In my early twenties, I was deeply influenced by Ezra Pound’s poetry and criticism. Now, 50 years later, I still find most of his judgements about poetry and art as impeccable as his political judgements are abhorrent. I am grateful to him, above all, for prompting me to learn Italian in order to read Dante in the original. In The Spirit of Romance, Pound’s earliest and most appealing book of criticism, he writes, “I am always filled with a sort of angry wonder that any one professing to care for poetry can remain in ignorance of the tongue in which the Commedia is written. It shows a dulness, a stolidity, which is incomprehensible to any one who knows the Commedia.” I took this to heart.
Over the years, I have returned to Dante many times—sometimes because I have been studying some of the many other poets who shared Pound’s devotion to him. Anna Akhmatova’s last public appearance was in October 1965, during a celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. In her notes for her talk, she wrote that the deepest bond between her and her fellow poets Nikolay Gumilyov and Osip Mandelstam, both killed decades earlier by the Soviets, was “love for Dante”.
Pound had the breadth of spirit to respond to many different aspects of the Commedia—not only to what he called the “sheer poetic magic” of some passages, but also to the clarity of Dante’s thinking. He writes of this tercet from a canto set in the Sphere of Venus (which I quote from DM Black’s new translation)...
Here we’re not penitent, but smile with joy,
not for the sin, which does not come to mind,
but for the ordaining providential power.
…that here “we have matter for a philosophical treatise as long as the Paradiso.”
Pound is equally sensitive to Dante’s visual imagination. Here, too, I quote from Black’s translation: “As by a ray of sunlight, slanting down / through broken cloud, my eyes, safely in shadow, / have sometimes seen a meadow full of flowers, / so now I saw more thronging splendours lit, / as if by lightning from on high, by radiant / beams coming from a source I could not see.”
Pound writes, “It is beautiful because of the objective vision, and it is all the more remarkable in having been written centuries before the painters had taught men to note light and shade, and to watch for such effects in nature.”
It is worth adding that the Commedia has inspired many great artists, in illustrating the poem, to their finest work. Botticelli’s intelligent, detailed silverpoint drawings, though very different from his paintings, are no less remarkable; they exhibit a deep understanding of Dante’s text. William Blake’s illustrations are technically innovative and have a broad emotional register; in comparison, his other watercolours and his illuminated books seem limited. Among contemporary artists, Monika Beisner has fused the seemingly naive reverence of a medieval illuminator with the bold colours and geometrical simplicity of such early modernists as Malevich and Popova.
Comparing Black’s translation with others, I notice that his is marked by a certain steadiness—of thought, vision and movement. Robin Kirkpatrick, whose translation of the Commedia (Penguin Classics) has been much praised, renders the second of these tercets as follows:
So here I saw a swirling crowd of splendours
flung out like thunderbolts down burning beams,
and could not see from where these flashes came.
Dante is about to see the Virgin Mary for the first time and these “splendours” are angels swirling about the Heaven of the fixed Stars. The violence of “flung out like thunderbolts” is inaccurate and out of keeping with the tone of this episode. Three lines later, Dante continues, in Black’s version:
The name of that most lovely flower, whom
evening and morning I invoke, drew my
whole spirit to face toward the greatest light,
and as with my two eyes I saw depicted
the being and greatness of the living star
that’s victor up there as it was down here,
a torch descended out of Heaven,
shaped in a circle like a crown, that first encircled
and then rotated swiftly all about her.
The verse flows smoothly and calmly. The “lovely flower” or “living star” is Mary; Black helpfully points out—in his accompanying commentary—that this is “an unusual acknowledgment of Dante’s own spiritual practice, which presumably included the Ave Maria”. Robert and Jean Hollanders’ version (Vintage), by comparison, moves jerkily and is even a little confusing:
The name of the fair flower I invoke
each morning and at evening time, enthralled my mind
as I gazed at the brightest of the flames.
