The Portable Dante (6 page)

Each group of souls on its particular terrace is assigned a prayer. When a soul has finished purging his sin on one level, he climbs to the next via a stairway, where there is an angel-sentry who performs a final cleansing gesture. A beatitude appropriate to the sin that has been cleansed is assigned to each ledge. In addition, on each terrace of Purgatory, representations of the sin being purged there are found, as well as examples of the virtue which is opposed to that sin. The representation of the sin is intended to incite disdain for the sin, while that of the virtue is designed to inspire souls to the emulation of virtuous behavior. These representations take on various forms—on the First Terrace they appear as carvings in the stone of the mountain—and both “disdain for the sin” and “inspiration for virtuous behavior” are drawn from examples of Christian and pagan love. But the first example of every virtue is always taken from the life of the Virgin Mary.

In the first canto of the
Purgatorio
Dante and Virgil are at the foot of a mountain again, and the reader is naturally reminded of the first canto of the
Inferno
: it is the same mountain, the one they could not climb then, because Dante was not spiritually prepared. But now, having investigated all sin, having shaken off pride during his perilous descent into humility, Dante will be able to climb the mountain.

Purgatory is a place of repentance, regeneration, conversion. Though the punishments inflicted on the penitents here are often more severe than in Hell, the atmosphere is totally different: it is one of sweet encounters, culminating in Dante’s reunion with Beatrice in the Earthly
Paradise and Virgil’s elegant disappearance. Brotherly love and humility reign here, necessary qualities for the successful journey of man’s mind to God. Everyone here is destined to see God eventually; the predominant image is one of homesickness (especially in the Antepurgatory), a yearning to return to man’s real home in Heaven. Toward the close of the
Purgatorio
the time comes for Beatrice (divine revelation) to take charge of the pilgrim; human reason (Virgil) can take man only so far; it cannot show him God or explain his many mysteries.

The
Paradiso
is an attempt to describe the religious life, one in which man centers his attention wholly on God, divine truth, and ultimate happiness. Only in perfect knowledge of the true God can man have perfect happiness.

Unlike Hell and Purgatory, Heaven in Dante’s poem does not exist in a physical sense. The celestial spheres through which the pilgrim and his guide, Beatrice, ascend and in which the souls of the blessed appear to the wayfarer are not part of the real Paradise. That place is beyond the spheres and beyond space and time; it is the Empyrean, and Beatrice takes pains to explain this early in the
Paradiso,
while they are in the first sphere of the moon:

Not the most godlike of the Seraphim, not Moses, Samuel, whichever John you choose—I tell you—not Mary herself

has been assigned to any other heaven than that of these shades you have just seen here, and each one’s bliss is equally eternal;

all lend their beauty to the Highest Sphere, sharing one same sweet life to the degree that they can feel the eternal breath of God.

(IV. 28-36)

The dominant image in this realm is light. God is light, and the pilgrim’s goal from the very start was to reach the light (we are reminded of the casual mention of the rays of the sun behind the mountain in the opening canto).

The word “stars, ” the last word of the poem, glows with a number of meanings which
The Divine Comedy
itself has given it in the course of the journey. The sun is another star, as the last verse surely implies through the use of the word “other, ” and we know that the sun is the
symbol for God—this is clear from the first canto of the
Inferno,
and the stars stand for all the heavens. It is through the sphere of the Fixed Stars, immediately below the Primum Mobile, that God’s grace is filtered down through the lower spheres, finally reaching the material universe—that is what canto II concerning the spots on the moon is all about. The stars, then, are the link between God and His creation. They are His eyes set in the outermost limits of the physical universe:

O Triune Light which sparkles in one star upon their sight, Fulfiller of full joy! look down upon us in our tempest here!

(XXXI, 28-30)

They are the constant reminder to mankind of his connection to his Maker. Through them we see God from our earth. Through them God touches us. Through them Dante connects the three distinct parts of his miraculous poem, the
Inferno,
the
Purgatory,
and the
Paradise,
into a single unity which is
The Divine Comedy.

