Divining Dante
June 23, 2003 | 12:00am
Dante Alighieris Divine Comedy was the last thing I wouldve thought of last week a week devoted largely to the more mundane concerns of academic administration like publication budgets and computer donations but then I received an e-mail message from a reader in Cebu that swept me back into the 14th century, into a shadowy forest
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la dirrita via era smarrita." So begins, in one of literatures most memorable openings, the Inferno: "Midway upon our road of life I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been missed...," according to Charles Eliot Nortons 1892 translation.
Shortly after Norton penned his translation, another man, halfway around the world, was struck by the same tercet, and would write his addressee in a hodgepodge of German, French, and English: "I should like to close this letter in the language of Dante but it seems to me that what I knew before I have now forgotten. Lucky are you who are in Europe, in correspondence with literary men and scholars you can exchange ideas whenever you please. As for me I am here Nel nezzo del cammin della mia vita ini una selva oscura ." The imperfect Italian, or the imperfect memory, was understandable, given the letter-writers circumstances: He was Jose Rizal, writing his friend Ferdinand Blumentritt from Dapitan on July 31, 1894.
And long before I discovered this factoid, I had tacked onto the wall of my UP English department office a poster that some graduate-school friends and I had made up in the United States to announce a literary reading sometime in March 1991 our graduation recital, as it were which we had chosen to title (you guessed it) "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai ."
What strange coincidences kept drawing me back to this haunting line? Last week it was this e-mailed question from Jonel Abellanosa, a Cebu-based writer whom Id met a few years ago during a visit to the University of San Carlos:
"In your opinion, is it possible to translate Dantes Divine Comedy into Cebuano or Filipino, or more specifically the fifth canto of the Inferno? I have this need, this itching need, to translate the said canto into either Cebuano or Filipino or even both. My knowledge of the Italian language is inadequate, thats why I plan to utilize John Ciardis English translation as guide. Do I really have to master the Italian language before even toying with the idea of translation? Also, I am not a Dante scholar, although my knowledge of Dante as poet and person is, you can say, average. Would a translation from someone of my inadequate literary or educational background be credible, or for that matter successful?"
I have to confess that I havent touched the Divine Comedy since my undergraduate days, and even then I glossed over the fine details of that long poem, like most undergraduates did. Jonels question sent me scurrying for copies of and commentaries on the Inferno, and the more I read the more I remembered what I had missed, about the work itself and the bliss of pure learning.
But what can I tell Jonel? Although I write in both English and Filipino, Im not a translator, and have never seriously attempted a translation of my own or someone elses work and perhaps I should tell Jonel why. I stand in awe of the good translators work; I think it requires a very special talent and expertise that even writers themselves may not necessarily have. It helps if the translator is himself or herself a creative writer (John Ciardi, who died in 1986, was one of Americas most eminent contemporary poets); but you have to be more a scholar, a linguist, a reader of minds, a negotiator. You have to balance your own lively imagination with a healthy respect for the original text and its presumptive intentions. You have to be thoroughly familiar, in this case, not only with Italian, but with the Italian of Dantes time, and with its regional nuances, if any.
Thats if you want to do a translation thats up to professional, academic standards. For something less rigorous, like a personal exercise for the sake of pushing yourself to the limits of the languages you know, then a translation from a secondary language should be all right. To test the waters, you might want to try something easier and more familiar say, one of Pablo Nerudas more popular poems (e.g., "Tonight I can write the saddest lines" then match it against the published translations of the same poem by people like Ben Belitt, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Bly.
In these days of globalized fiction, some translators have become stars in their own right, with the names of such as Eric Bentley, Gregory Rabassa, and William Weaver being almost synonymous with those of the writers theyve serviced (Brecht, Garcia Marquez, Eco). Its a full-time job, but unless youre one of these aforementioned stars still quite often thankless. It doesnt help much that many people will adamantly insist that literary beauty can never be transposed from one language to another. Dante himself was supposed to have maintained that "Nothing harmonized by a musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech without losing all its sweetness and harmony."
