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The Inferno of DanteRobert PinskyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, $35.00by Rachel JacoffWith Robert Pinsky's Inferno, the tradition of poets rediscovering Dante has a new and splendid exemplar. A poetic reappropriation of Dante had been the goal of Daniel Halperin's earlier project of farming out the Inferno to twenty different contemporary poets, each of whom was to translate one or two Cantos. It was translating Cantos 20 and 28 for that volume that got Pinsky hooked on the challenge of an English- speaking Dante. In the Introduction to the Halperin book James Merrill wrote of the potential for twenty further translations, but thus far Pinsky's is the only one.Pinsky has many virtues as a translator. His ear for tone is much sounder than that of other recent translators, as is his ear for spoken English. His translation rarely produces the discomfort I feel reading aloud in a classroom from Singleton or Mandelbaum. Pinsky's taut rendering gives it a robust muscularity. There is neither archaism nor the awkward padding characteristic of many verse translations, which fill out lines for purposes of rhyme. Rhyme is a central concern for any translator of the Commedia because of the importance of terza rima, a rhyme scheme of great narrative momentum and thematic suggestibility. In terza rima the first and third lines of each tercet rhyme with each other and with the central line in the antecedent terzina (aba bcb cdc and so on), producing the effect of two steps forward and one step back. With its seamless blend of forward motion and backward glance, the verse form has the nearly compulsive energy of waltz rhythm. Since rhyme is achieved so much more easily in Italian, the rhymes feel neither forced nor exaggeratedly emphatic. Because English is a language with greater lexical resources but far less capacity for rhyme, rhyming on the scale demanded by terza rima feels more like chiming, and is often obtrusive or comic. For this reason, some translators have modified the verse form (rhyming only the first and third lines of the tercet), or allowed themselves great leeway with inexact rhymes, or rhymed sporadically. Pinsky opts for consonantal or slant rhyme as his basic scaffold to avoid the negative potential of strong rhymes. Has Pinsky created the equivalent of terza rima? For long stretches of text it required the greatest effort to sense any rhyme at all. Although very taken with the idea that the effect of slant rhyme in English would approximate that of rhyming vowels in Italian, I found that I couldn't "hear it" most of the time; for me the slant rhyme couldn't provide the delight that strong rhymes offer by their mixture of "rightness" and surprise. Compression, concision, and clarity are the salient virtues of Pinsky's translation. The forward moving energy of the narrative derives from that compression as well as from the repeated transgression of the structural role of the three line unit. By working against the terzina structure Pinsky gets the poem moving even faster than it does in Italian and gains syntactical freedom for his own idiom. It is customary to signal the terzina by indenting its second and third lines, but Pinsky has done something unique in my experience of both Italian and English versions: he has accentuated their structure by separating out the tercets with double spacing. Since the typography is thereby in counterpoint with the syntax, the terzina's function as narrative building block is underscored with one hand while taken away with the other. And, I was constantly unnerved by the appearance of lines that begin a terzina in the middle of a Pinsky tercet. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered about the value of reprinting the Italian on the facing page at all. This translation isn't meant to be a prose trot for students, but rather a poem with a mind of its own that encourages you to read forward rather than sideways with an eye on the original. The presence of the original doesn't make sense here as it does in more literal or line-by-line translations. In Canto 3, for example, Dante compares the souls waiting to be ferried across the Acheron to falling leaves, a simile derived from Virgil's Aeneid, itself a rewriting of a famous passage in the Iliad. The "meaning" of Dante's simile depends on understanding how Dante subtly transforms Virgil's emphasis on the multitude of the souls ("As many as the leaves in autumn...") and on the seasonal, natural process represented by the leaves and the migrating birds that are the second term of the simile by shifting the point of view from that of the leaves to the branch that is losing them and from flocks of migrating birds to the flight of a falcon responding to its trainer's lure. Come d'autunno si levan le foglieTranslated literally, this would read: "As in the autumn, the leaves take off, one after another, until the bough sees all its spoils on the ground, so the evil seed of Adam throw themselves from that shore, one by one, at a signal, like a bird at its call." The Virgilian crowd-scene takes on different implications because Dante insists twice on viewing the leaves/souls "one by one," a phrase which will be echoed in the last Canto of Paradiso where Dante is described as having traversed the universe to see "le vite spiritale ad una ad una" (the spiritual lives one by one). Now here is Pinsky's version: As leaves in quick succession sail down in autumnThe dominant impression here is one of speed, with the "quick succession" of leaves mimed by the quickness of the verse, its energetic verbs and compression. Dante slows his verse with the reiteration of "one after another" and "one by one," phrases that Pinsky chooses to omit -- partly, I suspect, because they seem so odd when applied to falling leaves.