Dante in English

After some shrewd preliminary comments on Dante's Italian as revealed in his Commedia, Eric Griffiths, the co-editor of this volume, explains that his Introduction 'is an introduction in English to Dante, not an introduction to Dante-in-English'. He is, unfortunately, quite correct: the Introduction, for all its great interest, does not really belong with the anthology of English translations. Detailed annotation of the translations attempts to link the two; but the annotation is of varying value. Sometimes it seems irrelevant, sometimes illuminating; but too often it is concerned more with the original Italian – not available here – than with what the translator has made of it. We are told, for instance, of Longfellow's lines 'Broke the deep lethargy within my head / A heavy thunder'(Inferno IV, 1–2) that 'the abruptness and syntactic inversion of this opening match the original'. So they do; but are they good English? That question is not addressed. The editors seem throughout more sensitive to Italian than to English; but anthologists of translations, like the translators themselves, ought to be in tune with both.

The Introduction is preceded by a short account of Dante's life and times. Apart from a slick but utterly misleading comparison between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, on the one hand, and today's United Nations, this is a fine piece of work. The public events in which Dante was involved are never easy for a modern reader to follow, but here they are outlined very cogently. Matthew Reynolds has managed not only to write a clear account, but also (apart from the comparison I have just mentioned) one which does not try to adjust Dante to our notions, but rather conveys much of the dissimilarity between his time and ours.

Neither the Life nor the Introduction provides one thing which any reader of Dante needs – an outline of the structure of the Commedia. Hence the anthology is without its most basic requirement: a context for the passages chosen. Three diagrams, one for each of the stages of Dante's journey, and a short explanation could easily have supplied this.

If the Introduction is read simply as an essay on Dante, then it willbe found to be packed with good things – so many that I shall draw attention to only a few. Mention is made of the unfortunate tendency of Dante's English translators 'to plump and flesh out what he so delicately etched'. The anthology exemplifies this many times, and also reveals some of the reasons for this elaboration. Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745) obviously did not think that Dante had quite brought out the horror of Ugolino's making a meal of Archbishop Ruggieri's head, and so we find him adding a few details of his own:

He from the Horrid Food his Mouth withdrew, And wiping with the Clotted, Offal hair His shudd'ring lips, raising his Head thus spake.

As Griffiths shrewdly points out, English poets do have a 'greed for sensuous concretion'. There is, I believe, a further reason for this tendency to elaboration when translating. Dante often amazes us with his graphic representation of physical objects, and it is all too easy for a translator, struggling to do the same, to add fresh details during his floundering attempt, with the result that he obscures the spiritual effect which Dante's concreteness achieves so simply.

The anthology also illustrates elaboration to stress pathos in the version of the Ugolino episode by Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825), and in the version of the Francesca episode by Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), together with Hunt's reworking of this episode in Francesca da Rimini. Sometimes, of course, elaboration comes from a simple unwillingness to call a spade a spade, as in the excerpt from Henry Boyd (c. 1750–1832).

Griffiths' description of the Commedia as 'a learning process' is thought-provoking, and it is backed up with considerable detail. The contrast he makes between modern and medieval attitudes towards Scripture illuminates Dante's world view, and, although this is not Griffiths' primary intention, our own too. Similarly, the sheer complexity of what people may be said to 'believe', in Dante's time or in ours, is well brought out. We may nowadays think of Dante as being 'eclectic' and 'syncretic', when for instance he uses pagan myth alongside Christian history, and we may develop these ideas at tedious length, and build theories upon them; but Griffiths cuts the cackle when he declares wittily, and unanswerably, that 'we face not the result of elite cultural theory but early instances of recycling, a sensible use of what was lying around and came in handy. Even the most orthodox believers have other things to do as well as believe orthodoxly.'

I do not think that the many references in this introduction to modern writers – Proust, Beckett, Mandelstam, and many others, in fact almost everyone we think we ought to have read – are always very illuminating. Griffiths is at his best when he expresses his own insight, and dispenses with such fashionable back-up. The Introduction is long enough, and wide-ranging enough, to form a small book on its own. It is a formidable, and enjoyable, addition to Dante studies, although I question its suitability in its present context.

The anthology of translations and adaptations contains some passages which, by their very success, set up a standard against which so many other passages, through no fault of the editors, inevitably fall short. (It is true that, in contrast with, say, Virgil or Horace, there are not many readable translations of Dante in English.) We have here some well-chosen excerpts from Chaucer. His reworking of the Ugolino episode in The Monk's Tale is, despite a greater tendency to pathos than is found in Dante, a good touchstone. In fact it is so straightforward that it is noticeably easier to read than most of the passages which follow in modern English. Chaucer's version of Purgatorio VII, 121–3:

Ful selde up riseth by his branches smale Prowesse of man, for God, of his goodnesse, Wole that of hym we clayme oure gentillesse

is not put to shame by the original:

Rade volte risurge per li rami    l'umana probitate; e questo vole    quei che la dà, perché da lui si chiami.

There is a similar terseness and lucidity in another 'must', Milton's rendering of Dante's attack on the Donation of Constantine:

Ah, Constantine, of how much ill was cause Not thy Conversion, but those rich demaines That the first wealthy Pope receiv'd of thee.