But somehow I think I understand whats been driving Jonel to dare and attempt what scores of writers and scholars before him have already done, with widely varying degrees of success. (Over the past century alone, at least 50 translations of the Inferno have been published.) Its neither the prospect of fame or fortune nor the challenge of scholarly exactitude; its the love story in the poem, and the thrill of bringing it to life with a new vocabulary.
In the Infernos Fifth Canto, the poet Virgil leads the Pilgrim (Dante himself) through the second circle of Hell, where they encounter a whirlwind tossing about the souls of "carnal sinners" among them, the illicit lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. (What Dante is actually saying is that wayward love is bad but not that bad; the next circle of hell is reserved for gluttons, and the very last one the pits for people who betray their relatives and friends.) In 13th-century real life, Francesca the daughter of a nobleman had been married off for political reasons to the hunchback Giancotto. But a powerful attraction soon arose between Francesca and Giancottos younger brother Paolo. One day, while reading a book on romantic love, Francesca yields to Paolos kisses; but Giancotto catches them and kills them both.
Youd think that Francesca and Paolo would be happy being together forever somewhere, albeit in Hell but no: Francesca is so consumed with grief and shame that she cannot even mention Paolos name, and he is fated to remain naked by her side as an eternal reminder of that fatal moment. Their punishment is their togetherness in misery. She explains to Dante (in the translation of Allen Mandelbaum):
Yet if you long so much to understand
the first root of our love, then I shall tell
my tale to you as one who weeps and speaks.
One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot how love had overcome him.
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.
And time and time again that reading led
our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,
and yet one point alone defeated us.
When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.
A Gallehault indeed, that book and he
who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.
Its lines like these that cause me to give a translation perhaps the best accolade there is: It makes me want to learn the language of the original, so I can drink more, and more deeply, of that wine.
Possibly an even better alternative to translation at least for poets, painters, and the creative lot is to do your own adaptation, your own artistic response to someone elses profoundly moving or troubling work. This is a time-honored way by which literature has progressed, and by which writers and artists have paid homage to (or obliquely derided) their predecessors work.
While the general or natural tendency might be for the tribute, the sequel, or the adaptation to be inferior in quality to the original, sometimes very interesting things can happen over several centuries and continents. John Gays The Beggars Opera (1728) evolved exactly 200 years later into Bertolt Brechts The Threepenny Opera (1928) and so taken was I by these two plays (youll know Threepenny by its show stopper, "Mack the Knife") that I would write my own version of the MacHeath story in Mac Malicsi, TNT, transporting Mackie into Midwestern America and recasting him as a nimble-footed Pinoy, circa 1990. Im no Brecht and Im not Gay (whether big or, ahem, small G), but I had loads of fun trying to do something new with something very old.
And lets not forget George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion (1938), his take on the classic tale of the sculptor Pygmalion and his creation Galatea, which in turn became the basis for My Fair Lady (1964, film version). Just as famously, Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet (first published 1597) inspired West Side Story (1961, film version), not to mention all the stage and screen adaptations that were made of it, including Baz Luhrmanns 1996 version with Leonardo DiCaprio. (Shakespeare, of course, was the grandest adapter of them all, basing a host of plays Romeo and Juliet among them on pre-existent material.)
In fiction, I cant think of a more durable template than James Joyces "Araby" (1905), the classic story of a young boys burning infatuation with an older girl and his crushing disillusionment. My writing students have it coming out of their ears, because "Araby" happens to be a personal favorite of mine (alongside Ernest Hemingways "Hills like White Elephants" "Araby" for the sentiment and "Hills" for the technique). NVM Gonzalezs "Bread of Salt" (1958) is also an "Araby" story, and in 1994, with trembling hand, I essayed my own version, the transparently reversed "Ybarra."
