Chekhov’s Mistess

Oh the Look on Dante’s Face When He Can’t Find His Wallet

[update: for perspective on the Vendler/Griffiths issue, see Ocracoke Post, the blog of J.M. Tyree, whose most recent article in The Believer is “Ignatius Donnelly, Prince of Cranks.”]

I was a little confused when I saw a post at Maud’s because I followed the first link to the new Dante in English, edited by Eric Griffiths & Matthew Reynolds. On that page the LRB bookshop featured a nice quote by Helen Vendler:

The reader unfamiliar with Dante will be provoked agreeably by these translations to a further curiosity about the Commedia and its reverberations in English letters. Though there are books on Dante’s influence in England, the abstraction ‘influence’ takes on its true complexity when we see it generating so many English compositions in so many different forms over the last six hundred years.

I followed the second link (may require subscription to access) to find the article from which that quote came in the current issue of the London Review of Books. The above was the last paragraph in an article pretty much damning the whole endeavor. Vendler concludes:

It is acutely disappointing to see a new presentation of Dante that seems, at least to me, so false to the spirit of the author.

She takes on Griffiths’ “desperation…that nobody will pay any attention to Dante unless he is jazzed up in contemporary slang.” For example:

Does your recollection of the Paradiso portray Dante ‘mute and about to weep before Beatrice and the encircling blessed, harrowed with embarrassment, like a man who convivially declares “My shout!” and then finds he has forgotten his wallet’?

First roundly condemning Griffiths, she then turns to the translations:

What do we find? That there have been a surprising number of translations of the whole Commedia, and that many of them are in terza rima (about which Griffiths has a rewarding, if not original, set of comments, emphasising the counter-flows of its forward motion and its backward glances); that dreariness sets in very quickly in the hands of a stolid translator; that it is difficult to capture in English Dante’s many planes of discourse (ably described by his Italian commentators) without sounding rather absurd; that idiom ages very rapidly (one century’s modernity is another century’s archaism); that heroic couplets are the worst form in which to cast Dante’s lines; that some translators think up extraordinary means (Dante does well in the metre of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’); that the Spenserian stanza, with its pronounced spreading close after each nine lines, is death to the current of terza rima; that Shelley’s mastery of the form in the unfinished ‘Triumph of Life’ is a miracle; that the dilution of Dantean terseness (Felicia Hemans wrote ‘a 41-fold expansion’ of the story of La Pia) is always an error; that updating Dante’s circumstance (as Leigh Hunt does in what Griffiths refers to as his ‘Disneyfication’ of Francesca da Rimini) becomes parodic; and many other such trouvailles. It is fun (at least for anyone interested in Dante and in verse form) to see how the poet has been ‘channelled’ (as Griffiths might say) over the centuries.

Not altogether positive, I would say, particularly since she seems to find so many faults here that cataloguing them seems her only outlet.

But I’ll probably buy the book. Why? That last sentence: “ It is fun (at least for anyone interested in Dante and in verse form) to see how the poet has been ‘channelled’ (as Griffiths might say) over the centuries.” It’s true. I don’t really know why anyone would feel they have to make Dante seem relevant in any other sense than it already is. We don’t read it as an artifact or a history and besides, Dante even has fart jokes in there; what more could you ask for?

I’ve read the Musa translation and the Ciardi translation and I have one or two others laying around begging for attention. A book like Griffiths’ is fun precisely because it allows you to get in and taste Dante and the tremendous influence he’s had in the nearly 700 years his poem has existed (which, by the way, there were periods of hundreds of years that no one paid it much attention). Although comparing translations is not very satisfying because none seem perfect, each brings some new aspect to the poem in the way that even in your native language you never seem to read a great poem the same way twice.

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In addition to Dante in English, I recommend The Poet’s Dante, a collection of “twentieth century” responses to the Divine Comedy by 30 poets. The Poet’s Dante is entirely prose pieces, divided into two sections. The first section is, as the editors call it, “written by the Illustrioius Dead,” including Borges, Auden, Pound and Eliot. The second section consists of newly commissioned essays by (the illustrious living) poets such as Seamus Heaney, J.D. McClatchy, M.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, and others.

When I first bought the book, I was only interested in the “Dead” authors, but with Dante in English in hand, it might be fun to read some of the newer essays that not only address the Comedia, but some of the earlier responses to it as well. Not all of the essays are merely reverent either. C.K. Williams writes:

At the end, although there is certainly much strictness in the ethical method of the Comedy, the cosmology it presents, even to a nonbeliever, is benevolent and rich with hope. So much so that sometimes I think that what we’ve lived through in our recent history has been too vile, too willfully cruel, for this benevolence to seem more than a wistful conceit. There has been too much mindless and mindful malignity, too many hacatombs and holocausts for even Dante’s cosmos to contain. Sometimes it can seem as though Purgatory now would have to be a mountain of burnt flesh; would a consciousness creeping woefully across it be able then to proclaim itself the “soul” or “spirit,” even of itself?

So maybe The Poet’s Dante could be a substitution for reading Griffiths’ introduction. Either way, the two books together make a terrific companion or introduction to the Divine Comedy.

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• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: August 26, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Dante

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