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i. The Divine Comedy: Introduction
Dante Alighieri himself warned against the translation of poetry: 'Nothing', he said, 'that is harmonized by the laws of poetry can be changed from its own language to another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony.' Nevertheless, there are probably more translations of his Divina commedia (early 14th c., The Divine Comedy) than of any other postclassical literary work.
The first attempt in English, apart from a paraphrase by Chaucer of the story of Ugolino and of St Bernard's prayer to the Virgin, followed down the centuries by a few versions of isolated episodes, was Charles Rogers's (1711–84) rendering of the Inferno into blank verse. The first translation of the whole work, by Henry Boyd (c.1755–1832) in rhymed six-line stanzas, was published in 1802. This was followed in 1814 by Henry Francis Cary's (1772–1844) translation in blank verse. The best known of 19th-c. renderings, it still has its admirers. Cary is immortalized in Westminster Abbey as 'The Translator of Dante'.
The challenge of translating the Commedia poses in extreme form the fundamental questions which underlie the translation of all poetry. Should it be an aid to understanding the original or aimed at readers who read the work only in English? Should it be in prose or verse? If in verse, should it be a poem in its own right, a descant inspired by the original? Should the original rhyme scheme be retained? If blank verse is chosen, are occasional end-rhymes and internal rhymes desirable? As regards metre, should the Italian 11-syllable line (endecasillabo) be rendered by its near-equivalent, the pentameter, or are other metres and other stanzaic forms to be preferred? How important is it to adhere to Dante's paragraphing? If prose is chosen, should it be rhythmic, near-poetic, or plain narrative? There is no agreement on these matters, nor is there ever likely to be. Few translators have found much to admire in the attempts of their predecessors; few readers are entirely satisfied with any one version. It seems likely that new renderings will continue to appear, reflecting the changing literary tastes and prejudices of succeeding generations.
Some translators, holding the form and content of the Commedia to be indivisible, consider terza rima obligatory. Others reject it on the grounds that the difficulties are too costly, there being fewer rhymes in English than in Italian. This statement continues to be made, though it can easily be disproved. Geoffrey L. Bickersteth argues irrefutably in the Introduction to his terza rima translation that 'no-one, surely, can maintain that a language is deficient in [rhyme] which boasts of The Faerie Queene and Don Juan'. In her Introduction to her translation of Inferno Dorothy L. Sayers points out that though 'pure' rhymes, abundant in Italian, are comparatively scarce in English, 'impure' rhymes are frequent and legitimate and offer infinite variety.
Another problem, which arises whether the translation is in verse or prose, is the level of diction. Should it be traditional, formal, 'period', unvaryingly reverential, or idiomatic, informal, slangy, and up to date—or a mixture? Connected with this question is the 'thou'/'you' dilemma. Dante uses both the singular tu and the plural voi not only to distinguish number but also employing the latter as a respectful form of address to one person. The difficulty is that in English the difference between 'thou' and 'you' is not one of number; the plural of 'thou' is in fact 'ye'. Their use is now a matter of period and style. Furthermore, 'you', not 'thou', is the more intimate form. The effect of using 'thou', with the corresponding verb endings, the accusative 'thee' and the adjectives 'thy' and 'thine', is to produce a remoteness of style, Biblical in tone and echoing hymns or poetry of earlier centuries. In a translation designed to capture Dante's occasional colloquial, informal, even racy style, an irreconcilable contradiction is thus introduced. On the other hand, it must be said that the 'thou' forms give a truer impression of Dante's sublime moments than the flat up-to-dateness adopted by some present-day down-levelling translators.
ii. The Divine Comedy: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Cary's decision to use blank verse met with the approval of the poet Ugo Foscolo, who said that if Dante had written in English that is the form he would have chosen! The stately, Miltonic, unvaried style set a pattern of acceptability. Here is his rendering of the inscription on the gateway to Hell (Inferno, iii. 1–9):
Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
The last line, frequently quoted, has become part of English literary tradition.
