People
can't seem to let go of the Divine Comedy. You'd think that a fourteenth-century
allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian
vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have
been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrels. But no. By my
count there have been something like a hundred English-language translations, and
not just by scholars but by blue-chip poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi,
Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and Tchaikovsky have
composed music about the poem; Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about
it. In other words, the Divine Comedy
is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for
students. It's one of the reasons there are professors and students.
In some periods devoted to order and
decorum in literature-notably the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries- many
sophisticated readers scorned the Divine Comedy as a grotesque, impenetrable
thing. But not in our time. T. S. Eliot, the lawgiver of early-twentieth-century
poetics, placed Dante on the highest possible rung of European poetry.
"Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them," he
wrote. ''There is no third." A lot of literary people then ran out to learn
some Italian, a language for which, previously, many had had scant respect, and
a great surge of Dante translations began. In some-Laurence
Binyon's (1933-43), Dorothy Sayers's (1949- 62)-the translator even tried to
use Dante's rhyme scheme, terza rima (aha bcb cdc, etc.), a device almost
impossible to manage in English, because our language, compared with Italian,
has so few rhymes. Since then, we have had many kinds of Divine Comedy-lowbrow,
highbrow, muscly, refined. The more fastidious ones, the ones that actually try
to give equivalents for Dante's words, are in prose, because in prose the translator
doesn't have to sacrifice accuracy to such considerations as rhyme and rhythm.
As fot verse translations, they may be less accurate, but it can be argued that
they are more faithful than prose versions. The Divine Comedy, after all, is a
poem, and its meanings are contained as much in sound as in "sense." Verse
translations require more courage, and more thinking, because they are generally
more interpretive. Within the past year, two more have been published, one by
the American poet Mary Jo Bang, the other by the Australian essayist and poet
Clive James.
In his translation of the complete Divine Comedy (Liveright), James made the crucial decision to rhyme, in quatrains
(in his case, abab). But, as he tells us in the introduction, end rhymes were
no more important to him than rhymes or chimes within the lines: alliteration, assonance,
repetition. He says that his wife, Prue Shaw, now a celebrated Dante scholar
(her book "Reading Dante'' will
be out next year),
pushed him in this direction, by teaching him, years ago, that the Divine
Comedy had to be read phonetically. The great thing about it was its richness
of sound, as word after word, line after line, beckoned the next and thus kept
the reader moving forward. James says this is what he was intent on, above all.
All is
a lot. James gave himself permission to add lines to Dante's text and to
incorporate background material. He
didn't want footnotes-nothing should stop the reader. Many things do, though.
Here are Dante's famous opening lines:
Ne! mezzo de! cammin di nostra vita mi
ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa duraritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
And
here is James' s rendering:
At the mid-point of the path through life, I
foundMyself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to me-
Merely to think of it renews the fear.
"Keening
sound"? If ever there was a forced rhyme,
this is it. Also, Dante didn't say anything about wailing, only about fear, and
the two are different matters.
Soon
the pilgrim (as the protagonist of the poem is usually called) and his guide,
Virgil, arrive at the gates of Hell, with its dread inscription:
Per me si va ne la citra dolente,
per me si vane l'etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse ii mio alto fattore;per me si vane l'etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.
fecemi la divina podestate,
la somma sap'ienza e 'I primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
James
translates this as:
To enter the lost city, go through me.
Through me you go to meet a suffering
unceasing and eternal. You will be
with people who, through me, lost everything.
My maker, moved by justice, lives above.Through me you go to meet a suffering
unceasing and eternal. You will be
with people who, through me, lost everything.
Through him, the holy power, I was made -
made by the height of wisdom and first love,
whose laws all those in here once disobeyed.
From now on, every day feels like your last
Forever. Let that be your greatest fear.
Your future now is to regret the past.
Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.
This
shows a considerable drop in energy, partly because of a loss of compression. James
has lengthened the passage by a third. But, also, he has added some confusion
about what the gate is telling us. At least in the first line, it seems to think
that we have a choice about whether or not to enter. We don't, and that is what
makes going to Hell a serious business.Forever. Let that be your greatest fear.