But to return to where we began, with Dantes Fifth Canto of the Inferno, most worthy of note was the intensely lyrical John Keatss response to it, a sonnet titled "After Reading Dantes Episode of Paolo and Francesca, A Dream" (1820). The poem takes its persona, as lovelorn and as miserable as Keats was, not to the heights of ecstasy but
to that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose 1860s translation of the Divine Comedy set the standard for quite a while, wrote four sonnets to commemorate the experience of divining Dante. Theyre of little but scholarly interest now, and my pedestrian sense is that Keats out-Dantes Longfellow by a shimmering mile.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
Shortly after Norton penned his translation, another man, halfway around the world, was struck by the same tercet, and would write his addressee in a hodgepodge of German, French, and English: "I should like to close this letter in the language of Dante but it seems to me that what I knew before I have now forgotten. Lucky are you who are in Europe, in correspondence with literary men and scholars you can exchange ideas whenever you please. As for me I am here Nel nezzo del cammin della mia vita ini una selva oscura ." The imperfect Italian, or the imperfect memory, was understandable, given the letter-writers circumstances: He was Jose Rizal, writing his friend Ferdinand Blumentritt from Dapitan on July 31, 1894.
And long before I discovered this factoid, I had tacked onto the wall of my UP English department office a poster that some graduate-school friends and I had made up in the United States to announce a literary reading sometime in March 1991 our graduation recital, as it were which we had chosen to title (you guessed it) "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai ."
What strange coincidences kept drawing me back to this haunting line? Last week it was this e-mailed question from Jonel Abellanosa, a Cebu-based writer whom Id met a few years ago during a visit to the University of San Carlos:
"In your opinion, is it possible to translate Dantes Divine Comedy into Cebuano or Filipino, or more specifically the fifth canto of the Inferno? I have this need, this itching need, to translate the said canto into either Cebuano or Filipino or even both. My knowledge of the Italian language is inadequate, thats why I plan to utilize John Ciardis English translation as guide. Do I really have to master the Italian language before even toying with the idea of translation? Also, I am not a Dante scholar, although my knowledge of Dante as poet and person is, you can say, average. Would a translation from someone of my inadequate literary or educational background be credible, or for that matter successful?"
I have to confess that I havent touched the Divine Comedy since my undergraduate days, and even then I glossed over the fine details of that long poem, like most undergraduates did. Jonels question sent me scurrying for copies of and commentaries on the Inferno, and the more I read the more I remembered what I had missed, about the work itself and the bliss of pure learning.
But what can I tell Jonel? Although I write in both English and Filipino, Im not a translator, and have never seriously attempted a translation of my own or someone elses work and perhaps I should tell Jonel why. I stand in awe of the good translators work; I think it requires a very special talent and expertise that even writers themselves may not necessarily have. It helps if the translator is himself or herself a creative writer (John Ciardi, who died in 1986, was one of Americas most eminent contemporary poets); but you have to be more a scholar, a linguist, a reader of minds, a negotiator. You have to balance your own lively imagination with a healthy respect for the original text and its presumptive intentions. You have to be thoroughly familiar, in this case, not only with Italian, but with the Italian of Dantes time, and with its regional nuances, if any.
Thats if you want to do a translation thats up to professional, academic standards. For something less rigorous, like a personal exercise for the sake of pushing yourself to the limits of the languages you know, then a translation from a secondary language should be all right. To test the waters, you might want to try something easier and more familiar say, one of Pablo Nerudas more popular poems (e.g., "Tonight I can write the saddest lines" then match it against the published translations of the same poem by people like Ben Belitt, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Bly.
In these days of globalized fiction, some translators have become stars in their own right, with the names of such as Eric Bentley, Gregory Rabassa, and William Weaver being almost synonymous with those of the writers theyve serviced (Brecht, Garcia Marquez, Eco). Its a full-time job, but unless youre one of these aforementioned stars still quite often thankless. It doesnt help much that many people will adamantly insist that literary beauty can never be transposed from one language to another. Dante himself was supposed to have maintained that "Nothing harmonized by a musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech without losing all its sweetness and harmony."
But somehow I think I understand whats been driving Jonel to dare and attempt what scores of writers and scholars before him have already done, with widely varying degrees of success. (Over the past century alone, at least 50 translations of the Inferno have been published.) Its neither the prospect of fame or fortune nor the challenge of scholarly exactitude; its the love story in the poem, and the thrill of bringing it to life with a new vocabulary.
