Critica de Inferno

7/27/2019 Critica de Inferno

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Why is a fourteenth-century allegorical

poem about sin and redemption still such a

draw?

P

BO OKS

W HA T THE HELLDante in translat ion and in Dan Browns new novel.

by J o a n A c o c el l a

MAY 27, 2013

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eople cant seem to let go of the Divine Comedy.

Youd think that a fourteenth-century allegorical

poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian

vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of

that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the

scholars in the back carrels. But no. By my count there

have been something like a hundred English-language

translations, and not just by scholars but by blue-chip

poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi, Allen

Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and

Tchaikovsky have composed music about the poem;

Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about it. In

other words, the Divine Comedy is more than a text that

professors feel has to be brushed up periodically forstudents. Its one of the reasons there are professors and

students.

In some periods devoted to order and decorum in literaturenotably the seventeenth and early

eighteenth centuriesmany sophisticated readers scorned the Divine Comedy as a grotesque,

impenetrable thing. But not in our time. T. S. Eliot, the lawgiver of early-twentieth-century poetics,

placed Dante on the highest possible rung of European poetry. Dante and Shakespeare divide the

modern world between them, he wrote. There is no third. A lot of literary people then ran out to

Acocella: Dante in Translation and in Dan Browns Inferno :... http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/05/27/13

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learn some Italian, a language for which, previously, many had had scant respect, and a great surge

of Dante translations began. In someLaurence Binyons (1933-43), Dorothy Sayerss

(1949-62)the translator even tried to use Dantes rhyme scheme, terza rima (aba bcb cdc, etc.), a

device almost impossible to manage in English, because our language, compared with Italian, has so

few rhymes. Since then, we have had many kinds of Divine Comedylowbrow, highbrow, muscly,

refined. The more fastidious ones, the ones that actually try to give equivalents for Dantes words,

are in prose, because in prose the translator doesnt have to sacrifice accuracy to such considerations

as rhyme and rhythm. As for verse translations, they may be less accurate, but it can be argued that

they are more faithful than prose versions. The Divine Comedy, after all, is a poem, and its meanings

are contained as much in sound as in sense. Verse translations require more courage, and more

thinking, because they are generally more interpretive. Within the past year, two more have been

published, one by the American poet Mary Jo Bang, the other by the Australian essayist and poet

Clive James.

In his translation of the complete Divine Comedy (Liveright), James made the crucial decision to

rhyme, in quatrains (in his case, abab). But, as he tells us in the introduction, end rhymes were no

more important to him than rhymes or chimes within the lines: alliteration, assonance, repetition. He

says that his wife, Prue Shaw, now a celebrated Dante scholar (her book Reading Dante will be

out next year), pushed him in this direction, by teaching him, years ago, that the Divine Comedy had

to be read phonetically. The great thing about it was its richness of sound, as word after word, line

after line, beckoned the next and thus kept the reader moving forward. James says this is what he

was intent on, above all.

All is a lot. James gave himself permission to add lines to Dantes text and to incorporate

background material. He didnt want footnotesnothing should stop the reader. Many things do,though. Here are Dantes famous opening lines:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ch la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

And here is Jamess rendering:

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found

Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way

Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound

I still make shows how hard it is to say

How harsh and bitter that place felt to me

Merely to think of it renews the fear.


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Keening sound? If ever there was a forced rhyme, this is it. Also, Dante didnt say anything about

wailing, only about fear, and the two are different matters.

Soon the pilgrim (as the protagonist of the poem is usually called) and his guide, Virgil, arrive at

the gates of Hell, with its dread inscription:

Per me si va ne la citt dolente,

per me si va ne letterno dolore,per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;

fecemi la divina podestate,

la somma sapenza e l primo amore.

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

se non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi chintrate.

James translates this as:

To enter the lost city, go through me.

Through me you go to meet a suffering

unceasing and eternal. You will be

with people who, through me, lost everything.

My maker, moved by justice, lives above.

Through him, the holy power, I was made

made by the height of wisdom and first love,

whose laws all those in here once disobeyed.

From now on, every day feels like your last

Forever. Let that be your greatest fear.

Your future now is to regret the past.Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.

This shows a considerable drop in energy, partly because of a loss of compression. James has

lengthened the passage by a third. But, also, he has added some confusion about what the gate is

telling us. At least in the first line, it seems to think that we have a choice about whether or not to

enter. We dont, and that is what makes going to Hell a serious business.

From what I can tell, these two problems, awkwardness and inaccuracy, are due to exactly the

thing that sounded so nice when James told us about it in the introduction, his intention to capture thephonetic richness of Dantes lines. Worse are the demands made by the internal echoes. In the

Hell-gate inscription, theres almost no word that isnt singing a duet, or more. We have through

me / through me; suffering / unceasing / everything; me / me / meet / be /

people; maker / moved / made; him / holy. And thats just in the first six lines. The

technique asks a great deal: that the translator obey, simultaneously, the summons both of English-

language sounds and of Dantes meaning.

