To what extent should the
translator of Dante’s Inferno strive
to be faithful to the original? Ezra Pound distinguishes between what he calls
“interpretative translation,” which is what most translators are after, and a
more creative, original type of paraphrase – the translator using original
mainly as an inspiration for writing his own poem. But even those who attempt
an interpretive rendering differ greatly in the degree and manner of their
faithfulness to the original. The question has been raised and debated: should
it be the poet’s voice that is heard, or the voice of the one who is making the
poet accessible in another language? This is obviously a delicate,
sophisticated, and complicated problem.
Surely much depends on what it
is that is being translated. A principle that might apply to a sonnet or perhaps
any short poem, especially a lyrical one, would not be appropriate to a lengthy
narrative with theological and encyclopedic underpinnings such as The Divine Comedy. I should say that
anyone who attempts to translate this massive poem must try, with humility and
flexibility, to be as faithful as possible. He should do what Jackson Matthews
recommends to the guild of translators in general – “be faithful without
seeming to be” – and he adds in regard to this type of faithfulness: “a
translator should make a good lover.”
Perhaps it must always be the
voice of Dante’s translator that we hear (if we have to hear an intervening
voice at all), but he should have listened most carefully to Dante’s voice
before he lets us hear his own. He should not only read and reread what he is
translating, in order to know what it is about (know a whole canto thoroughly
before translating a line), but he should also read Dante aloud, listening to
the rhythm and movement within the lines and the movement from line to line. Consider,
for example, line 63 of the famous Canto V of the Inferno (Paolo and
Francesca’s canto), where Virgil points out to the Pilgrim the figure of
Cleopatra among the lustful souls of Dido’s band, and characterizes her with
one word that caps the line:
Poi è Cleopatràs lusuriosa
(And there is Cleopatra, who
loved men’s lusting)
This epithet, epitomising the
whole career of the imperial wanton, serves to remind us of the technical
nature of the sin being punished in the second circle, the circle of the
lustful: i lussuriosi. And in the
movement of the word lus-su-ri-o-sa (Dante forces us to linger over the word
this way; otherwise the verse would be a syllable short) there is an important
anticipation of a movement in the second part of the canto: the dovelike
movement that starts with the actual descent of Francesca and Paolo, a gentle
movement that becomes the movement of the entire second half of this canto and
offers such a contrast to the wild buffetings of the winds we hear in the first
half, where we see the damned dashed along by the tempestuous storm. The
sensitive translator must stop to question (then to understand) the rhythm of lussuriosa at this point in the canto:
to sense how this diaphanous word in this melodious line stands out against the
howling noises in the background. This seductive rhythm applied to Cleopatra’s
sin anticipates not only the gentle movements but the seductive atmosphere of
the second half of the canto, when Francesca is on stage and melting the
Pilgrim’s heart. No translator I have read seems to have made any attempt to
reproduce the effect intended by the line in the original: the simplicity of
the first half of the line (Poi è
Cleopatràs …) and the mellifluous quality of the epithet (lussuriosa) in final position, with its
tapering-off effect.
Again, the translator should
study Dante’s use of poetic devices such as enjambment and alliteration. This
does not mean that the translator should always use such devices when Dante
does and only when he does, but that he should study the effects Dante has
achieved with these devices – and his economical use of them. Dante is a
greater poet than any of his translators have been or are likely to be. A
translator using the English iambic pentameter may even learn from Dante’s
flowing lines to use better the meter he has chosen. It is true that Dante’s
hendecasyllabic verse is quantitative and not accentual; still, the words of
the Italian language have their own natural accent. In reading aloud Dante’s
lines with their gentle stress, one can hear the implicit iambs and trochees
and dactyls and anapaests. And one may learn to achieve the same effect of
“implicitness” to counterbalance the natural tendency of English meters to have
too insistent a stress.
Finally, there is the matter of
diction. Here the translator must be absolutely faithful, choosing words and
phrases that have the same tone as those of the poet. They must obviously
suggest solemnity when he is solemn, lightness when he is light; they must be
colloquial or formal as he is colloquial or formal. But, most of all, the
diction should be simple when Dante’s is. And this is where the translators
have sinned the most. There are two ways to sin against simplicity of diction:
one concerns only the matter of word material and syntax – for instance the use
of stilted or over-flowery language and of archaic phraseology. Most
translators would not agree with me; some feel free to use any word listed in
the O.E.D. after A.D. 1000: to girn,
to birl, to skirr, scaling the scaur, to abye the fell arraign – to say nothing
of syntactical archaisms.
