u00efate li occhi ci sospinse
\nquella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
\nma solo un punto fu quell che ci vinse.<\/p>\n

Quando leggemmo il dis\u00efato riso
\nesser basciato da cotanto amante,
\nquesti, che mai da me non fia diviso,<\/p>\n

la bocca mi basci\u00f2 tutto tremante.
\nGaleotto fu \u2018l libro e chi lo scrisse:
\nquel giorno pi\u00f9 non vi leggemmo avante.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s very clear here how each line is a distinct pulsation ending with a little pause on a key word that lingers in the mind even as we read on. The statements are very simple, precise and concrete, and as each hangs in the air, the space around it seems to fill with resonances we\u2019re left to notice for ourselves, without any kind of nudging by the poet. Take<\/p>\n

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,<\/p>\n

la bocca mi basci\u00f2 tutto tremante<\/p>\n

\u2018Tremante\u2019 \u2013 \u2018trembling\u2019 \u2013 explodes out of the line without specifying why<\/em> Paolo trembled. Into the space left by the poet\u2019s silence rush thoughts of different kinds of guilt, fear, excitement and romantic awe, all running together and pulling apart from each other in this overwhelming moment: the awestricken terror of a lover moving towards his unbelievable fulfilment yet still afraid of a rebuff; the couple\u2019s knowledge of the physical danger their adultery will put them in; Francesca\u2019s rapt yet sad reliving of how moved she was by Paolo\u2019s desire; and the awareness of committing a terrible sin. Or look how beautifully the phrase \u2018cotanto amante\u2019 \u2013 \u2018such a lover\u2019 \u2013 is set against \u2018questi\u2019 (this man). The pointed juxtaposition makes us compare the two lovers from various angles without telling us what to think.<\/p>\n

The Hollanders translate the lines like this:<\/p>\n

\u2018One day, to pass the time in pleasure,
\nwe read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him.
\nWe were alone, without the least misgiving.<\/p>\n

\u2018More than once that reading made our eyes meet
\nand drained the colour from our faces.
\nStill, it was a single instant overcame us:<\/p>\n

\u2018When we read how the longed-for smile
\nwas kissed by so renowned a lover, this man,
\nwho never shall be parted from me,<\/p>\n

\u2018all trembling, kissed me on my mouth.
\nA Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it.
\nThat day we read in it no further.\u2019<\/p>\n

Here too we\u2019re drawn into the moment. Like Dante, the Hollanders are clear, concrete and almost neutral in their narration, letting inferences and suggestions flower in the space around the bare facts. Admittedly they can\u2019t match the punctuation<\/em> of the original, to go back to Eliot\u2019s term. If we compare \u2018this man \/ who never shall be parted from me\u2019 with \u2018Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso\u2019 we see how much more starkly emphasis falls on the key terms in the original, so that the irony of the lovers\u2019 punishment emerges with more dreadful clarity. However, the Hollanders work in very much the same way as Dante does, keeping the focus on the bare steps of the narrative, letting its implications unfold of themselves in our imaginations.<\/p>\n

Denny\u2019s approach seems to me more intrusive and distracting:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were at a book some idle day, our eyes all ears,
\nlearning of Lancelot and his doomed affair \u2013<\/p>\n

quite alone, barely suspecting what lips are for \u2013
\nand now and again our illumined eyes would meet
\nthen dart back to the page, an unaccustomed heat
\npulsating in our smooth cheeks like a coral sea;
\nbut it was only at a certain point, when we
\nread of how the wondrous spot where a smile takes place
\nwas kissed and kissed to silence by the kisses of his face,
\nthat a depicted world entirely mastered us:
\nhe brought his mouth to mine then, tremulous,
\na moment out of time which we have lived in since.
\nOur morning\u2019s reading ended there. Words made no sense.\u201d
\nAs she finished speaking, the ghost whose hand she held<\/p>\n

