EN. Mandelbaum is another popular translation of the entire Divine Comedy. No wonder that Dante’s latest translator, the eminent Australian poet and critic Clive James, feared his task would be “thankless.”. James’s no-nonsense clarity also goes a long way toward unpacking the conceptual complexities of “Heaven.” Much of his success in the final canticle comes from his expert handling of Dante’s internal rhymes. . “But in English,” he writes, “the word ‘stars’ has very few words with which to rhyme. for I had lost the path that does not stray. Linguee. The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation - decades in the making - gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively listenable lyric poem. Dante wrote his masterpiece on the move, banned from Florence by political enemies. .”. Report scam, HUMANITIES, Winter 2017, Volume 38, Number 1, HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, SUBSCRIBE FOR HUMANITIES MAGAZINE PRINT EDITION, Sign up for HUMANITIES Magazine newsletter, How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale, Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War, Chronicling America: History American Newspapers. It does not help that Dante’s persona is as opaque as his poetry. I couldn’t even remember which translation it was. That interlocking pattern continues throughout the cantos and is one of the work’s most distinctive aspects. Which Divine Comedy translation is the best? The perfect translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” remains one of literature’s holiest grails. Detail of painting by Domenico di Michelino, 1465. The Divine Comedy ( ) is an epic poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed 1320, a year before his death in 1321. The keeningsoundI still make shows how hard it is to sayHow harsh and bitter that place felt tome. Reddit - Comment on Divine Comedy thread praising the work and certain translations Wordpress site - Line-by-line comparison of fifteen translations of Canto XXVI, lines 112-120 DanteInferno.info - Complete side-by-side comparison of the entire Inferno for Longfellow, Cary, and Norton translations The mellow and hopeful tone of “Purgatory,” announced with an opening image of “the sweet clear tint of sapphire in the east,” suits James’s wistful and autumnal voice better than does the raw energy of “Hell.” Virgil’s parting words to Dante in Canto 27, which have brought a tear to the eye of many a classicist, reveal James’s solemn and tasteful touch: . By starting with “Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,” she remains faithful to the starting point, “nel mezzo,” while Mandelbaum pushes this to the middle of the first line. Scam Advisory: Recent reports indicate that individuals are posing as the NEH on email and social media. Late 2018 I decided it’s about time to revisit this classic so I did a little research. Yet James fails to approximate Dante’s talent for compression. I liked it, but I don't have much to compare against (it's certainly better than Longfellow's, which is shockingly bad). Mandelbaum, will, in fact, interject rhyme if it’s not forced (as he does with way and stray). Dante's Divine comedy : The Inferno : a literal prose translation with the text of the original collated from the best editions and explanatory notes by Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321; Carlyle, John Aitken, 1801-1879 . from the straight pathway to this tangled ground. Here’s Dante’s original: Even without an Italian dictionary at hand, most of the words in these lines can be puzzled out by English speakers, except, perhaps “smaritta,” which means something along the lines of “obliterated” or just “lost from view.” An amateur literal translation can go a long way but doesn’t sing. It can be overwhelming to see so many versions all lined up, spine to spine, along a shelf in a literary bookstore, or to scroll through pages and pages of different editions online. ” But just when we think we’re starting to know him, he snaps back into character: the rest of the canto is a meditation on Christian hope. Clive James: 'Let no one impugn his incredibly hard work.'. Translator. In Dante’s age, theology was the queen of all intellectual disciplines, and the chief aim of “The Divine Comedy” is to create a song of Christian understanding. The Text is fully hyper-linked to the index and notes and vice versa. Thus began Dante’s famed journey, one that would take him through the depths of hell. Dante himself only referred to it as a Comedy; the “Divine” characterisation was added later. 1. The sheer number of characters and themes — each canto is a world in itself — merges with Dante’s universe of secular and spiritual concerns to frighten away all but the most scholarly and literary, and the lack of notes in James’s edition makes it hard for the nonspecialist to gain traction. When translating the Divine Comedy, the translator often has to choose between capturing the original meaning or capturing the poetry, often choosing an intermediate between the two. Seeking to preserve Dante’s “infinitely variable rhythmic pulse,” James makes an inspired metrical choice. Suggest as a translation of "Divine Comedy" Copy; DeepL Translator Linguee. What translation of The Divine Comedy is easiest to understand? This is the first volume of a new prose translation of Dante's epic - the first in twenty-five years. To convey the sinuous logic and rhetorical tricks of the brilliant but devious Guido, the translation should capture the winding syntax of Dante’s grammatical construction with its hissing “s” sounds for the Italian subjunctive (credesse, fosse, tornasse). James follows suit with similar syllabic pairings, ranging from the simple (“for what you will is now ill-willed”) to the exotic (“Of all their folderol and overkill”). Her methodology comes from picking up a book of poems by Caroline Bergvall and reading “Via (48 Dante Variations),” a “found poem,” she writes, “composed entirely of the first three lines of the Inferno culled from forty-seven translations archived in the British Library as of May 2000). James writes in the introduction to his Comedy, “I wanted the rhyming words close enough together to be noticed.” His devotion to language leads him in one direction, aiming even to end each book of the Comedy with a couplet whose final word is “stars,” as Dante did. Eliot, James recalls, once said that the last cantos of “Paradiso” were as good as poetry gets. He produced one of the first complete, and in many respects still the best, English translations of The Divine Comedy in 1867. Just like a musical score to someone who can’t read music. Famed translators Pevear and Volokhonsky reach another milestone. The greatest virtue of James’s translation is his gift for infusing poetry in the least likely places: the disquisitions on Christian doctrine. Dorothy Sayers rendered the first stanza this way: Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. Again, it might come down to your trust in a translator’s skill in keeping up the rhyme pattern. In “The Study of Poetry,” Matthew Arnold praised Dante’s “In la sua volontade è nostra pace” (“In His will is our peace”) from “Paradiso” Canto 3 as a “simple, but perfect, single line,” probably because of the lovely sonic links among the vowels in la sua volontade and nostra pace. My preference for a rhyming attempt wins out over Mary Jo Bang’s exuberant rendering, but only by a smidgen. It also has notes inside of it that helps to explain some of the things that happening in case you get confused. 