Will the real Dante translator please stand up!

Translators of Dante have the unenviable job of adapting to a contemporary sensibility not just a celebrated  religious-allegorical method but all or any combination of the following as well: a hendecasyllabic verse line; a 33-syllable terza rima verse paragraph (with interlocking rhymes) serving as the nucleus of a larger pattern of 33 canti per 3 cantiche; a very condensed syntax with generous sprinklings of latinisms and neologisms, brachylogies and rhetorical topoi;  rich chronicles of history and mythology; and a tendency, prevalent everywhere, to alternate between scholasticism and a more recognizable Florentine vernacular, always skilfully combined in the interests of conversion narrative. And, of course, the whole must be tempered by a gnawing sense of the injustice of the poet-pilgrim forced into involuntary exile. It is a text of poetry and theology rendered in an exquisitely beautiful lyricism. Dante's great because he's managed to do all of this.

The translator's task is no less than to give a sense of the greatness of a poet and a whole poem composed of these its constitutive parts. I think the translator who comes closest to the original in spirit and design ought quite rightfully to wear the poet's laurels, too. Who is then qualified to walk in the great poet-pilgrim's shoes? The academic (Dantisti), the educated reader whose first language is Italian, the autodidact poring tirelessly over every line, or the poet with a side interest in translation? I suppose the same could be asked of the Dante reader. I suppose I could even ask (as a forced deference to the postmodernist era), Is Dante translation even worth doing anymore? It's certainly hard to imagine any writing class instructors today touting the inherent advantages of familiarity with the Commedia (preferably in its original form), both as a model of imitation and great classical text. It seems a politics of art, premised on the virtues of 'non-meaning', may have done in the great Florentine bard after all.

I do, however, stubbornly persist in the belief that the classics have value and that poetical works, up to the present age, inspired and informed by them have always borne the best fruit: going even so far as to state categorically that familiarity with the best poetry specimens is a necessary (but never sufficient) condition of significant poetry. Translations have always seemed to give off varying degrees of scintillations of the lighted jewel held in the great master's hand. And since Dante is the poet de l'alta luce che da sé è vera, the Dante translation can be nothing but approximation, as if in the estimation we needed to determine a verse's nearness to the celestial vision as well. Identifying the lineaments of the splendid poetical jewel is always in Dante a type of devotion, whether we like it or not. It's something for which most of us are probably temperamentally unready.

 I have randomly listed 3 candidates for the distinction of being the 'best' rendition of lines 118-129 from Paradiso, Canto VI (of course, among the possible hundreds already in existence). But how we define the 'best' translation is precisely what is at stake here. The Paradiso excerpt is by no means atypical. Perhaps we'd do better to look at translation just as the sort of homage-bearing exercise it always seems to be, looking in each for intimations only of a Dantean ideal given to us almost whole over the centuries, an ideal that's worth pursuing for the reason John Henry Cardinal Newman said spiritual truths are worth pursuing, namely, because they are "implicitly true". Perhaps all the translator and reader of Dante can do is follow Cardinal Newman's injunction to regard any "skill" as "a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science" (from An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent). Guided by hopefully just this "instinct", I'd like to comment on three versions of the Paradiso passage and try making comparisons to something that's still strangely (and uncompromisingly) a literary ideal.

Ma nel commensurar d’i nostri gaggi
col merto è parte di nostra letizia,
perché non li vedem minor né maggi.

Quindi addolcisce la viva giustizia
in noi l’affetto sì, che non si puote
torcer già mai ad alcuna nequizia.

Diverse voci fanno dolci note;
così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.
                                     (PD, VI, 118-129)
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Instinctively, I like least the translation (Sisson's) that looks too smooth (almost glib), too relatively untroubled by all the usual challenges in the original. The poet, translator and critic glosses too confidently over the difficult and technical intersections purposely to be found between a state of fallenness and redemption: happiness that results, for example, from a correspondence of rewards to desert is almost a cliche as coming nowhere near the agony of moral ambivalence rooted in that one word "merto" (properly defined as "merit" only by Samperi). Sisson fails to strike the proper polyphonic tone. There are no affinities between 'music' and 'salvation'.Nor are there places in Sisson for pause and reflection as there ought to be : certainly none of the challenge of unearthing tough syntax for the "gem" concealed within. How can he see when he can't hear? "Gaggi" is unsurprisingly given (except in Samperi) as "rewards", as if a thing to be held by right, and the road ahead always skips too merrily.  The problem is that harmonies ("Diverse voci") too sweet and enticing are barely distinguishable from sin. The final Tenth heaven looks too bland and uniform here for anyone's bother.