Yeats' Ego Dominus Tuus fits beautifully into the category of those poems which 'allude' to Dante. Also the Eliot passage from Little Gidding, 'In the uncertain hour before the morning …', is remarkable, among other qualities, for its wholly successful adaptation of Dante's terza rima into English. Tennyson's Ulysses is here too, and justifiably quoted in full.

Nevertheless, there are many passages that would have been better omitted, either because their relation to Dante is too tenuous or distant (if it exists at all), or because the quality of the writing is not high enough. Spenser is in, but one wonders why, since the chosen excerpt has nothing much to do with Dante, while other Spenserian passages which are not included – the 'wandring wood' near the beginning of the first canto of The Faerie Queene (Spenser's own version of the 'selva oscura'), or the Fradubio incident in the following canto (reminiscent of Dante's wood of the suicides in InfernoXIII, even though it is probably ultimately traceable to Virgil), seem more, although not very, relevant. It is almost as though the editors were determined not to omit any English poet of note.

It is difficult also to see what Shelley is doing here. There seems to be very little, if anything, of Dante in Shelley's loosely conceived and slapdashly written Triumph of Life. It is in full terza rima, but rhymed with a strange disregard for the rhyming words except for the fact that they do rhyme:

Upon that path where flowers never grew;    And weary with vain toil & faint for Thirst Heard not the fountains whose melodious dew    Out of their mossy cells forever burst …

'Dew' there is simply the wrong word, and also is strikingly at odds with the next rhyme-word, 'burst', a common feature of translations into full terza rima.

Other passages which are here but do not deserve their place, simply because of the poor quality of the writing, include those from Robert Duncan (1919–88) and from Robert Creeley (1926– ), whose 'absence of perfectionism' (as Denise Levertov has called it, with striking understatement) is mentioned here with an apparently straight face. Ezra Pound's description of Bertran de Born in Near Perigord, whichis truly Dantesque, is not included. Instead we have, in imitation presumably of Dante's discriminating and significant coprology, a passage which manages to be overdone and, at the same time, rather coy:

black beetles, burrowing into the sh-t … the great arse-hole,    broken with piles … Flies carrying news, harpies dripping sh-t through the air …

The full absurdity of this passage can only be appreciated by much more extensive quotation, and the editors do not spare us.

If such passages had been omitted, there would have been space for a more generous selection from M. B. Anderson (1851–1933), whose rendering in full terza rima is still readable. There would have been room too for a more representative selection from the Sayers/Reynolds translation of the Commedia, which was completed in 1962. As it is, this is represented by one canto from Inferno only, when it deserves at least one canto from each of the three cantiche: despite some eccentricities, the Sayers/Reynolds version is by far the most lively of all the complete translations excerpted here.

We can be grateful for some interesting and unusual finds among those poems with a tangential relation to Dante – by the so often sneered at Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), by Landor (1775–1864), by Longfellow (1807–1882), by Thomas Moore (1779–1852), and evenF. S. Mahony ('Father Prout', 1804–1866).

Each writer included is provided with a headnote on himself and footnotes to the passages. These comments range from the astute – 'instant personifications such as "wearied Grief" are not characteristic of the Commedia' – to the pointless or even weird. To say that 'Sisson, like Dante, worked in civil administration' is at best to try to establish a resemblance where none exists; at worst it goes against the attempt in the Introduction to this book to emphasize the otherness of Dante's world. To report, of Yeats' Cuchulain Comforted, that 'Yeats wrote this poem first in prose' tells us nothing in particular, since that was his usual practice. To relate Pound's description of politicians as 'Addressing crowds through their arse-holes' to Inferno XXI, 139 ('ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta') is needless, since this is a saying as common as the practice itself. Worse, one is amazed to be told, of Binyon's phrase 'to give me heart of grace', that 'the original means "to encourage me"'! What else does Binyon's phrase mean? In such comments, as elsewhere in this book, one does sense a lack of discrimination, particularly of that discrimination which distinguishes good writing from bad. It will therefore perhaps not be out of place to discuss some qualities which seem desirable in a modern verse translation of the Commedia.

Any translation should, I think, be in a middle style, the tonerising and falling when the original demands it, but certainly not simply when the requirements of metre or rhyme demand it. It followsthat there is no place for 'thou' and 'thee' and their derivatives. The distinction between a formal and an informal style of address is there in Dante, as in modern Italian, French, and German; but it does not persist in English. Since this distinction has been lost, we cannot convey itin modern English by using forms which, although they do survive in dialect, do not carry the same meaning. This is not a minor point: to write as though nothing had changed in English cannot convey the distinctions which Italian makes, but it can give Dante an eccentric and archaic feel. Other archaisms and poeticisms are also best avoided, as are distortions of the normal word-order.

These negative requirements are worth stressing, because they are so often ignored by translators. So often their work fails to be natural, concise, and energetic, as Dante's is. If we can assume that translators nowadays do not imagine, in the old nineteenth-century fashion, that an archaic, pseudo-biblical manner is de rigueur for the translation of any great literary work, then we have to ask ourselves why such a manner remains so common.