A more subtle sin against the
simplicity of Dante’s diction is the creation of original striking rhetorical
or imagistic effects where Dante has intended none. Dante himself saves spectacular
effects for very special occasions. Most of his narrative, if we make an
exception of the elaborate similes, is composed in simple, straightforward
style. Occasionally one finds an immediately striking effect in a line or
phrase, and when this does happen, it is magnificent. Consider line 4 of Canto
V (so different from line 63, quoted earlier, with its muted, inconspicuous
effect):
Stavvi Minòs orribilmente e
ringhia
(There stands Minòs grotesquely
and he snarls)
Surely Dante meant to startle
his reader with this sudden presentation (after the sober explanation of the
opening three lines) of the monster-judge. The line ends with the resounding
impact of the verb ringhia – it ends
with a snarl that sounds like the lash of a whip (or tail). And we are made to
feel the horror of Minòs by the key word in the middle of the line, the
slow-moving orribilmente, which
points both backward and ahead: Stavvi
orribilmente, ringhia orribilmente.
Grammatically, of course, the adverb modifies the opening word, the static
verb, Stavvi. This construction, in
which an adverb of manner modifies a verb of presence, is most unusual: Minòs
was present horribly!
Usually, however, one comes to
realise only at the end of several tercets that a certain effect has been
achieved by the passage as a whole, one to which each single line has been
quietly contributing. Dante’s effects, then, are mainly of a cumulative nature.
And often there are no “effects,” only simple, factual, narrative details. In
fact, sometimes Dante’s style (and not unfortunately!) is purely prosaic. An
adventurous, imaginative translator is easily tempted to speed up the movement
of Dante’s tranquil lines, to inject fire and colour into a passage of neutral
tone. Even if he carries it off successfully, I would tend to question his
goal. And when the translator fails, when he falls, great is the fall thereof.
If the translator had to choose
in general between a style that strives for striking effects, sometimes
succeeding and sometimes failing, and one less colourful but more consistent,
the choice could be merely a matter of personal taste. But when it is a
question of translating a poet who himself is so economical in his use of
conspicuous effects, then, I believe, it is no longer a wide-open choice. I
have set as my goal simplicity and quiet, even, sober flow – except when I feel
that the moment has come to let myself go, to pull out the stops: to be
flamboyant or complicated instead of simple, to be noisy instead of quiet, to
be rough instead of smooth – or to be deliberately mellifluous. Except for
those rare occasions, I have consistently tried to find a style that does not
call attention to itself. And I might add that, in translating, this requires a
great deal of effort. To the extent that I have succeeded, those readers who
admire the fireworks of some recent translations of the Inferno will find my own less exciting – as little exciting as
Dante himself often is.
My desire to be faithful to
Dante, however, has not led me to adopt his metrical scheme. I do not use terza rima, as for example, Dorothy
Sayers does, or even the “dummy” terza
rima of John Ciardi. My medium is rhymeless iambic pentameter, that is,
blank verse. I have chosen this, first, because blank verse has been the
preferred form for long narrative poetry from time of Milton on. It cannot be
proved that rhyme necessarily makes verse better: Milton declared rhyme to be a
barbaric device, and many modern poets resolutely avoid it. Karl Shapiro, an
enthusiast for rhyme, is considering only shorter poems when he speaks of the
five main qualities that rhyme gives to verse: the musical, the emphatic, the
architectural, the sense of direction one feels in a well-turned stanza, and
finally, the effect of the rests that come between the stanzas. Three of these
qualities could apply only to stanzaic poetry, where rhyme is much more
necessary in establishing structure than in a poem with the dimensions of The Divine Comedy, whose only large
subdivision is the canto. Only two of the qualities of rhyme he mentions might
apply to Dante’s poem: the musical and the emphatic.
But my main reason for avoiding
rhyme has been the results achieved by all those who have used rhyme in
translating The Divine Comedy: they
have shown that the price paid was disastrously high. I believe that all those
who have offered rhymed translations of Dante could have produced far better
poems if they had not used rhyme. There are two reasons for the crippling
effects of rhyme in translating a lengthy poem. First of all it is apparently
impossible always to find perfect rhymes in English for a long stretch of lines
– and if good rhyme gives a musical effect, bad rhyme is cacophonous; it is a
reminder (and with some translators we are being constantly reminded) that the
search for rhyme has failed. I have found at least six kinds of bad rhyme in
translations of Dante: vowels that do not match, consonants that do not match,
stresses that do not match, plus combinations of these. Especially when there
is a pause at the end of a line or the line ends with a stressed syllable, so
that the cacophonous element is put into relief, the result can be most
painful. One can be more faithful to Dante (without seeming to be) by avoiding
rhyme than by introducing imperfect rhyme into the rendition of his lines,
whose rhymes are always acoustically perfect.