When the quality and magnitude of the living star,
who surpasses up above as she surpassed below,
were painted on my eyes,
there descended through the sky a torch that,
circling, took on the likeness of a crown.
It encircled her and wheeled around her.
The comma after “evening time” trips one up, making it hard to grasp that the “fair flower” and “the brightest of the flames” are one and the same. The Hollanders also lose the sense of movement and causality present in Black’s “The name… drew (my italics, here and elsewhere) my whole spirit”. And the near repetition of “circling” and “encircled” constitutes another small jolt to the forward movement of the verse.
Movement of every kind is central to the Commedia. Dante repeatedly emphasises the grinding arduousness of Dante’s and Virgil’s descent into the Inferno, the determination required to climb the mountain of Purgatory and the miraculous ease of Dante’s upward flight through the celestial spheres. More specifically, there is the helpless whirling of Paolo and Francesca, the circle dances of the Purgatorio and Paradiso, and the startling moment in canto II of the Paradiso when Dante finds he has arrived at the Heaven of the Moon “as suddenly as a crossbow’s bolt / thuds home, and flies, and is released from the barrel”. The sequence of events is reversed—as if both the arrow and Dante move too fast for words to keep up with them.
The Paradiso begins with “The glory of the One who moves all things” and ends:
And here my high imagining failed in power:
yet now already wish and will together,
like a wheel that spins with even motion, turned
with the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars.
Here, too, Black reproduces Dante’s “even motion” with remarkable success, stressing the word “turned” and making effective use of the similarities in sound between “wish”, “will” and “wheel”.
Translators and critics have long disagreed over the importance of reproducing Dante’s terza rima—the sequence of interlocking rhymes that helps to give the poem its impetus and ensure its memorability. Terza rima is difficult in English, but not impossible. Richard Wilbur manages terza rima brilliantly in his translation of “Inferno XXV”, though we do not know whether he could have kept this up for another 99 cantos. Laurence Binyon’s terza rima version of the entire Commedia, though admired by the American poet Robert Fitzgerald, is generally underestimated; Pound himself contributed many helpful revisions in the course of six years of intensive correspondence with Binyon, and there are relatively few strained rhymes or instances of contorted syntax.
Black, however, writes, “I have made no attempt to follow his rhyme scheme… I have given primacy to the best of my ability to following his content, and have tended also to follow him in the units in which the content is placed (in general translating whole sentences into whole sentences, tercets into tercets, and very often, where possible, individual lines into individual lines).” This may seem like a half-hearted compromise, but Black’s blank verse, shaped as it is into tercets, sounds surprisingly similar to Dante’s terza rima. It seems that an unwavering focus on intellectual and emotional meaning inevitably generates the appropriate pace and rhythms.
Dante begins the second canto of the Paradiso with a warning to those wishing to read the cantica more for its music than for its meaning. I myself, over the years, have tended to do exactly that, captivated by particular images or touching passages of dialogue and giving too little thought to the poem’s overall meaning. Reading Black’s translation, along with his thoughtful introduction and afterword, has been a valuable corrective.
Black is a poet and psychoanalyst. He has already translated the Purgatorio and he has published widely on the relationship between ethics, psychoanalysis and religion. His translation and accompanying apparatus are informed by his deep understanding of these matters, but he avoids academic jargon. I know of no better summary of the Commedia than this first paragraph of his introduction: “If we ask what Dante’s huge poem, The Divine Comedy, is ultimately about, it is about the discovery, or the rediscovery, of the capacity to love. In Inferno we see the horrifying or dreadful state of those who are unable to recognize the preciousness of love, and who are governed by other motives altogether. In Purgatorio, we see the state of those who have recognized the preciousness and primacy of love, but who still struggle with distracting and conflicting motives. And in Paradiso we see those who have aligned their motivation with love, and nothing remains for them to do but to embody love, and to understand it, in its many implications and in its ultimate unity, ever more deeply.”
