I mentioned the literalist translations, and that there
are a lot of scholars who translated all of the Divine
Comedy and they have usually a book of the Inferno
and then a book of commentary.
Amazing the historical knowledge and I
should just mention, though they're not out there,
the American John Sinclair and Charles Singleton in the 90s,
from Princeton, who have extensive commentaries.
So if you're reading it, and you wanted
to find out what some of their references are too,
you can use those commentaries, but I probably
wouldn't read their versions.
In the 20th century, there are some semi-famous people that
had translated, one of them is Laurence Binyon
who was a keeper of prints at the British Museum,
and later professor of poetry at Harvard.
His mentor in translation was Ezra Pound,
who cautioned him to kick out every sentence that
isn't as Jane Austen would have written in prose,
for when you do get a limpid line in perfectly
straight normal order, isn't it worth any other 10.
And he praised Binyon's work which was actually
in terza rima, which is the form that Dante
invented to write it in.
Which is the three couplets with a rhyme a, then b,
then a, then the next one starts with b, and then c, and then b.
So it is an interlocking sort of form that when it's done,
it's really an incredible thing.
And he said it--
Pound said about Binyon's work that it utterly
confounds the apes who told you terza rima wasn't English.
And many of the people who've translated it
have managed to keep it in that form.
Sort of curiosity though-- actually the parts that I read
were pretty good.
The English mystery writer and creator
of Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers,
translated the whole Divine Comedy into English,
it was published in the late 40s.
She is the only woman to translate the whole
all three Cantos.
In fact, I don't think there is another woman that even
translated the three books--
a whole book, in this book.
Dante's Inferno translation by 20 contemporary poets,
there are about 12 women that translated in this, so I guess
it's a boys book, I don't know.
About her translation Sayers says
this, "I have considered the whole range
of intelligible English speech to be
open to me excluding however, at the one end of the scale words
and forms so archaic as to be incomprehensible.
And at the other nonce words and up to the minute slang.
I have tried that is to steer a discreet middle course
between Water Street and Hollywood,
and to eschew 'Marry, quotha' without declining upon 'says you.'"
For Pinsky, the most famous American translation
was by the American poet John Ciardi,
who taught at Rutgers for many years in New Jersey.
And its modified terza rima in which
he doesn't link the tercets.
So it's just a, b, a, c, d, c, like that,
so, it's a little easier.
Here's what he's sad to say about translation,
the notion of word for word equivalence
also strikes me as false to the nature of poetry.
There've been a lot of translations, many of which
are not out there and I won't mention them,
I should of course, Pinsky's is out there
and it's received a lot of play around here lately.
There was a great reading, seven hours was it?
5 hours.
5 hours of the whole Inferno, which
was really fun, especially the local anchorman, what's
his name?
Andy Garcia.
Actually, he was great.
In fact, it was translated by Allen Mandelbaum, who's a poet,
and was published in 1980 in three volumes--
he translated all three volumes--
at the University of California Press with illustrations
by Barry Moser.
So it's about the same type of thing
as Pinsky's translation with Michael Mazur's illustrations.
And it's sort of quintessentially postmodern,
and it's been described as fully cognizant
of the private political, sociological, historical,
and linguistic words of the Commedia.
It privileges the complex play of language, the eccentric,
the digressions, diversions, and asides,
the intense internal structure of Dante's verse
as is evident in Mr. Mandelbaum's introduction,
where he sort of mimics Dante when
he talks about the scholars who worked on The Divine
Comedy over the years as "sages, elders, amenders, perpenders,
periphrasts, querists, amphibolists, nebulists,
quandarists, rhetors, wreckers, embalmers, bores,
and picadors."
I like the picadors.
If you think that paying a lot of attention
to the wordplay in the thing is wrong,
here is some of the internal rhyme words for a couple of--
I think it's four lines in canto '32 which sort of it's
like mimicking the falling apart of language.
Here in Italian the internal rhyme words,
abbo, gabbo, babbo; tebe, zebe, plebe, converebe; osteric, tambernic, cric, which is in English sort of amazing,
and maybe it's not so amazing in Italian.
There are a couple of places where Dante also makes up
languages.
And when he has the Giant Nimrod, in canto '33,
speak this incomprehensible sentence and scholars have
spent hundreds of years trying to figure out
what language he was mimicking there,
and they haven't been able to.
I should put in a word, there's a translation of The Divine
Comedy by English poet C.H. Sisson, which
is very, very eccentric, but elegant and humane in its core
and in his own poetry actually resonates similarly to Dante.
Here's a couple of lines from one of his poems.
"Lies on my tongue, get up and bolt the door for him coming,
not to be believed the messenger of anything I say.
So, I am calm to stand in the cold tonight, the servant
in the grain upon my tongue, beware, I am the man
and let me in."
One of the-- maybe this is the only time that somebody has
illustrated it, and translated it --
It's by Tom Phillips who is a word artist.
He did this great work called Humument, in which he took
a 19th century Victorian novel, painted all of the pages,
and let certain words stick out if you have never seen it.
I think there's a reprint of it available.
It's an amazing thing, but he did a great translation,
and there are nearly 100 illustrations.
His version of The Giants--
which is the three Giants that are Nimrod, Ephialtes,
and Antaeus, that are in hell.
He has King Kong as one of them on the Empire State Building,
so, it's very modern.
I mentioned this version--
which is actually great I have to say,
the women in particular, I think did
a much better job of their translations
in here than the men.
Some of the women: Cynthia MacDonald, Amy Clampitt,
Jorie Graham, Susan Mitchell, Carolyn Forché, Deborah Digges,
and Sharon Olds.
If you want one, that's pretty easy to read.
This is really good.
There are a couple of really bad ones I think,
or at least boring translations, and one of them
is by the editor of this book Daniel Halpern unfortunately.
Lastly, of course, Salvador Dali must
have been born to illustrate this,
and there are a couple of illustrations
you can see of his many illustrations of the Inferno.
And he did it actually for some centennial observation,
for the Italian government, and he had it all done
and they said, "Oh wait, you're Spanish,
we can't have this published."
But for an Italian poet by Spanish guy
so, years later he had it published by somebody else,
by a French press of course.
And lastly, the most modern version
is by two guys from San Francisco, Sandow Birk
and Marcus Sanders, Chronicle publishing, and it's out there
and it's actually pretty great.
Illustrations of Los Angeles as hell, so sort of fits right in.