Inferno, tr. Elio Zappulla.
Inferno, tr. John Ciardi.
The Divine Comedy, tr. Allen Mandelbaum.
Inferno, tr. Robert and Jean Hollander.
from Sewanee Review, Fall 2009
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 the tonalities of the highest dramatic poetry in the Western tradition or of elevated rhetorical psychodrama—of the Miltonic rhythms that blindness and English politics had banished from the real stage to the theater of imagination. Milton invented a tradition of verse narration that departs so completely from formal precedent that none has ever successfully followed it. Over the distance of three-quarters of a century, Pound's famous bellyaching about Milton now sounds like sour grapes over his not having found in Milton, the only English poet to have written a sustained poetic narrative, an instruction manual for doing it again. Dismissive of rhyme and the organizational energies of lyric (stanzaic groupings like quatrains), Milton accomplished for narrative poetry what Shakespeare did for dramatic poetry—advancing the claims of character over those of plot, of personality over the concept- and event-driven storytelling tradition that Homer began and Aristotle formalized. Without Milton's permanent deformations of blank verse there is no Prelude, no Alastor, no "Fra Lippo Lippi," and none of its modernist issue, accredited or not, from The Waste Land and The Bridge to John Brown's Body. The dramatic monologue, essentially a formal recognition of our greater interest in character than in plot, the who and not the what, needed the examples of both Shakespeare and Milton.
The Divine Comedy is not devoted to character in the Shakespearean sense. Dante's characters will never evolve or grow any farther; they do nothing to surprise us. They come to us literally from the end of time—as all commentators point out, from personal endtimes—and speak to us through the personal apocalypse whose hero is also its narrator. These characters have made their decisions and entered them in the book of time. Because Hamlet can change his mind, Hamlet is probably three acts longer than it should be (as Eliot complained); but the mind of the Ulysses of canto 26 cannot change or be changed. All Dante's characters have perfected their destinies; their personalities have matured, have accomplished what Aristotle terms their entelechies, the perfection reached with the exhaustion of a particular potential. This goes for saints as well as sinners. When Saint Peter rages about the popes who have usurped his place on earth, though he is a saint, he can still sputter like a cheated landlord: "Quelli ch'usurpa in terra il luogo mio, / il luogo mio, il luogo mio... " (Paradiso xxvii: 22-23). Divine authority penetrates human language: the result is a persistent, oddly compelling, robust amalgam of the sacred and the profane. Whence comes the Comedy's weird, unsettling matter-of-factness, as if human language could reach the level of the divine.
Shakespeare teaches us that all great art begins in the stereotypes that individual genius transforms into individual characters. Shakespeare's characters' changes of heart, whether instigated by themselves, God, destiny, or those occasions that inform against us, are never predetermined. There is no maturing of a telos already there. What shocks us in Shakespeare, what shocked Keats into calling it negative capability, was his agility at getting out of the way of his creations once the drama was under way. So self-sustaining seems the process of characterization in Shakespeare, even in his botches (e.g. Titus Andronicus), that no "real" Shakespeare seems ever to have existed. Yet the only way into Dante's characters is through Dante, whose outrageousness is his having isolated the tradition of heroic narrative in the habits that, up to that point, had been the lyric singer's. Dante introduces the autobiographical into the epic and changes both forever. His very ubiquity is probably the poem's most outrageous innovation.
The form of this poem, moreover, keeps reminding us that this is a writer whose roots were in the lyric, the breeding ground of the rootless self, the food of the autobiographical impulse; hence there is no way to get around the form itself as the vehicle of this extended reflective song. A comparison of Zappulla's and Ciardi's translations of the episode of Paolo and Francesca in canto 5 may make the point. Circle 2 is the circle of carnality, which is a relatively minor offense in Hell's canon of offenses. Ciardi has the sinners being blown around by "a war of winds," and Zappulla, by "storms that know no pity and no rest." Dante's transfiguration of the damned into cranes, helpless birds in a windstorm, is not arbitrary; it is the logical and most profound consequence of their sin, which stemmed from a voluntary loss of control, a descent to bestiality. Hence the circumstances of the punishment reproduce the initial offense and only heighten the anguish of the punished. The real punishment of transgression is the constant revelation of its real meaning. Having "betrayed reason to their appetite" (Ciardi)—Zappulla has "permitted reason to be passion's slave"—they have obliterated the threshold between will and reason, and nature in them is all bodily intelligence, pure instinct.
