Writers as diverse as Byron and Dorothy L Sayers have attempted to translate The Divine Comedy. Clive James has known for 50 years that it was a thankless task, yet now he has done it too – and in verse. He explains the reasons behind his rhymes.
The Telegraph - 03 July 2013
Many people, not all of them outside Italy, think that “The Divine Comedy” is
a rather misshapen story. And indeed, if it were just a story, it would be back
to front: the narrator has an exciting time in Hell, but Purgatory, when it is
not about art, is about theology, and Heaven is about nothing else. What kind of
story has all the action in the first third, and then settles back to stage a
discussion of obscure spiritual matters? But The Divine Comedy isn’t just
a story, it’s a poem: one of the biggest, most varied and most accomplished
poems in all the world. Appreciated on the level of its verse, the thing never
stops getting steadily more beautiful as it goes on. T.S.
Eliot said that the last cantos of Heaven were as great as poetry
can ever get. The translator’s task is to compose something to suggest that such
a judgment might be right.
My translation of The Divine Comedy is here today because my wife,
when we were together in Florence in the mid-Sixties, a few years before we were
married, taught me that the great secret of Dante’s masterpiece lay in the
handling of the verse, which always moved forward even in the most intensely
compressed of episodes. She proved this by answering my appeal to have the
famous Paolo and Francesca episode in Inferno 5 explained to me from the
original text. From various translators including Byron we can see what that
passage says. But how did Dante say it? My wife said that the terza rima
was only the outward sign of how the thing carried itself along, and that if you
dug down into Dante’s expressiveness at the level of phonetic construction you
would find an infinitely variable rhythmic pulse adaptable to anything he wanted
to convey.
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