Your future now is to regret the past.
Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.
From
what I can tell, these two problems, awkwardness and inaccuracy, are due to
exactly the thing that sounded so nice when James told us about it in the introduction,
his intention to capture the phonetic richness of Dante's lines.
Worse
are the demands made by the internal echoes. In the Hell-gate inscription, there's
almost no word that isn't singing a duet, or more. We have "through
me" I "through me";
"suffering" I "unceasing'' I "everything''; "me" I "me'' I
"meet"
I "be" I "people''; "maker'' I "moved" I "made";
"him" I "holy." And that's
just in the first six lines. The technique asks a great deal: that the
translator obey, simultaneously, the summons both of English-language sounds
and of Dante's meaning.
Still,
the freedoms James takes allow him to get off some beautiful phrases. When the
pilgrim realizes that his guide is Virgil, his idol, he says to him, "Or
se' tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte I che spandi
di parlar si largo fiume?" James turns this into "Are you Virgil? Are
you the spring, the well, I The fountain and the river in full Bow I Of eloquence that sings like a
seashell I Remembering the sea and the
rainbow?" I love that seashell, and the rainbow. Neither is in Dante. James
is a poet, doing a poet's work. Also, however interested he is in being fancy,
he can be plain as well, sometimes poignantly so.
See the
last line of the Hell-gate inscription: "Forget your hopes. They are what
brought you here." The second sentence is not in the original poem, but it
is wonderful, both sarcastic and sad. James is also a premier practitioner of
the high-low style that became so popular in the nineteen-twenties, notably via
Eliot and Pound, which is to say, in part, via Dante. He can be colloquial. Of
the she wolf that blocks the pilgrim's path, Virgil says, "In a bad mood
it can kill, I And it's never in a good
mood." (This could be from "The Sopranos.") James likes, iconoclastically,
to do this sort of thing with the grandees, like Francesca da Rimini, who says to the pilgrim, ''What you would have us say I Let's hear about." It's all rich and strange.
Mary Jo
Bang, a poet and a professor of English at Washington University, in St. Louis,
has much the same purpose: to convey Dante's internal music. Unlike James, she
has made some major sacrifices to this end. In her Inferno (Graywolf), the
only canticle she has taken on so far, she does not use end rhyme, and she does
not hold herself to any regular metre. (James used iambic pentameter.) But,
having cast off those restraints, she adopts another one.
James
was trying, he said, to be true to Dante. Bang is trying to be true to
contemporary life, to the "post-9/11, Internet- ubiquitous present."
As this implies, she aims to be faithful to something else as well:
undergraduates. She writes, "I will be most
happy if this postmodern, irttertextual, slightly slant translation lures
readers to a poetic text that might seem otherwise archaic and off-putting'' -especially,
I presume, to nineteen- year-olds. On the surface, this appears to be a
laudable purpose, but whenever you hear those words "true to contemporary
life," run for cover.
The
trouble starts on the first page. The pilgrim speaks of his relief upon issuing
from the dark wood. He says that he felt like a person who, almost drowned at
sea, arrives, panting, on the shore. Bang places him, instead, at the edge of a
swimming pool. But these two things-the ocean and the neighborhood pool-are
nowhere near the same, and every nineteen-year-old knows what the ocean is.
Other anachronisms create worse problems. Bang, in her lines, includes
references to Freud, Mayakovsky, Colbert, you name it. She picks up swatches of
verse from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. But, if readers get into the swing of
these, what are they going to do when they encounter the Roman Catholic
theology that is the spine of the Divine Comedy, and which Bang says, in her
introduction, that she will honor? ("God has to look down from Heaven;
Satan has to sit at the center of Hell.") Wouldn't it be better if she let
the reader know that there are old things as well as new things-that there is
such a thing as history? She is not unaware of this, as her learned footnotes demonstrate.
Why is she keeping it from her readers? If they knew
it, they might find out who Mayakovsky is, which I doubt that they have done.