That was what Dante was assumed to be like. Nevertheless, during the 19th c. a few brave souls attempted terza rima. Others compromised with blank terzine, keeping closer than Cary did to Dante's paragraphing. The best-known example is by Longfellow. Prose was used, chiefly for exposition, notably by William Warren Vernon (1834–1919), accompanying his Readings on the poem in six volumes, by the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), and by Henry Fanshawe Tozer (1829–1916), in a companion volume to his excellent line-by-line commentary. The Temple Classics rhythmic prose translation in three pocket-size volumes, published at the turn of the century (the Inferno by John Aitken Carlyle (1801–79), first published in 1849 and revised by Hermann Oelsner, the Purgatorio by Thomas Okey (1852–1935), the Paradiso by Philip Wicksteed (1844–1927)) provided the Italian text alongside the English. For over a century and a half this version and Cary's were the most influential conveyors of Dante's poem to British readers. A comparable work was published in 1921, also in three octavo volumes and also with a dual text, but with the translation in terza rima, by the American Melville B. Anderson. Between 1939 and 1946 John D. Sinclair brought out a very readable prose translation, facing the original, accompanied by excellent commentaries on every canto. This is one of the best aids in English to the understanding of Dante's text. The recent prose translation of the Inferno by the American Robert M. Durling is divided into paragraphs corresponding to the facing Italian text; it is a clinically accurate crib but pleasant to read, provided with introduction, notes, and illustrations.
Of 20th-c. translations in terza rima, the following three have been among the most admired: Laurence Binyon's, Geoffrey L. Bickersteth's, with dual text, and, containing the fullest commentary, the Penguin Classics version by Dorothy L. Sayers, the Paradiso being completed after her death by Barbara Reynolds. Though it has its detractors, the Sayers translation has met with deserved acclaim and is the most widely used.
Defective terza rima (i.e. leaving the middle line of each tercet unrhymed) has been used by an American translator, John Ciardi, who experimented, as others have since done, with an up-to-date and slangy style. Longfellow's choice—blank terzine—has been followed more recently by two other Americans, Mark Musa and Allen Mandelbaum. The freedom from the distortion which true terza rima is alleged to impose and the greater fidelity to meaning which is claimed for these forms are not strikingly apparent in either Ciardi's or Musa's translation; while the loss of pattern is. Mandelbaum's diction is smoother and less prosaic than Musa's, as may be seen from a comparison between their versions of the first six lines of Inferno, canto 27:
By now the flame was standing straight and still
it said no more and had already turned
from us, with sanction of the gentle poet,
when another, coming right behind it,
attracted our attention to its tip,
where a roaring of confusing sounds had started.
(Musa)
The flame already was erect and silent—
it had no more to say. Now it had left us
with the permission of the gentle poet,
when, just behind it, came another flame
that drew our eyes to watch its tip because
of the perplexing sound that it sent forth.
(Mandelbaum)
Here is the same passage by Sayers, in terza rima:
Erect and quiet now, its utterance done,
The tall flame stood; and presently, dismissed
By the sweet poet's licence, it passed on;
When lo! our eyes were drawn towards the crest
Of a new flame. coming behind its fellow,
By the strange muffled roarings it expressed.
It is not plain what the two preceding versions have gained from the avoidance of rhyme and regularity of rhythm.
The flatness of C. H. Sisson's recent translation—'plain Dante, plain as a board, and if flat, flat,' Donald Davie wrote of it (approvingly, it seems)—is apparently deliberate. Sisson says in his foreword that he chose to translate Dante in the language of his own day, as 'one does write'. He departs at random from the pentameter, using lines of varying length and beat. Here is his rendering of the first three lines of Inferno:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai in una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Half way along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.
There are some surprising departures from the original here. The adjective oscura (f.) applies to the wood, which is dark, not Dante. Nor does Dante call it a 'great' forest. It is not Dante who is 'bewildered', but the right road which is lost (smarrita). And mi ritrovai means, not 'I found myself', but 'I came to myself', 'I awoke'.
Here is another sample, from Sisson's version of the second canto of Purgatorio (ll. 19–21):
Lo bel pianeta che d'amar conforta
faceva tutto rider l'oriente,
velando i Pesci, ch'erano in sua scorta.
The lovely planet which gives comfort in love
Was filling the whole eastern sky with laughter,
Hiding the Fish which followed in her train.
Dante's word conforta does not mean 'gives comfort'. Venus empowers, urges, exhorts to love (much of Dante's vocabulary is nearer in meaning to Latin than to modern Italian, and this is an example). 'Filling the sky with laughter' suggests that souls or angels are singing—they are not: Venus is lighting up the east with joy. And the constellation mentioned is Pisces, the Fishes, not the Fish.
Here is Sayers' version:
The lovely planet, love's own quickener,
Now lit to laughter all the eastern sky,
Veiling the Fishes that attended her.