1304–1321), using the hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) line common to Italian poetry. In its depths I saw, packed tight,Bound in one book by love, all that issentAbroad throughout the universe asleavesTorn out and scattered. What I read whetted my appetite for more, but Sayers’ translation is archaising and difficult. If the translator’s task is “to liberate the language imprisoned in a work,” as Walter Benjamin writes, then few literary strongholds come as heavily fortified as “The Divine Comedy.” Written in Dante’s native Tuscan instead of the more prestigious Latin, the poem and its earthy idiom, copious allusions and otherworldy precision burden translators, especially in rhyme-poor English, which struggles to match the momentum of Dante’s terza rima and internal rhymes. . So when the time came to acquire the entire work, I turned to the American poet John Ciardi’s translation, still widely regarded as the best. A lot of reviews said that this translation by John Ciardi was one of the best. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy, finished by Dante Alighieri in 1320, is one of the most famous literary works of all time, and its author is considered the father of the Italian language. In the Inferno, it is well known, Dante singled out corrupt leaders and political enemies, but the poem as a whole was actually inspired by unrequited love. A tough call. Of your soulI make you captain. Michael Palma’s 2003 translation of Inferno begins this way: Midway through the journey of our life, I found. Easiest to understand (and read) would be Mary Jo Bang's (2013): Inferno: A New Translation: Dante Alighieri, Henrik Drescher, Mary Jo Bang: 9781555976545: Amazon.com: Books Skip right to the Dante Reading Journal. It did not hurt that Longfellow had also experienced the kind of traumatic loss—the death of his young … In Canto 27, the fraudulent counselor Guido da Montefeltro delivers the most famous (and perhaps the only famous) triple subjunctive in literary history when debating whether to speak to Dante. The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation - decades in the making - gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively listenable lyric poem. He expresses the staggering beauty of the upper cantos with calm and limpid language, as in this description of divine light: . . His translation keeps the “nel mezzo” element up front and duplicates the terza rima, continuing the next stanza with, “How hard it is to tell of, overlaid . Allen Mandelbaum’s translation goes like this: When I had journeyed half of our life’s way. If you’re the studious type and feel inspired by my previous post or for your own reasons to do a celebratory 750th anniversary reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, you might quickly find yourself awash in translations and guides and biographies and not know quite where to start.. The Divine Comedy, finished by Dante Alighieri in 1320, is one of the most famous literary works of all time, and its author is considered the father of the Italian language.In the Inferno, it is well known, Dante singled out corrupt leaders and political enemies, but the … In her own time she was better known for her hydrangeas. Since childhood they had exchanged in passing the one word their families would allow—Salute! A former U.S. Senate chief of staff makes the humanities accessible. The Divine Comedy is also a work of literary beauty that is beyond being antiquated by time or diminished by repeated translation. Despite these barriers to entry, James’s austere volume achieves something remarkable: It lets Dante’s poetry shine in all its brilliance even in those technical patches closer to Aquinas’s syllogisms than to Virgil’s hexameters. These lines have the virtue of being faithful to the original content, and then the next line continues with a rhyme (“The keening sound . Surprisingly, James’s translation picks up when Dante’s verses slow down. Most blessedamong men,Move on. Rather than write a strained couplet to close each book, I wrote a final line in which the stars indeed show up, but not as the last word.” Bang is led in another direction, hewing to a definition of translation by Walter Benjamin: “A translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language.”, Translator Robert Wechsler observed that “the foreign writer’s work looks like gibberish, or would if we ever saw it. In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—. Clive James's translation of Dante is an impressive feat. Instead, James’s stiff version falls flat: “If I thought now to afford / An answer to one bound to breathe the air / Again in the fair world, this flame would stand / With no more movement.” Accurate, eloquent even; but not incisive or diabolical enough for lines so memorable that T. S. Eliot included them as the epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Allen Mandelbaum’s version from 1980 reproduces the interlaced hypotheticals that make Dante’s lines stand out: “If I thought my reply were meant for one / who ever could return into the world, / this flame would stir no more.”. The surprising history behind the world’s most famous collection of folk tales. His metered language often seems more natural than Sayers’ and more in keeping with the diction of Dante, which favored solid vocabulary and straight-forward syntax. Both versions are vibrant and deal adroitly with some enigmatic aspects of the original text. About The Divine Comedy. . The translation is so similar, the result is a palimpsest, two works, one on top of the other, an original and a performance, difficult to tell apart.” Seeing translation in this light, may help decide which Dante to read. Her creative leap is to begin with the word “stopped” and end the third line with “I was lost,” emphasizing the predicament in the original and elaborating the image of the dark wood. The best crib available is still John D Sinclair's facing-page text from OUP; the best translation of the entire work is Allen Mandelbaum's (published by … But the musician’s performance doesn’t look anything like a score; the two couldn’t be any more different. As a one-time admirer of the troubadour poets, Dante was well versed, pardon the pun, in the intricate forms then in practice, such as the sestina, but his paean to Beatrice called for something new and even more demanding, a flexible and muscular form he invented precisely for the new undertaking, the terza rima. 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