Four Translations of Dante's Inferno

When John Ciardi translated The Inferno, over fifty years ago, he approached it through a poet's sensitivity to the limits of translation and an amateur Dante scholar's sense of the scholarly headaches. The bulk of theological, political, and historical information is a problem for both Italian and English readers. Ciardi's solution was to produce endnotes that are not only lucid but so appealingly down-to-earth that the notes might alone justify the translation. The larger problem, though, is represented by the formal demands of terza rima, which you cannot just ignore. Nothing comparable exists anywhere in our English narrative verse aside from Shelley's last great lyrics—isometrics carried out against the example of Dante's great original. This is not the place to argue the inextricable dependence of form on idea, or how form in poetry really is ideology. Had Shelley finished The Triumph of Life, he might have left an English terza rima suited to the verse narrative of such a rhyme-poor and uninflected language as ours. As it is, the form comes down to us intact in wonders like "Ode to the West Wind" or in distant homages to its tensile strength such as Stevens's "Auroras of Autumn."

It is hard to approach Elio Zappulla's elegant, dignified, and altogether faithful version of Inferno without finding it in the shadow of Ciardi's. Zappulla's scholarship is satisfying, and his notes, from the vantage of amateur Dantisti, probably better—less interpretive, perhaps a richer source of cultural detail. Take, for instance, Ciardi's note to the heroic political figure whom Dante calls only the "Greyhound" in canto 1. As he often does, Dante refuses to enlighten his readers; that's part of the spiritual test. Ciardi tells you only that the reference is almost certainly to Can Grande, Dante's patron; Zappulla, however, reminds you, cannily, that Can Grande was not just Dante's literary godfather but a powerful political boss whose name meant Big Dog. Zappulla's scholarship seems sturdier, less chatty, and on the whole more dependable, with an inevitability that is satisfying if you read the notes only for information.

Nevertheless you easily warm to Ciardi's way of buttonholing you in those bibliographic alleyways that scholarship reserves for unimpressive but useful data. Take this one example (among dozens) that occurs in a note to canto 21 dealing with Dante's "coarseness . . . [which] has offended certain delicate readers": "It is worth pointing out that the mention of bodily function is likely to be more shocking in a Protestant than in a Catholic culture. It has often seemed to me that the offensive language of Protestantism is obscenity; the offensive language of Catholicism is profanity or blasphemy: one offends on a scale of unmentionable words for bodily function, the other on a scale of disrespect for the sacred." "The difference," he goes on to say—the full note runs for two paragraphs—"is not national, but religious"; to illustrate his argument Ciardi refers to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. In something as small as a note to a single canto Ciardi's sensibility is ranging as he pulls all the loose ends together, organizing out of all the data, even seeming incidentals, the substance of a worldview. It is what contributes to Ciardi's translation's lasting charm, and what makes the Norton company's dropping Ciardi's for Allen Mandelbaum's relatively lifeless translation (in the most recent edition of Norton's World Masterpieces) difficult to justify.

Yet Zappulla's choice of the English blank-verse line may have been a mistake. Blank verse comes to readers of English covered with Shakespeare's and Milton's fingerprints. What we hear are...