But, despite his love of the logic behind it, Dante takes no pleasure in their pain, and his conversation with the damned lovers yields to a subtle shift in emphasis. They are not like cranes but "mating doves," and, when Francesca speaks, the verse modulates. Here is Zappulla:
Love, the swift conqueror of gentle hearts,
Inflamed my lover with a carnal lust
For my fair form, of which I was deprived
In such a way as to offend me still.
Love, who makes the beloved love in turn,
Enchanted me and sealed our common doom.
In Hell we are as one, as once on earth.
Now Ciardi:
Love, which in gentlest hearts will soonest bloom,
seized my lover with passion for that sweet body
from which I was torn unshriven to my doom.Love, which permits no loved one not to love,
took me so strongly with delight in him
that we are one in Hell, as we were above.
There is no question of comparative accuracy. Both render the gist of Francesca's agony. Ciardi uses four words (unshriven to my doom) where Zappulla needs a line and a half. Concision or contemporaneity? Zappulla's blank verse captures both the dignified despair and the inescapability of the lovers' situation. But Ciardi has consciously (and right down to the inversion) retained the contours of the very stilnovisti that Francesca goes on to condemn along with the elements of carnal desire that are its subject matter: the shape of our discourse embodies our situation; the way we speak issues from and exposes the fullness of our character. Our words indict us. For Dante a style is the body of a philosophical or moral principle, the incarnation of vision, and an absolute way of looking at things. What Zappulla gives is the estranging banality of Hell, the likeness in unlikeness, the sense of suffering made all the more unbearable by its near-perfect explicability and similarity to the suffering of the living. This is the Hell of Clive Barker and What Dreams May Come. But Dante's Hell is on the edge that separates surreality from sentimentality. What Ciardi gets, right down to the stylistic grace notes—each stanza's starting with the word love, for instance—is the tragedy of desire. We are always ourselves, right down to the words that speak us into being. Dante is never so convincing in fact than when he lets the damned bear witness to their crimes through the cold penal logic of which Hell is the final reduction. The logical or abstract clarity of the diagnosis is, as it were, more interesting to Zappulla than the aesthetic philosophy that Dante conceived to bring it to life.
Allen Mandelbaum's translation of Inferno, to repeat, has inexplicably displaced Ciardi's from the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (1999), and the editors are too worked up in their preface ("an exciting stage in the development of [this] anthology") to explain their omissions. Mandelbaum parts gently with the poem's formal demands, but only after giving you a sense of them in his translation of the famous opening lines:
When I had journeyed half of our life's way
I found myself within a shadowed forest
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, hard it is to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear.
Fair enough: now that you have a sense of the poem's lyric elegance, let's get on with the story. Yet compare Ciardi:
Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I saywhat wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
While neither translator has a convincing way with Dante's sixth line (che nel pensier rinova la paura, with its hint of the conditional), Ciardi has Dante rather than our path doing the straying, which is, to my ear, idiomatically consonant with the way an American speaker, or poet, would say that line.
