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FELIX STEFANILE
sound of gears shifting. Let us get a sample of this, as one poet ends
his canto, and the poet immediately following picks his up:
Here he gently
hard going,
C. K. Williams)
out the book, and the ratcheting of tonalities varies from poet to poet.
The reader can get no feeling for Dante's massive fluency, or the
themselves,
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and so, here in the second ring, each one who has deprived
himself
by dissipation?
occurs every two cantos or so, is clear from the way each of them
and "languages" aside, the organ tone of Dante's rhetoric was terza
terza rima, without which the Commedia is unthinkable." Milano was not
bantering cannot relieve the poets in this book of their burdens, and
darting rhyme-scheme that shows off his nostalgia for Dante's rhyme.
He gives us an echo, and it works for me. Let me quote from his
section once again. The excerpt here is from the beginning of Dante's
encounter with Pope Nicholas III, a sinner in the Hell of Simony. The
sinner has been shoved head first into a stone urn reminiscent of the
baptismal fonts of Dante's day, with his feet sticking out. The element
is heat, not water. The Pope was a member of the Orsini clan, named
for Orso (bear). The grim joke of this part of the Pope's conversation
is the triangulation of orsa (Dante used the feminine form), with borsa,
Italian for purse or pouch, and the sinner himself stuffed, like some
gross coin, into a fiery purse or pouch. Williams gets over this
semantic hurdle:
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C. K. Williams)
Williams notes that as he was writing his poem he realized that the
tried various sorts of ballad stanzas: they had no hope of being for
anything but the wastebasket. Then I hit on what I may as well call
dummy terza rima, which is to say, I kept the three-line unit but
tuted iambic pentameter, rhyming line one and three of each tercet."
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happens to Graham, excerpted above, when for Puote omo (man can,
or may), she gives us "A man or woman may." She stirs up a nest of
nouns come buzzing out. She still ends up with the generic "he." This
serious principle:
in grief. . . .
canto. Hoarfrost covers the fields where the peasant must bring his
ison of the simile, Vergil's troubled face, and the dismayed man is
translator of Dante I know does this. For fodder she says food. She
also gives the man a cellar and a bed, neither of which is mentioned
in the original Italian, though they are nice homeowning touches for
action. Note that Forche, from the word "then" in the third line of her
quotation to the bitter end, takes nineteen words to say what both
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students of Dante. Too often, and for longish periods, the murmur of
this great scholar's versions runs through this book. Where in one
another poet gets the locution "by dissipation," thereby diluting the
text to state that Singleton applied too wisely results in the translation
author's name:
(Dante)
up the scattered twigs, and gave them back to him who was already
faint of voice.
(Singleton)
(Charles Wright)
Dante's action here actually closes off an incident held over from
the preceding canto. As they skirt the Wood of the Suicides Dante and
voice issues from the torn and mangled branches the Harpies have
fed on. Blood pours from the injured limbs, and the voice asks to have
his ripped leaves gathered and placed by him. The poor soul speaks
in the accent of Dante's own region in the upper world, and stirs
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but most of the poets of this book go to Singleton for the Englishing,
not the notes. Singleton, always cautious, often reserves his sensibility
for his notes, and did so here. Longfellow shows how great translators
symbiosis. In the excerpts that follow I let my case rest with the
that Singleton got his version from Longfellow. We deal with lines 7 to
12 of Canto VI:
(Galway Kinnell)
rain: its measure and its quality are never new; huge hail, foul
water, and snow pour down through the murky air; the ground
(Charles S. Singleton)
The best advertisement for the Ecco Press book is Seamus Heaney's
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The "had been lost sight of" of the third line is a perfect rendering
of era smarrita, those famous last words of Dante's very first tercet of
selvaggia, even to the repeat of the first syllables. Observe also the echo
Richard Wilbur's Canto XXV is a terza rima gem. His rhymes place
tail coiled into a "garrotte" that ties a "knot." In this chapter Dante's
the joint reading given by the Ecco Press Poets in New York City last
May. The report mentions rather chattily that almost none of the
poets were familiar with Italian, but "had dictionaries." The whole
story has this breezy tone. Given our enthusiastically inquisitive and
poet of Italian descent, no poet with that special intimacy with the
contemporary poets this book does not, for various reasons, stack up
among the best. As a work for students in school the book's paucity of
Hell. The notes at the end of the book are of some service, I guess,
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except, perhaps, for the curiosity of the thing. Real hostility, I should
think, would come from this quarter, because Dante is not so much
the goal of the book's production, but its occasion. Those whose
in this book does the reader find the opportunity, amid the chorus of
voices and styles, to appreciate the high incentive of epic, the grand
2 Three modern translators of Dante high on my list are John Ciardi (W.W. Norton
& Co., 1970, now available in three volumes from Mentor Books), James Finn Cotter
(Element Books, Inc., Rockport, Mass., 1990), and Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Books,
Ltd., London, 1949, also available from Basic Books, Inc., N.Y.). For each of these
Dante has provided unique inspiration. Ciardi, a talented poet, wanted to make the epic
medieval scholar, wanted to present the sublime poet as a prize of the classical past. In
each case these translators succeeded admirably, and offer their own special rewards.
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