Dante Re-Englished

Prue Shaw

The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri Trans. and introduced Kenneth Mackenzie (Folio Society E9.95)

The best parts of Shelley's unfinished poem The Triumph of Life give the English reader some sense of what The Divine Comedy sounds like in Italian. In it Shelley used strict terza rima, an almost impossibly difficult metre, but one which he here makes seem effortless and inevitable. In Dante, the same exhilarating mastery of a demanding medium is accompanied by a range of tone and style infinitely more varied and subtle than Shelley's, so that the Comedy, which aspires to encompass all human experience, from the most squalid physical degradation to the most exalted intellectual and spiritual truths, seeks to match this aspiration in linguistic terms, including within itself all the expressive possibilities of human speech. The poem ranges from obscenity to sublimity. It stops short only at the ineffable, the strictly inexpressible splendour of the divine. The extraordinary richness and variety of Dante's language is controlled by an acute sensitivity to tone and register, so that every element seems in context right and necessary, the perfectly chosen word to express the poet's meaning.

Dorothy Sayer's Penguin Classics version of the.,poem — for a long time now the most readily available tfanslation to an English reader — attempts to match Dante's metrical skill and his linguistic and stylistic range. It uses slang, archaisms, and neolog isms, but it uses them indiscriminately. The result is a jumble in which all these dispa rate elements are incongruously and irritatingly mixed. I budged not, but abode is a not uncharacteristic turn of phrase.

Less obviously jarring examples can be utterly destructive of the poet's effects. To translate Ulysses's ardorelch'io ebbi a divenir del mondo evert° (the passion I had to become experienced in the world) as the restless itch to rove and rummage through the world is to trivialise Ulysses's thirst for knowledge as surely as it is to betray Dante's fastidious ear. (An 'itch . . to rummage' sounds as if Ulysses wants to turn the attic out.) I budged not, but abode, incidentally, corresponds to nothing in Dante, who says simply Ma poi che vide ch'io non ml par tiva, rendered in Sayers's next line So, when he saw me hold my ground. Persistent pad ding (roughly one hag line in three), and the astonishing contortions produced by efforts to accommodate the rhyme-scheme, are defects of this version directly attributable to the retention of terza rima. Its vitality, adduced by some as its great positive achievement, is the flailing vitality of a monster. Nothing could be further from the disciplined vigour and energy of the original.

Shelley himself translated a small portion of the Purgatorio and may well have found translating into terza rima more tax ing than composing in it. Certainly terza rima versions tend to be particularly unsuccessful. It perhaps requires the tal ents of a poet even to begin to solve the problems — a supposition borne out by the fact that the least unsatisfactory version to date (long unobtainable, and now happily reprinted in the Penguin Portable Dante) is the one by Laurence Binyon.

To abandon terza rima — a metre Dante himself invented, of 'course — is to lose a very powerful part of the poem's effect: the forward propulsion of the narrative, carTied inexorably on by the interlinking rhymes; and the formal satisfaction of the three-in-one principle, which works at all levels in the poem as it does in the created universe it mirrors. But there ought to be compensating advantages: no forced moves, no strained rhymes, a greater likelihood of remaining faithful to Dante's own words.

Some translators, notably John Ciardi, take a middle course and rhyme in a looser and less rigorous way than terza rima.

Kenneth Mackenzie's new version for the Folio Society elects not to rhyme at all.

This version is printed as blank verse (though it must be said that occasional lines resolutely refuse to scan as any kind of pentameter). It invites comparison with the two classic blank verse translations of Cary and Longfellow; and emerges very creditably.

Cary's booming Miltonics now seem almost comic: cid sa ii tuo dottore (your teacher knows that) comes out as that kens thy leam'd instructor. The sustained sweep and flow of the blank verse paragraph, undeniably impressive as a pastiche of Paradise Lost, is far from Dante. Longfellow, linguistically less idiosyncratic, is rhythmically closer to Dante also. He even prints his lines in groups of threes, so that they look like terzine. But his scrupulous line by line rendering leads to some awkwardness and occasional incomprehensibility. Mackenzie avoids both Cary's rhythmical obtrusiveness and Longfellow's linefor-line correspondence. He exploits the advantages of blank verse while remaining free of its drawbacks.

One simple criterion for assessing versions of the Comedy might be the extent to which translators refrain from adding to what Dante wrote. The problem is in part intractable. English simply tends to express the same content more concisely than Italian, so that to match hendecasOlable to pentameter is almost inevitably to dilute.