howled. I sank to the ground like a man the knife has felled.<\/p>\n

I suppose tastes will vary as to whether this is crudely over-coloured. To me, parts of it seem so, though I enjoy touches of vivid animation like the eyes darting<\/em> back to the page. What I have no doubt of is that both the clear line of Dante\u2019s narrative and the flowering of the reader\u2019s reflections around it are overwhelmed by the insistence and explicitness with which Francesca tries to impose her own point of view. The fussiness with which it\u2019s developed breaks narrative momentum, and the couplet form seems to retard things further. The over-elaborate development of some ideas may partly be caused by the need to create contexts for the rhyming words but I suspect that the lyrical impulse of the poet \u2013 his desire to create patterns and express emotions, to freeze things into vivid but static emotional moments \u2013 is also a factor. What else could explain a line like \u201cwas kissed and kissed to silence by the kisses of his face\u201d? I generally enjoy allusiveness in poetry, but I find apparent echoes of Marlowe\u2019s \u2018Hero and Leander\u2019 in the third and fifth lines of the passage from Denny simply distracting.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in lyrical passages that I think Denny triumphs. We see this most continually and intensely in Bliss<\/em>, his version of the Paradiso<\/em>, especially in the culminating cantos as Dante climbs closer and closer to the final vision. It may be in little touches of animated simile, as when Dante is momentarily overwhelmed by Beatrice\u2019s words in the starry sphere and compares himself to a tree, bowing to the wind and then springing back. Denny particularizes the tree as a cypress, creating a picture that gives vivid body to the theological idea suggested by the metaphor in the penultimate line, the idea that the healthy soul naturally reaches towards God:<\/p>\n

A cypress in the path of the bodiless winds
\nbows down its slender tip, a dark green spire that bends
\nback with the vigour of its own sun-seeking force
\nand thus I swayed at her words<\/p>\n

The Hollanders\u2019 literal translation lacks both the visual particularity and the rhythmic animation:<\/p>\n

As the tree that bends it highest branches
\nin a gust of wind and then springs back,
\nraised up by natural inclination,<\/p>\n

so was I overcome while she was speaking \u2013<\/p>\n

In the great visionary descriptions Denny\u2019s lyrical power unfolds more extensively. These passages are dominated by imagery of light. As imagery, this light speaks unforgettably in more regular and scholarly translations but Denny makes it sing. Here is Robert M. Durling\u2019s prose version of the famous lines in which Dante, looking into the light that is the mind of God, sees the universe as God sees it. As in the printed book, I\u2019ve separated the terzine as if they were paragraphs:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In its depths I saw internalized, bound with love in one volume, what through the universe becomes unsewn quires:
\nsubstances and accidents and their modes as it were conflated together, in such a way that what I describe is a simple light.
\nThe universal form of this knot I believe I saw, because I feel my joy expand as I say this.
\nOne point alone is greater forgetfulness to me than twenty-five centuries to the enterprise that made Neptune marvel at the shadow of the Argo.<\/p>\n

And here is Denny:<\/p>\n

I saw in its depths, bound by Love in one volume,
\nthe poem the whole universe speaks and conceals \u2013
\nfor God is both essence and its myriad veils \u2013
\nand this solitary phrase was a simple light\u2026
\na knot which to recall makes me pulse with strange delight,
\nalthough I\u2019ve forgotten much more of the instant\u2019s
\nsplendour than every single thing that\u2019s happened since
\nNeptune marvelled at the Argo\u2019s flying shadow.<\/p>\n