In the Infernos Fifth Canto, the poet Virgil leads the Pilgrim (Dante himself) through the second circle of Hell, where they encounter a whirlwind tossing about the souls of "carnal sinners" among them, the illicit lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. (What Dante is actually saying is that wayward love is bad but not that bad; the next circle of hell is reserved for gluttons, and the very last one the pits for people who betray their relatives and friends.) In 13th-century real life, Francesca the daughter of a nobleman had been married off for political reasons to the hunchback Giancotto. But a powerful attraction soon arose between Francesca and Giancottos younger brother Paolo. One day, while reading a book on romantic love, Francesca yields to Paolos kisses; but Giancotto catches them and kills them both.
Youd think that Francesca and Paolo would be happy being together forever somewhere, albeit in Hell but no: Francesca is so consumed with grief and shame that she cannot even mention Paolos name, and he is fated to remain naked by her side as an eternal reminder of that fatal moment. Their punishment is their togetherness in misery. She explains to Dante (in the translation of Allen Mandelbaum):
Yet if you long so much to understand
the first root of our love, then I shall tell
my tale to you as one who weeps and speaks.
One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot how love had overcome him.
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.
And time and time again that reading led
our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,
and yet one point alone defeated us.
When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.
A Gallehault indeed, that book and he
who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.
Its lines like these that cause me to give a translation perhaps the best accolade there is: It makes me want to learn the language of the original, so I can drink more, and more deeply, of that wine.
Possibly an even better alternative to translation at least for poets, painters, and the creative lot is to do your own adaptation, your own artistic response to someone elses profoundly moving or troubling work. This is a time-honored way by which literature has progressed, and by which writers and artists have paid homage to (or obliquely derided) their predecessors work.
While the general or natural tendency might be for the tribute, the sequel, or the adaptation to be inferior in quality to the original, sometimes very interesting things can happen over several centuries and continents. John Gays The Beggars Opera (1728) evolved exactly 200 years later into Bertolt Brechts The Threepenny Opera (1928) and so taken was I by these two plays (youll know Threepenny by its show stopper, "Mack the Knife") that I would write my own version of the MacHeath story in Mac Malicsi, TNT, transporting Mackie into Midwestern America and recasting him as a nimble-footed Pinoy, circa 1990. Im no Brecht and Im not Gay (whether big or, ahem, small G), but I had loads of fun trying to do something new with something very old.
And lets not forget George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion (1938), his take on the classic tale of the sculptor Pygmalion and his creation Galatea, which in turn became the basis for My Fair Lady (1964, film version). Just as famously, Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet (first published 1597) inspired West Side Story (1961, film version), not to mention all the stage and screen adaptations that were made of it, including Baz Luhrmanns 1996 version with Leonardo DiCaprio. (Shakespeare, of course, was the grandest adapter of them all, basing a host of plays Romeo and Juliet among them on pre-existent material.)
In fiction, I cant think of a more durable template than James Joyces "Araby" (1905), the classic story of a young boys burning infatuation with an older girl and his crushing disillusionment. My writing students have it coming out of their ears, because "Araby" happens to be a personal favorite of mine (alongside Ernest Hemingways "Hills like White Elephants" "Araby" for the sentiment and "Hills" for the technique). NVM Gonzalezs "Bread of Salt" (1958) is also an "Araby" story, and in 1994, with trembling hand, I essayed my own version, the transparently reversed "Ybarra."
But to return to where we began, with Dantes Fifth Canto of the Inferno, most worthy of note was the intensely lyrical John Keatss response to it, a sonnet titled "After Reading Dantes Episode of Paolo and Francesca, A Dream" (1820). The poem takes its persona, as lovelorn and as miserable as Keats was, not to the heights of ecstasy but
to that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose 1860s translation of the Divine Comedy set the standard for quite a while, wrote four sonnets to commemorate the experience of divining Dante. Theyre of little but scholarly interest now, and my pedestrian sense is that Keats out-Dantes Longfellow by a shimmering mile.
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