An example should help to make this clear: Francesca's words in which she tells how reading of Lancelot and Guinevere led to her own and Paolo's undoing. The book acted as a Gallehault (the English equivalent would be a Pander), it brought the lovers together. The lines in Italian are miraculously simple: questi, che mai da me non fia diviso la bocca mi back') tutto tremante.

Galeotto fu ii libro e chi lo scrisse. Quel giorno pin non vi leggemmo avante.

Sayers translates: He that may never more from me be parted Trembling all over, kissed my mouth. I say The book was Galleot, Galleot the complying Ribald who wrote; we read no more that day.

She has gained the admirable concision of we read no more that day, but at what price. Not only the superfluous I say, but the ludicrous complying ribald, which adds a crassly moralistic comment to the economy of Dante, the reticence of Francesca. It destroys the lines the whole episode has been moving towards, and destroys them on every level. (It is noticeable that those translators who do pad reveal their hands most clearly in the padding. Even Shelley's I fragment of Purgatorio is most Shelleyesque where he is furthest from Dante: mid the gloomsIPierced with my charmed eye . .) Mackenzie reads: . • . he who shall never be Parted from me all trembling kissed my mouth. A Galleot was the book and he who wrote it; We read no further in the book that day.

No padding: there is nothing here that is not in the original. The reason becomes clear when we notice that Mackenzie's cantos are regularly shorter than Dante's by anything up to ten lines. (This is not immediately obvious because the lines are not numbered in the Folio text.) Nothing is lost, the same coutent is tactfully and unobtrusively ordered into fewer lines. Mackenzie, like all other translators of the Comedy I have come across, reduces Dante's richness and subtlety to a uniform homogeneity of style. (Even Cary and Sayers are homogeneous in their eccentricity.) There is a consistent levelling down, a flattening out to a neutral, middle style. But better something neutral than something which falsifies, distorts, and betrays. At best, Mackenzie suggests something of the qualities of Dante's language; at worst, he is merely pedestrian. There are no arresting or haunting lines. But neither are there any offensive or laughable ones.

Only when Mackenzie unnecessarily reduces the linguistic compass of the poem does one want to take issue with him. A small (but I think significant) illustration. bante's ancestor Cacciaguida greets him in the 15th canto of Paradiso in Latin, in words which allusively remind us that bante's voyage to the afterlife parallels those of Aeneas and St Paul. There is a deliberate echo of Anchises's words in Aeneid VI (0 sanguis meus . ). Macken zie translates into English, and although he Comments on the Virgilian parallel, he does not mention that Cacciaguida's first three lines are in Latin. But this is important, not a mere whim on Dante's part. The use of the most elevated form of speech known to the Poet sets the seal of solemnity and dignity Oh the encounter, providing an ideal contrast to the episode in inferno where Nimrod, the giant responsible for the tower of abel, speaks in gibberish. Here we have the extremes of human speech, from unintelligible nonsense to language as densely and powerfully evocative in poetic and spiritual terms as it could well be. A note would have been in order.

On the whole the notes are helpful and adequate. The introduction is less satisfactory, containing some simplistic and even false assertions. For example, Mackenzie Contends that Dante 'makes it clear that he does not believe that Hell is an underground dungeon where the damned are literally burned, that Purgatory is a high mountain on the other side of the world, or that Heaven is up in the sky'. Where and how does Dante make this clear? Certainly nowhere in the poem; indeed it could be said that the main burden of the poem's effort is to convince the reader of the physical reality of the realms it describes. Further misleading statements about judgment and tstice seem clearly designed to make ante's view of the afterlife more palatable Li) the modern reader. But if an English reader turns to a translation of Dante today it is surely because the une Comedy is a great poem, not because its Christian or theological significance. Equally, i it is because it is a great poem, a great work of the imagination, that it continues to provide such a challenge to translators. Probably out of modesty, Mackenzie tlYs nothing at all in his introduction about Uante'S poetry or the problems he faced in translating it. This is a great pity, but s it hould not lead us to underestimate his e onsiderable achievement. There are now C lose on 50 complete version of the Divine c .°InedY in English, some 40 of them in verse. This latest one takes an honourable Place among them. It remains only to say that the book is beautifully printed and typographically Pleasure to read, though John FlaxmOn's eengravings which intersperse the text seem n elegant irrelevance.