Shapiro, speaking of the power
of rhyme to draw us into the movement of a poem, says that our expectation is
thereby being continually raised and then satisfied; ideally, rhyme helps pull
us through, and pull us in deep, as we anticipate the scheme. But, when the
translator uses a mixture of perfect and imperfect rhyme – when, that is, we
never know whether our expectation will be satisfied – the effect is quiet
different. In every tercet the reader with a sensitive ear will always be
wondering “Will he make it this time?” and may often look ahead to see the
result, thus breaking the movement of the poem.
But the rhymed translation of
the Inferno reveal, all of them, a
second disadvantage, and a far greater one than the difficulty of matching
sounds. Because of the difficulty imposed by the continuous mechanical
necessity of finding rhyme, good or bad, the translator is often forced to use
a diction that is aesthetically unacceptable, or even contrary to the spirit of
the language (and once a translator has agreed to distort the English language
for the sake of rhyme, the result could well be an increasing insensitivity to
the requirements of natural diction). To be forced to think, with every line,
in terms of the sound of the final stressed syllable has resulted, far too
often, in lines that sound like a translation. And the first of the Capital
Sins in translating is for a translation to sound like one!
For the poet creating original
verse in his own language, the search for rhyme also, of course, imposes
limitations, but these limitations themselves may be a help in the creative
process, and the rhyme, when found, as Shapiro says, may bring an image or idea
that will suggest a new line of development. At its best, rhyme leads the poet
into discoveries. And since he is in the process of creation, he can afford at
any moment to change the course of his poetic fluidity. But for the translator,
who is faced from the beginning with an existing structure whose shape has been
forever fixed, rhyme constitutes a crippling burden.
But if I feel such horror at
the paralysing potentiality of rhyme when used to translate The Divine Comedy, why have I chosen to
bind myself to the mechanical device of meter? Five beats in every line – no
more and no less. Why not choose free verse? Free verse, I feel, is more
appropriate for purely creative composition than for translation; and it is
more suitable for verse deeply charged with emotion than for narrative. The
irregular rhythms, the modulations, of free verse must be determined by the
writer’s own moods, which will direct the ebbing and flowing of his verse. For
this he needs space; as a translator such a writer would need to get as far
away as possible from the original!
Moreover, the requirements of
iambic pentameter can be very flexible if one is ready to avail oneself of the
alternations possible. One need not limit oneself continually to the sequence: ˘ˊ/ ˘ˊ/ ˘ˊ/ ˘ˊ/ ˘ˊ/.
The last foot, for example, may be given, when desired, an extra unstressed
syllable (feminine ending; in Italian this is the norm):
Whĕn those/ŏffén/dĕd soúls/hăd told/their
story …
For an iamb one may substitute its
opposite, a troche (ˊ˘)
Iň thĕ world/this mán/wăs filled/with
aŕ/rŏgańce …
(The reader sensitive to rhythm
should be on the alert for such opening anapaests.)
Or the opposite of this, the dactyl (ˊ˘˘):
Ĭ said/tŏ hím,/bowing/my head/modestly
…
And I have often used a
substitution that some translators seem to avoid, the amphibrach (˘ˊ˘); the final foot
is always an amphibrach when there is a feminine ending):
Ĭ said,/”Frăncéscă,/tȟe tór/mĕnt
that/yŏu suffer …”
(Compare this with Dorothy
Sayer’s and John Ciardi’s translations of the same line, in which the natural
rhyme of the name Francesca is not echoed in an amphibrach foot:”[Thy dreadful
fate,] Frăncés/că, mákĕs/mé weep,/ĭt só/iňspiŕs [pity]”; “Ĭ said:/’Fráncés/că what/yŏu
súf/fĕr heŕr …’”)
Finally, one may let just one
syllable count as a foot when the stress is very heavy:
Loṽe,/that kín/dlĕs quick/ĭn tĥe
gén/tĬe/ heart …
And there may be gradation in
degrees of stress. Iambic pentameter is a beautiful, flexible instrument, but
only when the translator is freed from preoccupation with rhyme.
Because I am free of this
tyranny I have had time to listen carefully to Dante’s voice, and though the
result is far
from being a miracle of perfect translation, still, I believe I can
promise that my reader seldom, if ever, will wince or have his teeth set on
edge by an over-ambitious attempt to force the language into the unnatural
tensions almost never felt in poetry other than translations.
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