Oddly,
given Bang's stated aims, she's happy to court obscurity. She says that the
she-wolf that detains the pilgrim outside the wood has a "bitch-kitty"
face; Virgil tells the pilgrim to climb the "meringue-pie mountain"
that lies ahead. "Bitch-kitty" gets an explanatory footnote: Bang
says it's something that she found in the Dictionary of American Slang. My
edition of that book says "bitch kitty'' was a phrase of the
nineteen-thirties and forties. (Roughly, it meant a "humdinger.") Did
Bang expect today's readers to know it? Not really, it seems. She says that she
wants these oddities to be fleeting pleasures for us. To me, they're not pleasures,
but just oddities, something like finding a Tootsie Roll in the meat loaf.
Translators are not the only ones
drawn to Dante. Since 2006, Roberto Benigni has been touring a solo show about
the Divine Comedy. In 2010, Seymour Chwast rendered
the poem as a graphic novel. There are Inferno movies and iPad apps and video games.
As of last week, their company has been joined by a Dan Brown thriller, "Inferno"
(Doubleday).
In many
ways, the new book is like Brown's 2003 blockbuster, "The Da Vinci Code." Here, as there, we have Brown's beloved
"symbologist," Robert Langdon, a professor at Harvard, a drinker of
Martinis, a wearer of Harris tweeds, running around Europe with a good-looking
woman-this one is Sienna Brooks, a physician with an I.Q of 208-while people shoot at them. All this transpires in
exotic climes-Florence, Venice, and Istanbul-upon which, even as the two are
fleeing a mob of storm troopers, Brown bestows travel-brochure prose: "The
Boboli Gardens had enjoyed the exceptional design talents of Niccolo Tribolo,
Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti." Or: "No trip to the piazza
was complete without sipping an espresso at Caffe Rivoire."
As we
saw in "The Da Vinci Code," there is no thriller-plot convention, however
well worn, that Brown doesn't like. The hero has amnesia. He is up against a
mad scientist with Nietzschean goals. He's also up against a deadline: in less
than twenty-four hours, he has been told, the madman's black arts will be
forcibly practiced upon the world. Though this book, unlike ''The Da Vinci
Code" and Brown's "Angels and Demons" (2000), is not exactly an ecclesiastical
thriller, it takes place largely in churches and, as the title indicates, it
constantly imports imagery from the Western world's most famous eschatological
thriller, Dante's Inferno. Wisely, Brown does not let himself get hog-tied by
the sequence of events in Dante's poem. Instead, he just inserts allusions
whenever he feels that he needs them. There are screams; there is excrement.
The walls of underground caverns ooze disgusting liquid. Through them run
rivers of blood clogged with corpses. Bizarre figures come forward saying
things like "I am life" and "I am death." Sometimes the
great poet is invoked directly. The book's villain is a Dante fanatic and the
owner of Dante's death mask, on which he writes cryptic messages. Scolded by
another character for his plans to disturb the universe, he replies, "The
path to paradise passes directly through hell. Dante taught us that."
The
hellfire material makes the book colorful and creepy. It also sounds notes of
conspiracy. (The villain, with his "Transhumanist philosophy," has
many followers.) Religion and paranoia have a lot in common: above all, the
belief that something big is going on out there and also that everything means
something else. Further, both religion and paranoia are short on empirical
evidence, so that greater faith is required. Finally, the conviction that
everything refers to something else generates codes and symbols, which is what
generates Robert Langdon. As a symbologist, he can read these runes. Often, the
clue they give him does not point him to what he's looking for but rather to something
that will offer a further clue, which will get him a little closer to what he's looking for, and so on,
as in a treasure hunt.
That
process is the plot, or at least the skeleton of it. It is then fleshed out with
a million details: dreams, murders, priceless paintings. There is a yacht lurking
off the Adriatic coast, where, for vast fees, sinister, tight-lipped men arrange
for governments to change, wars to be hushed up, and the like. Meanwhile, we
are given lessons in how to do ancient mosaics and how to make a death mask. We
are introduced to products galore: Plume Paris glasses, Volvo motors, Juicy
Couture sweatsuits, even a "Swedish Sectra Tiger XS personal voice-encrypting
phone, which had been redirected through four untraceable routers." Page
after page, things keep coming at you. People who sit down to read
"Inferno" should bring a notepad.