The formal beauty of the
Commedia
should not be dissociated from its spiritual message. The universal appeal of the poem comes precisely from a combination of the two: poetry and philosophy. For Dante, though not for the majority of poets of the Renaissance, ultimate truth was known—in principle it was contained in the
Summa
of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the doctrine of the
Commedia
comes largely from the writings of Aquinas and the other church fathers.

Dante was in accord with Hugh of Saint Victor, who, in his
Didascalia
(VI. 5), says: “Contemplating what God has done, we learn what is for us to do. All nature speaks God. All nature teaches man. ” Dante, then, with his special kind of allegory, tries to imitate God: the symbolic world he creates in his poem is in principle a mirror of the actual world created by God himself.

T
O WHAT
extent should the translator of Dante’s
Comedy
strive to be faithful to the original? Ezra Pound distinguishes between what he calls “interpretative translation, ” which is what most translators are after, and a more creative, original type of paraphrase—the translator using the original mainly as an inspiration for writing his own poem. But even those who attempt an interpretive rendering differ greatly in the degree and manner of their faithfulness to the original. The question has been raised and debated: should it be the poet’s voice that is heard, or the voice of the one who is making the poet accessible in another language? This is obviously a delicate, sophisticated, and complicated problem.

Surely much depends on what it is that is being translated. A principle that might apply to a sonnet or perhaps any short poem, especially a lyrical one, would not be appropriate to a lengthy narrative with theological and encyclopedic underpinnings such as
The Divine Comedy.
I should say that anyone who attempts to translate this massive poem must try, with humility and flexibility, to be as faithful as possible. He should do what Jackson Mathews recommends to the guild of translators in general—“be faithful without seeming to be”—and he adds in regard to this type of faithfulness: “a translator should make a good lover. ”

Perhaps it must always be the voice of Dante’s translator that we hear (if we have to hear an intervening voice at all), but he should have listened most carefully to Dante’s voice before he lets us hear his own. He should not only read and reread what he is translating, in order to
know what it is about (know a whole canto thoroughly before translating a line), but he should also read Dante aloud, listening to the rhythm and movement within the lines and the movement from line to line. Consider, for example, line 63 of the famous canto V of the
Inferno
(Paolo and Francesca’s canto), where Virgil points out to the Pilgrim the figure of Cleopatra among the lustful souls of Dido’s band, and characterizes her with one word that caps the line:

Poi è Cleopatràs lussurïosa

(And there is Cleopatra, who loved men’s lusting)

This epithet, epitomizing the whole career of the imperial wanton, serves to remind us of the technical nature of the sin being punished in the second circle, the circle of the lustful:
i lussuriosi.
And in the movement of the word
lus-su-ri-o-sa
(Dante forces us to linger over the word this way; otherwise the verse would be a syllable short) there is an important anticipation of a movement in the second part of the canto: the dovelike movement that starts with the actual descent of Francesca and Paolo, a gentle movement that becomes the movement of the entire second half of this canto and offers such a contrast to the wild buffetings of the winds we hear in the first half, where we see the damned dashed along by the tempestuous storm. The sensitive translator must stop to question (then to understand) the rhythm of
lussuriosa
at this point in the canto: to sense how this diaphanous word in this melodious line stands out against the howling noises in the background. This seductive rhythm applied to Cleopatra’s sin anticipates not only the gentle movements but the seductive atmosphere of the second half of the canto, when Francesca is on stage and melting the Pilgrim’s heart. No translator I have read seems to have made any attempt to reproduce the effect intended by the line in the original: the simplicity of the first half of the line (
Poi è Cleopatràs
…) and the mellifluous quality of the epithet (
lussuriosa
) in final position, with its tapering-off effect.