But in the appropriateness of our rewards
To our desert is part of our happiness,
Not to see them either more or less.

By this means the living justice so softens
Our affections that they may not be
Ever twisted by any iniquity.

Different voices make notes sound sweet;
And so different stations in our life
Make a sweet harmony among these spheres.
                               (C. H. Sisson)

Does poet and America's first translator of Dante fare any better? Here the poet in Longfellow works too much against him: trying to fan a spark into bonfires (sparks fly everywhere in Paradiso) draws attention only to itself. Beginning every line with a capital (and a capitalized "Justice" above all) is a silly affectation, and "herein" and "evermore" look as much out of place here as they do even in nineteenth-century poetry: didn't Longfellow know that Dante studiously avoided archaisms (except for rhetorical effect) and preferred to invent his own words wherever even the vernacular failed? The "instinct" for the original Dante is so errant in Longfellow that even rhymes, had the great versifier attempted them, would have all but obliterated the "terza rima". Translation here is pure dictionary work. "Portion", for example, only portions out as in a children's story whereas the more judicious "part" can at least make the reader feel the true edginess of  incomplete joy (as every step in the climb to heaven is necessarily designed to show). In Longfellow, souls, not the true bodies in which souls always chafe, sit too sweetly awaiting their turn on the dance floor. A poet whose idea of "dolce armonia" is "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" hasn't really budged an inch.

But in commensuration of our wages
With our desert is portion of our joy,
Because we see them neither less nor greater.

Herein doth living Justice sweeten so
Affection in us, that for evermore
It cannot warp to any iniquity.

Voices diverse make up sweet melodies;
So in this life of ours the seats diverse
Render sweet harmony among these spheres

                           (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

About three words separate Samperi from the others. He sings with a true Dantean heaviness in his heart: a kind of plodding literalness always pervades the true poet-pilgrim's chronicle (Perhaps only some of that is felt in this short passage). And against the greyness of exertion, physical and spiritual,  angels in Dante as in life, and their fulgurating movements, appear without the intermediaries of  technique ("sanza mezzo"): always studded with their own painful brilliances  (as in Celan), always grainy and sharp as their speech. That's the best that can be said for them: the rest is a matter of images and endless analogies and commentary. Because Samperi is he who walks also the twisting to"iniquity" (and the difference here is not slight) must be felt precisely in that "to". Samper says in Habitudinem that "To in Truth shows/the Imprint".It's not directional so much as torsional effort. The path to the light always runs obliquely to competing spheres and that requires "twisting". Furthermore, "pledges" are cold and insensate things and they don't always pay (as Sisson and Longfellow stupidly thought). The contractarian burden from which the journey to the Empyrean meant to free him could only have weighed him down the more: terrestrial life (especially in the eastside) is hard to shed even in flight. Best to make a virtue out of necessity. So Aquinas enjoins Dante in the Fourth heaven to walk with leaden feet, like someone worn out with reflection on invisible things: "E questo ti sia sempre piombo a' piedi,/per farti mover lento com' uom lasso/ e al sì e al no che tu non vedi". Redemption works rather like the endless turn of "wheels" that is all there is of heaven's own too distantly "sweet harmony". Again, Celan comes to mind.

Frank Samperi wins the laurels...

 

But in the commensuration of our pledges
  with merit is part of our joy,
  because we see them neither less nor greater.
Hence the living justice so sweetens
  affection in us, that it can never
  be twisted to any iniquity.
Diverse voices make sweet notes;
  thus diverse seats in our life
  render sweet harmony among these wheels
                                   (Frank Samperi)