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Posted by Michael Sympson on 8/9/2001, 8:34:32
Medieval illuminators liked to illustrate whole stories in every miniaturesque detail on barely more than a square inch of parchment. We see the bread loaf on the table, bricklayers work on unfinished walls which direct the view to a landing ship. Hunters chase game in a near forest. It is a view into a doll house; there is comfort and cosines and complete self-sufficiency of the mind. It is the mind of a child, a child with not enough supervision. It doesn't wash, terrorizes the streets in gangs, it is illiterate and hysterically credulous, it brutalizes animals and immolates witches; it is a street-wise thug, superstitious like a fox, ill fed, blaspheming and continually drunk, because only beer avoids the ever present diarrhea which lurks in every well. Such surrounding calls for hell to be painted in strong colours. And trapped in a lifelong purgatory of ceremony and feudal obligation, the only escape seems prayer and paranoid speculation.
Dante's poem is not a ripping good yarn of conflict and conquest; just a travelogue from a parallel universe. Its philosophical baggage, the ponderous logic, is no longer quantum physics and taxes our patience. The structure appears to be over-engineered. and artificial. Only gradually emerges how tightly knit everything falls into place. This is great poetry. A traveller lost in Dante's universe, finds himself in the realm of an absolute power. At its feet a gigantic concentration camp drills into the ground; the victims cannibalize each other and Satan himself is the "Herr Commandant." Penal colonies circle a mountain all the way up to the Lord's own top security compound, and the intellectual opposition lingers in exile: Inferno (Canto 4) is not such a bad place after all.
Visuals are intense and specific. In passing distant bystanders squint and frown at us; we address a man who can barely stop scratching his eczema, but is spurred to race along naked - images, a survivor may remember from Auschwitz. A demon (named Dr. Mengele, no doubt), performs life surgery on Mohammed, but forgot to anesthetize. The poem's topography reaches from the iron walls of a city of red mosques to the unfolding rose at the centre of the empyrean. No other poem makes you hear the Sun's thundering silence; the scattered leaves of an entire universe bundle up in one flame, before everything peels off in a cloud of starlings and cranes across the skie.
At the entry to Paradise T.S. Eliot tries to sell us Dante's pageant as a "higher dream" of spiritual beauty. Must be me, but a three eyed woman is a troubling sight. So are wings polka-dotted with wide open eyes, or green and crimson skin pigmentations. And this is just the beginning. Subsequently, Dante's encounter with his immutable sweetheart turns into a real nightmare, and despite best efforts by the poet, the two never really warm up to each other. Of course, this is a carnival of allegories and we have learned to frown on allegory (but Kafka does it all the time). However in the end it comes all together in a visualization of meticulous accuracy and sensual presence. Dante is still the undisputed Lord of Fantasy. (On a more mundane level, his poem is of course a clever way of writing libel against his political foes.)
A final observation: Poor Francesca who ended in hell for loving much, says: "if only the King of the Universe had been our friend ..." It echoes the Iliad, of which Dante himself had no first hand knowledge: "Gods make dangerous company." There is more in this vein and the 3rd part even opens with an invocation of the pagan god Apollo. Maybe it is merely a convention of learned poetry - but I wonder: why here of all places, at the entrance to Paradise? And what shall we think of this monumental idolatry, which Dante lavished on his fish-blooded sweetheart, (who in real life was neither the first nor the last girl who kept the money in the family and married a banker instead of a poet?) The author seems to hold out on us. He revives conventions of bygone days, which had been condemned as heresies wenn this type of poetry was common fare at the "love-courts" in the Languedoc.
So, how can a reader with English as his only language get an authentic taste of Dante? I am sure, it could be done to produce an englished Dante in terza rima of utmost clarity and a bearable minimum of padding, but it would take a bilingual and very talented translator and a publisher willing to subsidize a lifelong and single-minded effort. I don't see it happen. So for now, paradoxically, only an accurate prose translation, will preserve the essentials of Dante's poetic substance - his accurate visuals and the wealth of sub-textual counterpoints. A Miltonian barrage of "thee" and "thou" will not do. Durling's translation is very good, Singleton's still the staple, Hollander's rendition appears even to preserve many of the Italian rhyme words. They do not resonate in English, but their position at the closing of a line allows to see how their semantics toss on the ball to their companions. Pinsky is only for fans who want to read Pinsky, not Dante.
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