Again, the translator should study Dante’s use of poetic devices such as enjambment and alliteration. This does not mean that the translator should always use such devices when Dante does and only when he does, but that he should study the effects Dante has achieved with these devices—and his economical use of them. Dante is a greater poet than any of his translators have been or are likely to be. A translator using the English iambic pentameter may even learn from Dante’s flowing lines to use better the meter he has chosen. It is true that Dante’s hen
decasyllabic verse is quantitative and not accentual; still, the words of the Italian language have their own natural accent. In reading aloud Dante’s lines with their gentle stress, one can hear the implicit iambs and trochees and dactyls and anapaests. And one may learn to achieve the same effect of “implicitness” to counterbalance the natural tendency of English meters to have too insistent a stress.

Finally, there is the matter of diction. Here the translator must be
absolutely
faithful, choosing words and phrases that have the same tone as those of the poet. They must obviously suggest solemnity when he is solemn, lightness when he is light; they must be colloquial or formal as he is colloquial or formal. But, most of all, the diction should be simple when Dante’s is. And this is where the translators have sinned the most. There are two ways to sin against simplicity of diction: one concerns only the matter of word material and syntax—for instance the use of stilted or overflowery language and of archaic phraseology. Most translators would not agree with me; some feel free to use any word listed in the
O.E. D.
after A.D. 1000:
to girn, to birl, to skirr, scaling the scaur, to abye the fell arraign
—to say nothing of syntactical archaisms.

A more subtle sin against the simplicity of Dante’s diction is the creation of original striking rhetorical or imagistic effects where Dante has intended none. Dante himself saves spectacular effects for very special occasions. Most of his narrative, if we make an exception of the elaborate similes, is composed in simple, straightforward style. Occasionally one finds an immediately striking effect in a line or phrase, and when this does happen, it is magnificent. Consider line 4 of canto V (so different from line 63, quoted earlier, with its muted, inconspicuous effect):

Stavvi Minòs orribilmente e ringhia

(There stands Minòs grotesquely, and he snarls)

Surely Dante meant to startle his reader with this sudden presentation (after the sober explanation of the opening three lines) of the monster-judge. The line ends with the resounding impact of the verb
ringhia
—it ends with a snarl that sounds like the lash of a whip (or tail). And we are made to feel the horror of Minòs by the key word in the middle of the line, the slow-moving
orribilmente,
which points both backward and ahead:
Stavvi orribilmente, ringhia orribilmente.
Grammatically, of course, the adverb modifies the opening word, the static verb,
stavvi.

This construction, in which an adverb of manner modifies a verb of presence, is most unusual: Minòs was present horribly!

Usually, however, one comes to realize only at the end of several tercets that a certain effect has been achieved by the passage as a whole, one to which each single line has been quietly contributing. Dante’s effects, then, are mainly of a cumulative nature. And often there are no “effects, ” only simple, factual, narrative details. In fact, sometimes Dante’s style (and not unfortunately!) is purely prosaic. An adventurous, imaginative translator is easily tempted to speed up the movement of Dante’s tranquil lines, to inject fire and color into a passage of neutral tone. Even if he carries it off successfully, I would tend to question his goal. And when the translator fails, when he falls, great is the fall thereof.

If the translator had to choose in general between a style that strives for striking effects, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing, and one less colorful but more consistent, the choice could be merely a matter of personal taste. But when it is a question of translating a poet who himself is so economical in his use of conspicuous effects, then, I believe, it is no longer a wide-open choice. I have set as my goal simplicity and quiet, even, sober flow—except when I feel that the moment has come to let myself go, to pull out the stops: to be flamboyant or complicated instead of simple, to be noisy instead of quiet, to be rough instead of smooth—or to be deliberately mellifluous. Except for those rare occasions, I have consistently tried to find a style that does not call attention to itself. And I might add that, in translating, this requires a great deal of effort. To the extent that I have succeeded, those readers who admire the fireworks of some recent translations of the
Inferno
will find my own less exciting—as little exciting as Dante himself often is.