Coming Clean:
Like and dislikes
On
Tuesday 4th of August three enthusiastic readers of Dante presented
favourite translations as part of the third Carmelite Library Lecture for 2015.
In conclusion, Robert Gribben, Will Johnston, and Philip Harvey ‘came clean’
with declarations of their likes and dislikes, their own thoughts on good
translation of the Comedy and named some preferences. All three sets of closing
remarks are published here on the Library blog. These are Robert’s closing
words.
Now you hear from
the junior member of this group of Dante lovers! My interest began when my
professor in Cambridge in 1968 read to us part of a canto in both the original
Italian and then in English. I suspect the English was Dorothy L. Sayers,
but both language versions moved me. It led to my wife and I learning Italian
for about seven years, until I could at least recognize the stems of verbs and
nouns and begin to see the nuances of Dante's poetry. I love Sayers'
theological essays, and all her detective novels several times, but I have not
read all three volumes (Pelican, beginning in 1949) of Dorothy L's Commedia.
However, in recent times I find myself coming back to her for accurate
translation, in which she retains the
three-line terza rima, blithely rejecting the 'alleged impossibility' of
finding enough rhymes in English (she rehearses her arguments in 10 of her
69-page introductory essay (to Hell).
Her account of the background to Dante and his world is remarkable for
its detail, though no doubt now superseded by studies such as Prue Shaw's.
However, my
favourite translation for getting the gist of a canto is Mark Musa's,
boldly entitled The Portable Dante (Penguin 1995). His language is
modern American (more East Coast universities than street slang). His introduction runs to 43 pages, and is
easier to absorb than Sayers'. His translation makes no attempt at the terza
rima, but its triplets are 'rhymeless iambic pentameter', that is, blank
verse. His footnotes throughout the Commedia are hugely helpful and not
too numerous; but best of all are his short essays before each canto
summarizing its contents and making the links across Dante's schema. And he is
indeed portable.
Robert Durling's are not. Three enormous volumes (Oxford UP
from 1995 to 2011) amounting to some
21,000 pages, but you also get the original text, with an English translation
on the facing page, a commentary almost
literally on every word, phrase and allusion, canto by canto, plus maps, charts
and relevant contemporary texts from e.g. Virgil. His translation is literal
prose, only arranged in triplets to match the Italian text. It is very spare, very precise: its intention
is to get the meaning. These are the volumes for those who want to
penetrate to the bottom, particularly if you are interested in the mediaeval
Italian.
I have only just met
the very English Sissons and the Irish Carson, and I love Carson,
though it's a pity he only translated the Inferno. He is a bit
rollicking and backstreet Belfast.
Last, to our own, if
such a serial expatriate can still claim to be Australian: Clive James.
You will know Clive from his poetry, his essays and autobiographical books and
from his television. He was a generation
behind me at Cambridge, and his autobiographical stuff amuses me in a nostalgic
way. His recent reflections on his somewhat drawn-out dying I find fascinating,
and impressive. And I find him something
of a mystery - I speak as a Christian - and not least when he translates, with
such care and respect, reams of poetry whose underlying faith he must reject. I
have noticed this most recently as I have worked through the Paradiso
(with Musa in my hand). Translating the Commedia
has been a life's work, and it is dedicated to his wife, Prue Shaw, a very
distinguished Dantean scholar.
His introduction is
a mere 23 pages and worth reading for seeing into his mind. Does his didactic
approach to the modern reader, of adding into the text explanations of
mediaeval references, work? Well, they help, but they are not sufficient if you
really want to know what Dante means. There are times when it's not
translation, it's paraphrase, a problem some biblical translations share. He
does thereby make the translation much longer than the original.
Clive rejects the
claims of the terza rima. He chooses, as I said, the quatrain, or
rather, rhyming couplets, which he churns out with ease, so naturally that as
one of his friends said, they sound like Clive talking. Certainly there are phrases and expressions
which are pure Australian. But one thing
Clive James gets brilliantly. His page design shows no sign of couplets,
quatrains or triplets: the verses follow each other down the page to the end,
every 160 or so of them per canto. He captures one central aspect of Dante: the
way in which a new idea burst forth from halfway through a line, so that almost
breathlessly you are catapulted ahead. Clive has Dante's splendid pace
right, and this makes the translation fairly whip along, a thrill to read out
loud. That's why I chose the sudden arrival of the angel with the boatful of
souls. It's why I found Inferno canto 1 so fresh (along with Carson). It
applies throughout, including in the mutual admiration of Franciscans and
Dominicans in the Paradiso, not necessarily the most arresting part of
the plot. In the end, his version excites, amuses, challenges me, and for that
I am very grateful.
And for us, moderns?
Depending on the admirer, [Dante] was the harbinger of modern poetry,
the liberator of vernacular speech, the civic leader, the wanderer and refugee,
the prophet of nationalism, the advocate of universal government, the exacting
craftsman, the master of the poetic monologue - a man for all seasons. To those
struggling to liberate 'Italy enslaved' [P 6], he was the founding father of
his country - a mediaeval Garibaldi' [1].
Dante appeals at many levels, from his descriptions of the Italian
landscape, to his vivid images.
Australians might like it because
it is in the vernacular, because of its realism, and that is a virtue of
James's translation. We might share a love of the human story written in
mythical form - think Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, Ursula Le Guin, the endlessly
re-cycled Arthurian legend, the detective novelists (from Dorothy L. Sayers to
P. D. James), autobiographies (as self-revealing writing) and travel writing.
James's (estranged) wife, Prue Shaw, herself a distinguished scholar of
Italian, suggests,
...
in fact Dante's concerns in the poem are those of any thoughtful person in any
age or place: what is it to be a human being? how do we judge human behaviour?
what is important in a life or a death? Human behaviour, our own and other
people's, is at the core of human experience in this world.
We engage with these questions
through the stories Dante tells in the Commedia.
There is his own story (how he came to be the person who writes the poem we are
reading), and there are the stories of the people he meets on the journey. The
stories of their lives are endlessly fascinating: the predicaments they found
themselves in, how they came to make the choices they made, why they have ended
up damned or saved.
Those
stories involve human emotions we can all recognize and relate to: love, hate,
anger, fear, joy, anxiety, bewilderment, despair. The poem invites us to think
about these powerful feelings and their place in human life - to reflect on
them not just in relation to our own experience but also to the wider scheme of
things.
Clive James himself welcomes it as standing at the dawn of modern science:
'its essential moment is its final vision, when Dante, the traveller, at the
apex of heaven, looks into the source of creation and sees the imprint of a
human face'. From an atheist, that is
quite a statement.
No comments:
Post a Comment