Idea and its unfolding, rhythm and emotion seem to me to fuse in these lines, catching fire together in a way they don\u2019t in Durling\u2019s literal translation. Sometimes this involves adding his own metaphors, as with the beautiful ones in the second and third lines of this quotation. Living the idea from within, Denny can add to Dante\u2019s words without violating their spirit. Or for another example, there\u2019s such a momentum of surprise in the word \u2018flying\u2019 \u2013 his addition \u2013 and such a contrast with the meditative circling of the previous lines that the ship\u2019s shadow almost seems to fly off the page. Joy in the transient phenomena of this world is beautifully realized within the deep joy of eternity, in a spirit akin to that of Hopkins\u2019s praise of ephemeral things in \u2018Pied Beauty\u2019. Here, I would say, the literal version and the more radically recreative one serve different ends. If one is using Durling essentially as an aid to reading the parallel Italian text, one looks to him for the most precise possible expression of meaning on a semantic level and turns to the Italian itself to hear how it sings rhythmically and syntactically. However, if one is reading in English alone, Denny\u2019s freer handling of meaning \u2013 not adding thoughts of his own but importing ideas stated or implicit elsewhere in the poem \u2013 seems to me to convey the essence of Dante\u2019s thought in a more living and therefore truer way.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, of course, different versions of a passage, Denny\u2019s and a scholar translator\u2019s, will achieve poetic expressiveness in different and complementary ways. I think this is true of Denny\u2019s and the Hollanders\u2019 versions of the beginning of St Bernard\u2019s prayer to the Virgin Mary, asking her to grant Dante that final vision. The Hollanders first:<\/p>\n

\u2018Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son,
\nmore humble and exalted than any other creature,
\nfixed goal of the eternal plan,<\/p>\n

\u2018you are the one who so ennobled human nature
\nthat He, who made it first, did not disdain
\nto make Himself of its own making.<\/p>\n

\u2018Your womb relit the flame of love \u2013
\nits heat has made this blossom seed
\nand flower in eternal peace.<\/p>\n

\u2018To us you are a noonday torch of charity,
\nwhile down below, among those still in flesh,
\nyou are the living fountainhead of hope.<\/p>\n

\u2018Lady, you are so great and so prevail above,
\nshould he who longs for grace not turn to you,
\nhis longing would be doomed to wingless flight.\u2019<\/p>\n

The Hollanders follow the original closely. I think that in the first two stanzas rhythmic flatness almost does make a \u2018caput mortuum\u2019 of Dante\u2019s ideas but \u2018Your womb relit the flame of love\u2019 is electrifying and unforgettable. The lines that immediately follow are almost as much so, both in sound and movement and in the evocative interplay of their metaphors. \u2018This blossom\u2019, of course, is the vast gathering of saved souls, described as seated in many tiers round a centre larger than the sun, like a gigantic white rose. The whole passage marvelously stretches the imagination between the particularity of the Virgin and her body, on the one hand, and the unutterable vastness of Creation on the other: a vastness transfigured by the Incarnation and birth of Christ. But to my mind there\u2019s a new dip into flatness of expression after the following stanza, so that however potent the ideas might be for a believer, there isn\u2019t enough in the poetry to bring them home to a nonbeliever like me.<\/p>\n

Denny has St Bernard say this:<\/p>\n

\u201cDaughter of your own son, calm and vestal mother \u2013<\/p>\n

ah how could I, how could I dance with another? \u2013<\/em>
\nmost humble and exalted, endlessness\u2019s goal,
\nwho gave such nobility to the human soul
\nthat the entire Creator entered flesh\u2019s tomb\u2026
\nlove was rekindled and remade within your womb,
\na love whose warmth opens, in unfading silence,
\nthe white song of this bloom\u2019s immense incandescence.
\nYou are the world\u2019s deathless spring of hope, the daystar
\nof charity for us throughout heaven; you are
\nso powerful and prevailing, gentlest lady,
\nthat to yearn for Him yet not turn to your beauty
\nis to seek to fly without wings\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

