Dante in English Paperback – January 1, 2005

How "Dante-in-English," as editors Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds title this collection, renders both translations and inspirations within English poetry from Chaucer to now conjures up a promising theme. The results in this Penguin Classic, unfortunately already out of print despite its 2005 publication in Britain and Canada only, may dull some diligent readers as much as excite them. Patience, as with the poem, rewards perseverance.For, lots of these translations and adaptations seem included more for historical reasons, to show the scope of those who created their own versions, especially of the Commedia, than for readability. As Dante in Griffith's estimation created post-Latin the "first masterpiece by a post-colonial writer" (xl), so English translators try to transfer the inventiveness of this pioneering narrative (and proto-novel as Griffiths argues) into our own framework, caught as we are by our less flexible linguistic syntax and word order.While one could reconstruct much of Dante's epic from the excerpts herein (and a table appended shows which parts of the poem are included where in the contents), I don't think many today could reconstruct an enjoyable Dante as distributed among many, many poets in our own language. Too many of the inclusions are inevitably products of their own fusty or stodgy versification. So, like any generation, translators labor to create a fresh Dante, which may not be, as often here, very faithful. However, scholarly value lies in documenting this reception.The modern versions that I liked best were those that (as W.S. Merwin strove in his Purgatorio) aim at the meaning and not the manner in which Dante wrote his eleven-syllable lines in tercets. This extreme fidelity to repeat this intricate Italian pattern in recalcitrant English dooms some who try here, but their valiant attempts caution peers and those coming after to try out variations. For the most common section (80% of Inferno's cantos get some space here) taken on, Steve Ellis in a conversational mode evoking in his opinion his native Yorkshire and Peter Ellis' first ten cantos that chop down the telling into chiseled small bursts succeed. It's a pity that Ellis died before he could do more, and like many poets here, he attempted to take scenes or snippets to remake, not all 100 cantos.Geoffrey Hill in his poem-sequence The Orchards of Syon has a marvelous passage here moving from the narrator's "mood of angry dislike" with Dante's treatment for "my fellow sufferers and for myself that I dislike them," past "words of justice" as they "move on his abacus" and then the mercy of Mary and the vision that takes all in, the evil and the good, to where finally "the sun/ moves a notch forward on the great wheel." Brunetto is told by the poet to "look," as well as Farinata. (421-22) Hill sums up the intended path of the pilgrim, and he also reminds us of what many even in translation or editing here show on the contrary: a reader's reaction starts with and often turns to hell.While about 60% of Purgatorio's cantos get some coverage here, the time- and earth-based nature of this transitional section tends to slough off readers. The number of translations of the Inferno seems always to have multiplied most, full of ingenious, fiery torments and the shouts of sinners who had refused contrition and insisted on their individuality. This gives way to hell's chill and Satan's bowels. Tellingly, Paradiso gets only about 25% of its cantos included; no contemporary poet that I know of has given his or her ambition over to telling only this last section in English, after all the one towards which all the energy and the direction of the poem is meant to attain, once hell has been trudged down into its depths, and once Mount Purgatory has beckoned its penitents upward to the pageant.The mercy of Purgatorio blurs, as Hill notes, with the borders of hell, but in heaven, the challenge is to capture in whatever language its vision. As Griffiths writes in his wonderfully eclectic, prefatory peregrination over a hundred unpredictable, wry, pages, "I can't say" is the litany the poet repeats as he tries to and does manage to carry the poem into a final third, up into rapture and verbal breakdown. Readers today may resist paradise, and our mentality may not be able to capitulate to God's will as Dante depicts it precisely and logically (if with wiggle room or loopholes of his own?).I agree with the co-editor that it must be reasoned that if God loves sinners and not the sin, Dante must be supposed to do the same in his treatment of the damned and the repentant. Yet Griffiths allows necessary ambiguity for the poet's choices. He avers that "not self-evidently the better half" of the poem lies in doctrine, as "orthodoxy is in the process of becoming actual." (lxxx) The other half of the Commedia lies in what most of us remember. The exchanges with people the pilgrim meets are never the same; the landscape, the pace, the "sticky moments," their introductions and conclusions keep us guessing. In this variation, the medieval mind emerges, too, for the high and low, the folk and the clerical, the oral and literate cultures do not always clash nor do they run off on divergent tracks. Griffiths defends contraries and labors to convince readers that Dante's audiences moved more easily from one extreme to the other than we do. He observes, too, a nuance that has eluded many critics. "Dante may assent to all the official teaching, but only these unforeseeably various inflections in the staging of his conversations tell us which doctrines troubled or seized him or left him tepid." (lxxxi)Finally, despite the languors of much of the contents from past poets tackling Dante in English, this presents a range of responses. Griffiths and Reynolds catch the times translators cheat, when they skip over, distort, or very rarely improve Dante's form as he tries to express such a vast content. Osip Mandelstan is cited here for "Dante can only be understood with the help of quantum theory." (lvii)Griffiths suggests this may account for Dante the poet's "bilocation" as well as the nature of the poem, as it leaps between the vision and the way the poet tries to put it into words, over two decades. The dramatic range of the Commedia entices many, and the appeal of it in translation, while but an echo of the original, reverberates. Griffiths in his introduction shows how the sounds of Italian work and versification rebounds to connect the message of the characters with their own emotions and thoughts, and as wandering as his explanations may be at times, in this manner they convey well the medieval excitement at a work where dogma and delight, demons and drudgery, combine intricately.

The introductory essay was a joy to read (although the power of Dante's universe often pulls commentators into highly concentrated evocative states of mind) and I'm looking forward to wandering through the forest of translations...

The content of the book is fascinating for anyone with an interest in Dante's reception by writers in English. The introduction is especially good. Unfortunately my copy arrived damaged owing to Amazon's increasingly shoddy packaging of books so I've immediately returned it. A simple cardboard envelope that allows the book to move around and get scraped and bashed and creased is not good enough. The condition it arrived in is completely unacceptable for a book that is sold as new. I won't be buying any more books from Amazon unless I hear their packaging has improved considerably.