The reason is the difficulty which anyone encounters in writing verse. How does one cope with the restrictions of metre, and, if the poem is rhymed, with the demands of rhyme? This is particularly hard with Dante. His hendecasyllables can be represented well by English pentameters, and the only question there is the competence of the translator. The matter of rhyme is a different problem altogether. Terza rima is not easy in English, where there are few poems in this measure, and those few are seldom successful. And yet most would agree that the three-line structure of Dante's poem should be preserved somehow.

Since this cannot be done by writing blank verse and then simply chopping the result into three-line bits, there are those who, both by precept and example, show their preference for the complete preservation in English of the Italian rhyme-scheme. Among these, the three most notable and successful translations (all from the last century) are those by M. B. Anderson (under-represented in this book), Geoffrey L. Bickersteth (not represented at all), and Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (represented here only by one canto by the first of those collaborators). All four have argued persuasively for the use of full terza rima. The introduction to Bickersteth's translation is worth quoting:

No one, surely, can seriously maintain that a language is deficient in words of like-sounding termination, which boasts of the Faerie Queene and Don Juan … the Spenserian stanza is proof positive that English possesses enough rhymes for the purposes of terza rima.

This is not as sound an argument as it may at first appear. Both Don Juan and The Faerie Queene are expansively written, in the sense that the poet writes as though he had all the time in the world to say what he wants to say. This is not to denigrate either of these great poems, but simply to distinguish them from the closely written Commedia whose lines are all, in the old meaning of the word, 'strong', densely packed with meaning, giving the translator little room to manoeuvre. Moreover, Don Juan is a comic poem, where a certain strain in the rhyming, and also much 'irrelevant' badinage in the content, can be part of the general comic effect:

So Juan wept, as wept the captive Jews By Babel's waters, still remembering Sion: I'd weep, – but mine is not a weeping Muse, And such light griefs are not a thing to die on; Young men should travel, if but to amuse Themselves; and the next time their servants tie on Behind their carriages their new portmanteau, Perhaps it may be lined with this my canto.

(II.xvi)

In Spenser a certain strangeness of diction is necessary for the effect he is aiming at, and so he has plenty of scope for varying his vocabulary and the shape of his words, and thus coping with the problems posed by an apparently difficult rhyme scheme:

For whiles they fly that Gulfes deuouring iawes, They on this rock are rent, and sunck in helpless wawes.

(II.xii.4)

In both Byron and Spenser rhyming is made easier by the kind of poem they have chosen to write and the manner in which they have chosento write it; which is, of course, evidence of their skill, and not a lucky accident. They do not provide good models for the translating of Dante, in which too often the demand for rhyme leads to circumlocution, and the use of words which suit the rhyme but not the context, particularly words in the wrong register.

How then is it possible to maintain in translation the three-line structure of the original, which is so in keeping with the structure of Dante's thought? T. S. Eliot's Dantesque lines in the second sectionof Little Gidding – which rely not on rhyme, but on the alternation of masculine and feminine line-endings – are brilliantly achieved, but they reveal a solution for that occasion only, and could not be followed more generally. However, A. W. von Schlegel suggested a way. He is, of course, still famous for his translations of Shakespeare; but he also translated some 1,700 lines of the Commedia. His comments are the more forceful when we remember that he was an exceptionally good translator and was translating into German, where rhymes are easier to come by than in English. Schlegel wrote (in my translation):

It was impossible in our language to maintain these triple rhymes while still translating accurately; and also the euphony [of the verse] suffered less through my leaving the middle line unrhymed than it would have done in Italian.

This method, which has come to be known generally as 'defective terza rima', seems to offer a way forward. In the volume under review the selections from John Ciardi (1916–1985) show something of what it can do.

The mere reproduction of a rhyme-scheme, moreover, should not be regarded as an end in itself. The general purpose of the rhyming is to maintain the three-line structure, and to this end it need not even be full rhyme, or even always half-rhyme, but sometimes assonance or a mere echo. There is also a final point: it is more difficult to find rhymes when translating than it is when writing original verse, since fidelity to the work which is being translated limits what can be said and how it can be said, and the writer's scope is therefore narrowed.

There is little indication of editorial concern with such problems in this book, where too much seems to be the result of whimsy rather than a considered and settled policy. As an instance, there is a strange obsession with the title of Dante's great work. The 'Editors' Note' says 'We refer throughout to Dante's last poem as the Commedia without the "Divina" which crept into its title in the sixteenth century.' Then the question is referred to again, at more length, in the Introduction. What is said about the origins of the title is accurate; but it seems wrong-headed to insist upon changing it now after hundreds of years of general acceptance. After all, it is not like the title of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, where the corruption to Astrophel and Stella destroys the wit and meaning. The absurdity, and indeed futility, of harping on this point is underlined by the fact that on the very first page of this volume itself the work is referred to as the Divine Comedy.

In this volume much of the work of selection and discrimination that the editors themselves should have performed is left to the reader. However, if that reader is prepared to forage, sift, and sort out, there is much of value here.