If selva oscura, moreover, is "shadowed forest," it is so only literally, and perhaps only in a translator's laboriously literal first draft. "Dark wood," Ciardi's version, instantly announces precisely what American readers don't want to have to bother with—the presence of that bete noir allegory. Line 5, with Mandelbaum's rendering of selva selvaggia e aspra e forte as "savage forest, dense and difficult," barely raises the level of expectations, whereas "so rank, so arduous a wilderness" not only iterates the initial rotacisms and takes great Longfellowish metrical strides in doing so, but neatly (for anybody who cares to remember) reminds you how Hawthorne's own Hester, we are told, entered not just any forest but a "moral wilderness." Ciardi, in other words, nearly wrings dry the connotative potential. Nor do Mandelbaum's tum-te-tumty rhythms communicate anything of the estranging dignity of Dante's Nel mezzo del camin'; none of the friction present in Dante's words—and some ghost of which makes it into Ciardi (with its serial n's, r's and m's)—is present.
Dante's speech is always powerfully direct, yet Mandelbaum's version, while direct, retains none or little of that power and comes across as a hopelessly confused compromise between the embarrassed reflexiveness of contemporary poetic diction and the enforced flatness that it is always attempting to escape:
Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart,
Took hold of him because of the fair body
Taken from me—how that was done still wounds me.
Even those familiar with the poem may be stopped by the emphatic vagueness of him; the pronoun belongs to Paolo, of course, but Paolo is never directly named in canto 5. He is identifiable only by way of his scandalous connection with Francesca, who speaks these words. Mandelbaum supplies the background and the antecedents in his note, but it's either a puzzling oversight or a tacit dismissal of the reader's situation not to anticipate the mental breath that must precede our continuing to read. Over the course of the translation the cost of such oversights is telling. Here and there Mandellbaum coughs up rhetorical furballs that are present in the original and that test the resourcefulness of the translator. Thus "I think that he was thinking that I thought" is how he bouncily renders Dante's thinking out loud about Virgil's prolepses into his questions (Inferno 13:25). The original reads Io credo ch'ei credette ch'io credesse; Zappulla, reaching for respectability, has "I am convinced he thought that I believed," whereas Ciardi gives us "I think perhaps he thought that I was thinking," which faithfully translates the gist of Dante's good-natured puzzlement without accidental invocation of the authority of Abbot and Costello.
At other points Mandelbaum pushes the Comedy's comic possibilities to the point of, in this case, tragic slapstick. In Inferno 12:80-82, when Chiron the centaur marvels over the fact that Dante, unlike everyone else in Hell, physically affects the environment, Mandelbaum has, "Have you noticed / how he who walks behind moves what he touches? / Dead soles are not accustomed to do that." A pun worthy of Reader's Digest, but nowhere in the original Italian, which has only i pie de' morti and no pedestrian doubletakes on souls and soles. Compare Ciardi's version, which Mandelbaum openly pickpockets: "Have you noticed / how the one who walks behind moves what he touches? / That is not how the dead go."(1) Irritations such as these may not sink a competent translation, and Mandelbaum's is certainly that; yet they neither rise to the level of inspired mistakes nor constitute novel interpretations on the translator's part. One can only wonder about the editorial wisdom that would elect to jettison a classic of the translator's art for a middlebrow translation of the same poem.
Effective translation should always be accountable to the original, but often accountability is achieved, or is only possible as time goes by and the canon expands, by the addition of hefty scholarship. The newer bilingual Inferno from Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander is a deeply learned—and, by its looks, totally accountable—version of Dante's poem in the translations that began appearing a decade ago, and it is equipped with a scholarly apparatus that balloons the text out to more than six hundred pages. The accountability comes at the cost of the intense readability and enjoyment of Ciardi's version, yet it is still stirring to see two experts picking their way over the old ground and summarizing a good deal that the amateurs have left out. The Hollanders' notes to the poem rather than their translation makes this a nearly indispensable companion to Dante.