*they do?* That oddness, however, is necessary to Dante's "correction" of Virgil and his insistence on the uniqueness and specificity of each soul. Michael's Mazur's thirty-five monotypes provide an icily haunting gloss to the translation. The recognizable form of the tower of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio in the tower of the City of Dis (described by Dante as a mosque) points to the reciprocity of Florence and Hell as tellingly as Dante's own hints in that direction. The ruin of the Roman Forum's Temple of Castor and Pollux makes a suggestive image for the presentation of Dante's classicizing Limbo. His illustration for Canto 22 (where one of the sinners is hooked and mutilated by a devil) has been reproduced on the book's cover against a red background. But even at it's nadir, Dante's version of Hell is a great deal chillier than the conventional hothouse, and Mazur's monotypes for the frozen final circle of traitors are among the best in the book. John Freccero's Introduction to the translation distills a compelling reading of the Inferno into a few powerful and immediately intelligible pages that make it clear why Freccero is not only a great Dante scholar, but a legendary teacher of the poem as well. The contemporary relevance of the poem's moral dimensions have never been stated so boldly and convincingly. Nicole Pinsky supplies brief but very helpful notes, and there are fascinating commentaries on several of the individual Cantos written by Pinsky and Freccero. These mini-commentaries will help beginning readers to gauge the weight of episodes that have, over the centuries, taken on a life of their own. With the Commedia there is always a danger that the weight of commentary will swamp the poem, but the mini-commentaries and the notes resist such overkill. As much as I relish the interest in the Inferno this translation has generated, I can't help regretting its reinforcement of the cliche that the Inferno is the Commedia. Of course no one actually says such a thing, but it is implied in both Pinksy's own comments and those of the reviewers, who are unanimous in their conviction of the special pertinence of the Inferno to our contemporary sensibilities. It is implied above all in the separate publication of the Inferno, which is a strikingly odd thing to do. No one would publish a translation of the first two acts of a Shakespeare play or the first third of a Tolstoy novel. There is no question that the Inferno has special status in our culture. And the convention of reading only the Inferno has been reinforced in Humanities courses where there is never enough time to read the whole Commedia and by the unexamined idea that our own terrible times couldn't find an echo in the idealizations and sublimations of the later canticles. This is simply wrong. Reading the whole Commedia is essential to understanding how the Inferno itself works, since it is retrospectively glossed by parallels and revisionary rewritings in the later canticles. Reading "vertically" is particularly important for understanding the most mesmerizing of the infernal personalities whose limits are clarified by the subsequent dramatization of their positive counterparts. In the Middle Ages, too, people were a lot better at imagining Hell than Paradise. The pre-Dante medieval visions of the afterlife dilate on the details of Hell at much greater length than they depict the rewards of the blessed. What is remarkable about Dante from a medieval point of view is that he gives equal time not only to Paradise and Hell, but to Purgatory which, until his poem, had only a tenuous imaginative substantiality. Taking a hint from the Halperin project of multiple translators, I began to dream of a late twentieth century Commedia with a different translator for each canticle, each as strong as Pinsky. Gjertrud Schnackenberg's radiant responsiveness to Dante, evident in A Gilded Lapse of Time, makes her my choice for Paradiso, while Seamus Heaney would be ideal for Purgatory. Probably these poets, so visibly inspired by Dante, are less interested in translating than in transfiguring Dante's verse into their own, but Pinsky's achievement leads me to hope. Rachel Jacoff is chair of the Italian Department at Wellesley and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Dante.
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