Recommend a Dante Translation

Dorothy Sayers--preserves the poetry, a little stiff and formal, actually understands the theology (not incidental, with Dante)

Mark Musa (the Penguin Classics version as well as the Viking Portable Library version)--clear, sometimes picturesque, free verse, no rhymes

John Sinclair--it's a prose translation. Me personally, I'd rather see how close a poet can get to nailing it. After all, the thrill of someone continuing to get the story "right" while also hitting the rhymes, more or less, is part of what Dante's original readers were able to enjoy, so why not an approximation for his English readers?

Robert and Jean Hollander--I've heard strong claims made for these two. When I make my next trip through the Comedy, I might use their version.

But probably the thing to do is just go to a good bookstore, read the first few lines from each of the three sections as done by several translators, and buy the translation that grabs your interest.

I read the Sinclair translations of all three back in college. I liked them fine then, but I'm with Phil--there should be some music to this.

Later re-read with new Oxford editions for Inferno and Purgatorio (Durling/Martinez) - they're still cranking out the Paradiso one, though, but it's a solid translation. I also read it with the Mandelbaum translation, which I heard get knocked a lot, but I thought was pretty decent.

Lastly, I've read the academic critical one, by Charles Singleton, which I think is the most authoritative commentary, but not good unless you've already read it once or twice.

So in my opinion Oxford (Durling/Martinez)>Mandelbaum>Ciardi>Singleton

But I have to recommend the Ciaran Carson one. He's a scottish poet and, as the TLS said, his translation seems to be the most human the least allegorical--it is at least much more vivid than the other ones, if more cartoonish. When Virgil and Dante meet the souls who weren't good or evil enough to make the cut for heaven or hell, Carson's Virgil calls them "the so-so souls." It may sound too Martin Amisy and not universal enough for some people's ears, but there were a lot of passages I read in him that I felt like I was reading for the first time--but then realized I had read twice in the other translations. It at least goes by much faster than the other translations, brisk and novelistic, and makes the other ones seems sort of cumbersome or hollowly rhetorical.

Anyways it seems like it might be more useful if all of you who've read it posted up a translation of a passage you liked. Then you could compare translations of the same passage and see which one you liked better.

This is the Sayer's first canto:

Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

Here is Carson's:

Halfway through the story of my life
I came to in a gloomy wood, because
I'd wandered off the path, away from the light.

Another example of Carson's slanginess:

There from beside him rose another shade,
visible down to the chin: it must, I guess,
have struggled to its knees. It made

to look around me, as if anxious to address
someone it hoped might be attached to me;
but when its survey met with no success,

it wept and said: 'If by sheer poetry
you infiltrate this murky prison zone,
where is my son? Why is he not with thee?'

Sorry that was dumb. I guess I read one chunk of action, about a page and then read it in another translation. I think two at at time is usually good enough or maybe read one for plot and then reread the other ones. I think the thing is that Dante seems to be a poet whose metaphors depend least on the language used to describe them: they have a purity that seems to come out more (rather than less) when you notice how irrelevant the wording is--and I think reading the different translations brings that out.

Bed

Of Terza Rima I am uncertain (eg: I would not always spot it on sight, and I am not sure of its Function): but did you know that the last section of Heaney's pome 'Station Island' is written in it?

As you read Heaney (his name is pronounced SHAY mus HEE knee), it will be obvious that a big poetic intelligence is at work.

Yes, I am translating the Divine Comedy into terza rima vernacular--that is, into English neither slangy nor collegey (as one of my two incalculably helpful counselors put it--Stuart and Steve are my private Dante Club). I have qualifications, but only by the spoonful. I am a poet, the real thing, but have published very little (a book in 1983)--I keep on making poems, although Dante has all but taken over my creative life, because that's what you do. I am fluent in a Romance language, but unfortunately it is Portuguese. I was a Classics Major at a good school--but couldn't translate my way, as we say in America, out of a paper bag. I am learning, but hardly know, Italian. I have a gift for translation, somehow. I was forcefed the King James Bible as a boy, like a Periogord goose, and this magnificent translation's rhythms and diction more than anything else are probably why I entered Words. I'm a total lexicophile, with the OED and maybe eight other dictionaries on this computer I use to address you--but wonderful words like tope and toque and topiary will never ever find their way into my homage to Dante. Finally, the first qualification I can claim in abundance, not drops, I fell utterly under Dante's spell around 1999. His inexhaustible greatness is my second sky.

How far along am I? After, oh, three or four years? Why, I've translated all five of the first five cantos of the Inferno.

As it happens, I was talking with Inferno translator Michael Palma recently, after the 11th annual Maundy Thursday nine-to-midnight Dante Inferno reading at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City. Many illustrious poets read, with some half of the cantica's cantos being read. I was a reader last year, but not this year. I hope to be a reader next year. Anyway, Michael mentioned realizing, after his leisurely beginning, that if he wanted to finish this translation (which he did!), he'd "better pick up the pace." Exactly what I'd better do, especially since, unlike Michael, I mean to go all the way to Heaven and back.

Should you want to see a sample (and hear: I've attached a recording of me reading to each terzina) of my attempt to date, you'll find PowerPoints and Word documents at my ever-edited website:

www.tsoules.com/dante

Best,
Terrill

just finished the hollander inferno. i can't speak for its accuracy but i loved it, and the edition is wonderful: italian on the left; english on the right; friendly, punchy, hilariously detailed notes between cantos. (satan's height, in feet, is helpfully calculated in the notes to canto xxxiv, not without a wink.) i actually went to the italian pretty frequently: it's cousin enough to english that i could usually tell which words were which, so i got more of a sense of dante's style than i would have from even the best translation by itself. might move straight on to purgatorio.

oh also i have this thing where any book accompanied by a map automatically makes me happy: pulp fantasy, sure, but also faulkner, tolstoy, and, if you read it like nabokov wants you to, ulysses. this book had a map OF HELL. so that was cool.

anyone reading Clive James' translation? It's quite good.

Im reading CH Sisson, its v good imo.

I'd like to try James's maybe. I like Sisson's, though it's a bit too sternly plain-style sometimes (tho' maybe that's me carrying over my idea of sisson from his own verse – uptight Eliotic).

Thread has triggered a Dante mood. Just ordered Carson's Inferno.