Their note, for instance, for the presence of the three metaphysical beasts that appear in canto 1 is typically exhaustive. All you probably really need to know is that these three beasts—a she-wolf, a lion, a leopard—are figures traditionally (or at least in the most respected and earliest accredited ancient sources) said to represent three of the seven deadly sins. But the Hollanders, not content with this scanting of a much longer scholarly conversation, reveal a tradition of long-standing disagreements among commentators "as to which beast represents which Aristotelian/Ciceronian category of sin: is the leopard fraud or incontinence? is the she-wolf incontinence or fraud?" The mother of all footnotes is to Inferno 1:32-54, the Hollanders' runs for two pages. At another point, in canto 4, Dante includes himself in the company of the greatest poets in history; again the Hollanders come to the rescue: "For a review of the various sorts of discomfort among the commentators occasioned by Dante's promotion of his own poetic career in this verse (some going so far as to insist that he displays humility here rather than pride) see Mazzoni.... It is clear that Dante is putting himself in very good company on the basis of very little accomplishment: a series of lyrics, the Vita Nuova, two unfinished treatises, and three cantos of the Comedy. His daring is amazing."
In other words here we are catching Dante in the act of betting on the inside straight. The fact that he pulls it off has made us forget how little he had coming in—a fact that the Hollanders' alone among the translations under review here seem either alert to or capable of reporting at length (and the note goes on for another two paragraphs). Their point, of course, is not mere donnish fussiness or squeamishness but confidence in readers' abilities to make up their own minds, perhaps their curiosity to learn more, as well as an example of the serious yet good-natured character of real scholarship when it's done by pros. It is also a reminder that nothing is ever written or read in isolation, and the experience of reading Dante is too often an isolating one.
Yet the price of fidelity to the original is also occasionally high and, to my mind, unnecessarily so. In Inferno 2:52, Dante reveals his fear to Virgil about making the trip to Hell, and Virgil's response is to explain that his own intercession in Dante's moral crisis could not have occurred without the philanthropic concern of others. Dante has,
Io era tra color che son sospesi
e donna mi chiamo beata e bella,
tal che di comandare io la richiesi.
In the Hollanders' translation line fifty-two is perfectly literal and perfectly unnatural:
I was among the ones who are suspended
when a lady called me, so blessed and so fair
that I implored her to command me.
You need the note, a model of scholarly economy and pointed comprehensiveness, to get out of the reader's muddle over the use of suspended in line 52: "The verbal adjective sospesi," meaning the participle suspended, "that is, in a position between the presence of God and actual punishment, is a technical term for the virtuous heathen who dwell in Limbo." The note then directs you to yet additional commentary. Zappulla follows Ciardi in demystifying these lines' strangeness when translated literally and gives '"While I was with the other souls in Limbo, / A lady came to me, she was so sweet, / So fair, I asked her to command my will." Ciardi's is the best solution:
I was a soul
among the souls of Limbo, when a Lady
so blessed and so beautiful, I prayed her
to order and command my will, called to me.
His note reads, "See Canto IV, lines 31—45, where Virgil explains his state in Hell." It seems incontestable to me that Ciardi's is the supreme choice from the standpoint of readerliness. His choices are directed by a familiarity with and a fidelity to Dante's prosodic designs and may have led him to take liberties—and this is a liberty. Dante never mentions the word Limbo or calls the place by that name. Yet, when there is no crux involved, you wonder what might be the advantage of a translation that achieves scholarly comprehensiveness at the cost of the tradition of comprehensive common sense that is also part of the poem's background. Still, when their notes are not means of breaching the obstacle the translation has become, the Hollanders' version is both a recognition of the canonical realities and a wonderful, thoroughly reliable complement (along with Zappulla) to Ciardi's translation, which is still the champion.
Note:
1) To round this off, let me add that Zappulla spends four lines that make the same point but surrender all the seamless elegance of the original: "Look at him! You see? / It's obvious that anything he treads / On moves. I mean that one standing behind / His guide. The feet of dead men can't do that."
About the Author
J. T. Barbarese has contributed prose (essays and reviews) and poetry to the Sewanee Review since 1986.
University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
Editor: George Core
Managing Editor: Leigh Anne Couch
Copyright © 2009 by J. T. Barbarese
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