The
book has almost no psychology, because one of Brown's favorite plot devices is
to reveal, mid-novel, that a character presented all along as a friend is in
fact an enemy (see Leigh Teabing in "The Da Vinci Code"), or vice
versa. To do that-and it's always pretty exciting- Brown can't give his
characters much texture; if he did, they would be too hard to flip. Of course,
without texture they don't have anything interesting to say, except maybe
"Stop the plane there." The dialogue is dead. As for the rest of the
writing, it is not dead or alive. It has no distinction whatsoever. Because "Inferno"
transpires in so many glamorous places, Brown may rise to the grandiose. In
Hagia Sophia, he speaks of the "staggering force of its enormity,"
and barely a page passes without italics. But this is to relieve the general
coldness.
No,
Brown is a plot-maker, and only that. This story is a little more complicated than
usual, because although Langdon, with his trusted Brooks, is looking for
something, he's not quite sure what it is. Meanwhile, from one side he's being
chased by the storm troopers-black-clad thugs, with umlauts over their
names-and from the other by Vayentha, the lady with the Swedish Sectra Tiger
XS. There's also a reconnaissance drone buzzing through the sky, telling them where
to find Langdon.
Too bad
for them, because our hero knows more secret tunnels than you can shake a stick
at. At one point, it takes Brown twenty pages to get Langdon and Brooks, in
Florence, up and down the Palazzo Vecchio's hidden passages: through the
corridor behind the Armenia panel in the Hall of Geographical Maps, into the
cupboard in the Architectural Models room, down the Duke of Athens stairway,
and so on.
Never
does the story slow down, though. Brown gives us extremely short chapters (often
just two or three pages) and constant cross-cutting. He also adores
cliffhangers. One of the storm troopers calls his superior: "'It's
Bruder,' he said. 'I think fve got an ID on the person helping Langdon.' Who is
it?' his boss replied. Bruder exhaled slowly. 'You're not going to believe
this.' " Cut to Vayentha, who thinks she's been fired for failing to kill
Langdon and is revving her motorcycle disconsolately. She's not the person
helping Langdon, though. She's something else, which you have to figure out.
The
book ends weakly, because Langdon-and Brown, too, clearly actually sympathizes
with the villain, or at least with his motives. And those who are familiar with
Brown's previous books will not be surprised that the boy doesn't get the girl.
Brooks clearly wishes it were otherwise. ''You'll know where to find me,"
she says, as she and Langdon part, and then she kisses him on the lips. He
gives her a big hug and puts her on the plane. In "The Da Vinci Code,"
Langdon's companion, Sophie Neveu, turned out to be a descendant of Jesus, and
this made the question of a romance between them a tricky business. Brooks is
free, though. Maybe Langdon is gay.
For all its absurdities, Brown's book is a
comfort, because it proves that the Divine Comedy is still alive in our culture.
The same is true, on a higher level, of the James and the Bang translations. Take
James. He probably gave us more oddities-outrages, even than he would have with
a less famous text. Surely he knew the number and the excellence of his
predecessors. But he is seventy-three and ailing, so, if he said to himself,
'What the hell, let's just do it," you can see why. As for Bang, she's not
seventy-three (she's sixtyseven), but if she has taught the Divine Comedy she
has unquestionably faced a lot of young people saying, "What?" "What?"
You can't blame her for trying to do something about that. At least she
cares. All of us should worry about her students, though. They’re going to go
off thinking that Dante wrote about meringue-pie mountains, and this is wrong.
Furthermore, there is no reason that they couldn't have faced the mountain without
the pie, and the fourteenth century without the twenty-first.
Thankfully,
because the original text survives· more faithful translations will keep
coming. Indeed, they have. The edition by Jean and Robert Hollander (2000-07)
is both accurate and beautiful. I don't think any general reader, or any
student of Mary Jo Bang's, needs more than this. But if Bang-and James, and
even Brown-disagrees, so be it. As long as Dante is here, and the text is
available, why shouldn't they have some fun?
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