This reproduces Dante's stress on rider, in the same strong position in the line, and leaves the 'eastern sky' at the end, where it should be. 'Quickener' is an excellent solution for Venus and her power, while 'lit to laughter' lifts the heart with joy. The rendering is accurate, lucid, simple, and the lines sing, which Sisson's fail to do.
His Paradise, also, is full of disconcerting jolts, as in the flat matter-of-factness, not to say misinterpretation, of Canto 28, lines 88–96. Dante, wishing to convey the sense of an infinite number of angels, says that they exceeded by thousands the figure arrived at by the progressive doubling of the number of squares on a chessboard. Sisson translates:
And when her words had ceased, there was such sparkling
From the circles, as is seen in the sparks
Which are thrown off by the iron when it boils.
Every spark followed the fire it belonged to:
There were so many that the number of them
Was greater than all the combinations at chess.
The Sayers–Reynolds translation reads:
Her words, when they had ceased, were greeted by
A sparkling of scintillas in the spheres,
As showers of sparks from molten metal fly.
Tracing each fiery circle that was theirs,
They numbered myriads more than the entire
Progressive doubling of the chessboard squares.
The difficulties of writing terza rima in English have been much exaggerated. Of the twelve who contributed to the composite translation of Inferno broadcast by the BBC in 1966, nine chose terza rima and handled it with skill.
One of the best renderings in blank verse to have appeared in recent years is that by Tom Phillips, published in 1985 in a de luxe edition with Phillips's own illustrations. Here is his version of Dante's meeting with Brunetto Latini (Inferno xv. 16–30):
We happened on a troop of souls who moved
alongside the embankment, each of whom
examined us, as, when the moon is new,
men peer at one another in the dusk.
They squinted at us, knitting up their brows
like some old tailor at his needle's eye.
I underwent this group's strange scrutiny
till one of them discovered who I was;
and, clutching at the corner of my cloak
he cried aloud, 'Why, what a miracle!'
Then, as he reached towards me with his arm,
I tried to see beneath his facial burns
for fear those roasted features might prevent
my memory from knowing who he was,
and, stretching down my hand towards his face
said, 'Ser Brunetto is it you? Down here?'
If it must be blank verse, let it be of this quality.
Of two recent updated translations, Steve Ellis's Hell aims at recapturing Dante's vigour by using 'primarily the language of the 1980s and 1990s'. Rejecting terza rima and the pentameter, he uses a racy four-foot line. Here is his beginning of Canto 22:
I've seen troops get under way,
whether to attack or to parade
or sometimes to make a retreat;
I've seen horsemen on your land,
you Aretines, I've seen raiders,
clashes at tournaments and jousts;
I've witnessed clarions and bells,
drum-rolls, signs from battlements
or other signals, native or foreign;
but I never heard a bugle like this
get horses or infantry into action,
or ships steering by land or stars.
The rapid pace is well suited to passages of this nature. But not even Inferno is as racy throughout, and there will be problems when he comes to Purgatorio and Paradiso.
Another recent verse translation of the Inferno is that by the American poet Robert Pinsky. His stated aim is to make the Commedia sound like a poem in English. He admits occasional rhymes, and varies the length of lines as the mood takes him. Here is his beginning of Canto 8:
Continuing, I tell how for some time
Before we reached the tower's base
Our eyes were following two points of flame
Visible at the top; and answering these
Another returned the signal, so far away
The eye could barely catch it. I turned to face
My sea of knowledge and said, 'O Master, say:
What does this beacon mean?
And the other fire—
What answer does it signal?
And who are they
Who set it there?' …
The jerkiness of this rendering may be compared with the controlled version in terza rima by Bickersteth:
I say, continuing, that long before
we reached its foot, our eyes had onward sped
up to the summit of the lofty tower,
because we saw two beacons it displayed
and—from so far, 'twas well nigh past discerning—
another, which gave back the sign they made.
And I, turned towards the deep sea of all learning,
said, 'What does this one say? And what replies
that other fire? And who have set it burning?'
iii. Other Works
Translations of Dante's minor Italian writings are less numerous. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 1861 translation of La vita nuova (1290–4, The New Life) does not always adhere to the original rhyme scheme. It was followed in 1867 by Charles Eliot Norton's, which does and is more accurate. The Penguin Classics translation by Barbara Reynolds follows the rhyme scheme and the length of lines of the original. That by Mark Musa, which in its earlier edition supplies the Italian original, avoids rhyme altogether.