This sings more softly but more continuously than the scattered singing lines in the Hollanders\u2019 version. Nothing reaches the imaginative height or intensity of \u2018your womb relit the flame of love\u2019 and the couplets rhyming \u2018goal\u2019 and \u2018soul\u2019, \u2018womb\u2019 and \u2018tomb\u2019 seem to me a little awkward, as though embarrassed by the patness of their rhymes. However, the writing becomes magical with the evocation of love\u2019s opening, the unfolding of the white flower of the saved. Here, Denny beautifully runs together imagery evoking the growth of the foetus of Christ within Mary\u2019s womb and that of the unfolding of the white rose of the church. He does so by means of overlapping syntax. \u2018Opens\u2019 can be read both transitively and intransitively. Reading it intransitively, the lines \u2018Love was rekindled and remade within your womb, \/ a love whose warmth opens in unfading silence\u2019 form a unit, figuring both the Incarnation of Christ and His prenatal growth as the opening of the flower of God\u2019s love within Mary\u2019s womb. Reading it transitively, the lines \u2018A love whose warmth opens, in unfading silence, \/ the white song of this bloom\u2019s immense incandescence\u2019 form a new unit, making one see God\u2019s love as the sun shining above and opening the white flower of the song of saved souls. In keeping with this bringing together of God and man, the warmth of God\u2019s love feels more human<\/em> in Denny\u2019s version than the flame of love does in the Hollanders\u2019. There\u2019s more to the magic of the second of those couplets though. There was nothing particularly striking about Denny\u2019s direct treatment of the paradoxes that open St Bernard\u2019s prayer \u2013 \u2018Vergine madre, figlia del tuo Figlio, \/ umile e alta pi\u00f9 che creatura\u2019. However, with the vividly sensuous, synaesthetic image of \u2018opens, in unfading silence, \/ the white song of this bloom\u2019s immense incandescence\u2019\u00a0 he creates a wonder-engendering imaginative paradox of his own, equally suggesting how God\u2019s power and being transcend anything the human mind can conceptualize or even coherently imagine. And if the rhymes at the start of the stanza seemed clanging, that between \u2018silence\u2019 and \u2018incandescence\u2019 is almost miraculous in its combination of haziness and daring. Full internal rhyme comes into its own with \u2018yearn\u2019 and \u2018turn\u2019 \u2013 the similarity of sound makes yearning<\/em> but not turning<\/em> seem almost perverse.<\/p>\n

In his Preface, Denny says \u2018It should be made clear at the outset that I make no claim to strict fidelity. This is, rather, an interpretation and portrayal of the Commedia in the form of another poem, a subsidiary song, echo or counterfeit though it may be.\u2019 It is, he says, \u2018at least partly aimed at those who know the original \u2013 a variation, one might say, on a familiar theme \u2013 and hence full of conscious expansions, explications, compressions and distortions.\u2019 In accordance with this idea, I think the whole story and the fundamentals of the many dramas it contains are best absorbed in other versions before one comes on to the often beautiful lyricism of Denny\u2019s subsidiary song. And of course it isn\u2019t just lyrical highlights that B<\/em> offers. Over time, the lover of Dante who turns to it might fruitfully reflect on any number of the \u2018expansions, explications, compressions and distortions\u2019 it contains, whether for their own sake or for the perspectives they offer on Dante\u2019s original.<\/p>\n

TEXTS QUOTED:<\/p>\n

Ned Denny: B: After Dante<\/em>. Carcanet Press. ISBN: 978-1-78410-959-2
\nDante Alighieri: Inferno<\/em>, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander. Anchor Books, Random House. ISBN: 0-385-49697-4
\nDante Alighieri: Paradiso<\/em>, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander. Anchor Books, Random House. ISBN: 978-1-4000-3115-3
\nDante Alighieri: Paradiso<\/em>, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-19-508742-0<\/p>\n

I would like to thank David Cooke for his permission to repost this essay, written for his magazine The High Window<\/a>.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three things keep drawing me back to Dante\u2019s Commedia: the skill, inventiveness and human depth of his story-telling, his lyrical genius, and the beauty of his terza rima meter. His use of terza rima can only be enjoyed in Italian, which for me involves heavy dependence on English translations and on the notes and glosses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dante","category-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2570"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2571,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570\/revisions\/2571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}