The poems of La vita nuova and of Il convivio (1304–8, The Banquet), as well as others making up Dante's lyrical output, have been excellently translated into rhymed verse, in English equivalents of the original metres, by H. S. Vere-Hodge. This is a dual text, containing admirable notes and an Introduction in which Dante's poetic technique is knowledgeably discussed. Dante's Lyric Poetry, by Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde provides the original text and a prose translation. Dorothy L. Sayers's rhymed translation of the four 'Pietra' canzoni, previously circulated privately, was published posthumously in 1989.
Il convivio in its entirety was translated by Katharine Hillard in 1889; the poems are rendered in blank verse. She was followed by Philip Wicksteed in 1903 and by William Walrond Jackson in 1909, who both rendered the poems in prose. The best recent translation is by Christopher Ryan, who also renders the poems in prose.
Barbara Reynolds
DIVINE COMEDY The Inferno of Dante Translated, tr. Charles Rogers, London, 1785 ·
The Divina Commedia, tr. Henry Boyd, 3 vols., London, 1802 [Inferno, 1785] ·
The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, tr. Henry Francis Cary, 3 vols., London, 1814 [frequent reps.] ·
The Divine Comedy, tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 vols., Boston, 1867 [frequent reps.] ·
Readings on the Purgatorio, by William Warren Vernon, London, 1889 ·
The Divine Comedy, tr. Charles Eliot Norton, 3 vols., Boston/New York, 1891–2 ·
Readings on the Inferno, by William Warren Vernon, London, 1894 ·
The Divina Commedia, ed. Hermann Oelsner, 3 vols., London, 1899–1902 [Temple Classics; tr. John Aitken Carlyle, rev. H. Oelsner (Inferno); Thomas Okey (Purgatorio); Philip Henry Wicksteed (Paradiso)] ·
Readings on the Paradiso, by William Warren Vernon, London, 1900 ·
Dante's Divine Comedy, tr. Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Oxford, 1904 ·
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, tr. Melville Best Anderson, New York, 1921 ·
Dante's Inferno, tr. Laurence Binyon, London, 1933 ·
Dante's Purgatorio, tr. Laurence Binyon, London, 1938 ·
The Divine Comedy, tr. John D. Sinclair, 3 vols., London, 1939 ·
Dante's Paradiso, tr. Laurence Binyon, London, 1943 ·
The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, tr. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, 3 vols., Harmondsworth, 1949–62 [Penguin] ·
The Divine Comedy, tr. Geoffrey Langdale Bickersteth, 3 vols., Aberdeen, 1955 [Paradiso 1932] ·
The Inferno, tr. John Ciardi, New York, 1954 ·
The Purgatorio, tr. John Ciardi, New York, 1961 ·
The Paradiso, tr. John Ciardi, New York, 1970 ·
Dante's Inferno, tr. Mark Musa, Bloomington, Ind., 1971 [later Penguin] ·
The Divine Comedy, tr. Allen Mandelbaum, Berkeley, Calif., 1980 ·
The Divine Comedy, tr. C. H. Sisson, Manchester, 1980 [World's Classics] ·
Dante's Purgatory, tr. Mark Musa, Bloomington, Ind., 1981 [later Penguin] ·
Dante's Paradiso, tr. Mark Musa, Bloomington, Ind., 1984 [later Penguin] ·
Dante's Inferno, tr. Tom Phillips, London, 1985 ·
Hell, tr. Steve Ellis, London, 1994 ·
The 'Inferno' of Dante, tr. Robert Pinsky, London, 1994 ·
Inferno, tr. Robert M. Durling, New York/Oxford, 1996 ·
CONVIVIO The Banquet, tr. Katharine Hillard, London, 1889 ·
The Convivio, tr. Philip Wicksteed, London, 1903 ·
Dante's Convivio, tr. William Walrond Jackson, Oxford, 1909 ·
The Banquet, tr. Christopher Ryan, Stanford, Calif., 1989 ·
ODES The Odes of Dante, tr. H. S. Vere-Hodge, Oxford, 1963 ·
Dante's Lyric Poetry, tr. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, vol. i, Cambridge, 1967 ·
The Heart of Stone, tr. Dorothy L. Sayers, in Barbara Reynolds, ed., The Passionate Intellect, Kent, OH, 1989 ·
VITA NUOVA The New Life, tr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his The Early Italian Poets, London, 1861 ·
The New Life, tr. Charles Eliot Norton, Boston, 1867 ·
La Vita Nuova, tr. Mark Musa, New Brunswick, NJ, 1957, 1992 [World's Classics] ·
La Vita Nuova, tr. Barbara Reynolds, Harmondsworth, 1969 [Penguin].
From The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation
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