Still, the freedoms James takes allow him to get off some beautiful phrases. When the pilgrim


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realizes that his guide is Virgil, his idol, he says to him, Or se tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte / che

spandi di parlar s largo fiume? James turns this into Are you Virgil? Are you the spring, the well, /

The fountain and the river in full flow / Of eloquence that sings like a seashell / Remembering the sea

and the rainbow? I love that seashell, and the rainbow. Neither is in Dante. James is a poet, doing a

poets work. Also, however interested he is in being fancy, he can be plain as well, sometimes

poignantly so.

See the last line of the Hell-gate inscription: Forget your hopes. They are what brought you

here. The second sentence is not in the original poem, but it is wonderful, both sarcastic and sad.

James is also a premier practitioner of the high-low style that became so popular in the nineteen-

twenties, notably via Eliot and Pound, which is to say, in part, via Dante. He can be colloquial. Of

the she-wolf that blocks the pilgrims path, Virgil says, In a bad mood it can kill, / And its never in

a good mood. (This could be from The Sopranos.) James likes, iconoclastically, to do this sort of

thing with the grandees, like Francesca da Rimini, who says to the pilgrim, What you would have us

say / Lets hear about. Its all rich and strange.

ary Jo Bang, a poet and a professor of English at Washington University, in St. Louis, has

much the same purpose: to convey Dantes internal music. Unlike James, she has made some

major sacrifices to this end. In her Inferno (Graywolf), the only canticle she has taken on so far, she

does not use end rhyme, and she does not hold herself to any regular metre. (James used iambic

pentameter.) But, having cast off those restraints, she adopts another one. James was trying, he said,

to be true to Dante. Bang is trying to be true to contemporary life, to the post-9/11, Internet-

ubiquitous present. As this implies, she aims to be faithful to something else as well: undergraduates.

She writes, I will be most happy if this postmodern, intertextual, slightly slant translation lures

readers to a poetic text that might seem otherwise archaic and off-puttingespecially, I presume, to

nineteen-year-olds. On the surface, this appears to be a laudable purpose, but whenever you hear

those words true to contemporary life, run for cover.

The trouble starts on the first page. The pilgrim speaks of his relief upon issuing from the dark

wood. He says that he felt like a person who, almost drowned at sea, arrives, panting, on the shore.

Bang places him, instead, at the edge of a swimming pool. But these two thingsthe ocean and the

neighborhood poolare nowhere near the same, and every nineteen-year-old knows what the ocean

is. Other anachronisms create worse problems. Bang, in her lines, includes references to Freud,

Mayakovsky, Colbert, you name it. She picks up swatches of verse from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath.

But, if readers get into the swing of these, what are they going to do when they encounter the Roman

Catholic theology that is the spine of the Divine Comedy, and which Bang says, in her introduction,

that she will honor? (God has to look down from Heaven; Satan has to sit at the center of Hell.)

Wouldnt it be better if she let the reader know that there are old things as well as new thingsthat

there is such a thing as history? She is not unaware of this, as her learned footnotes demonstrate.

Why is she keeping it from her readers? If they knew it, they might find out who Mayakovsky is,

which I doubt that they have done.


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Oddly, given Bangs stated aims, shes happy to court obscurity. She says that the she-wolf that

detains the pilgrim outside the wood has a bitch-kitty face; Virgil tells the pilgrim to climb the

meringue-pie mountain that lies ahead. Bitch-kitty gets an explanatory footnote: Bang says its

something that she found in the Dictionary of American Slang. My edition of that book says bitch

kitty was a phrase of the nineteen-thirties and forties. (Roughly, it meant a humdinger.) Did Bang

expect todays readers to know it? Not really, it seems. She says that she wants these oddities to be

fleeting pleasures for us. To me, theyre not pleasures, but just oddities, something like finding a

Tootsie Roll in the meat loaf.

ranslators are not the only ones drawn to Dante. Since 2006, Roberto Benigni has been touring

a solo show about the Divine Comedy. In 2010, Seymour Chwast rendered the poem as a

graphic novel. There are Inferno movies and iPad apps and video games. As of last week, their

company has been joined by a Dan Brown thriller, Inferno (Doubleday).

In many ways, the new book is like Browns 2003 blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code. Here, as

there, we have Browns beloved symbologist, Robert Langdon, a professor at Harvard, a drinker

of Martinis, a wearer of Harris tweeds, running around Europe with a good-looking womanthis

one is Sienna Brooks, a physician with an I.Q. of 208while people shoot at them. All this

transpires in exotic climesFlorence, Venice, and Istanbulupon which, even as the two are fleeing

a mob of storm troopers, Brown bestows travel-brochure prose: The Boboli Gardens had enjoyed

the exceptional design talents of Niccol Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti. Or:

No trip to the piazza was complete without sipping an espresso at Caff Rivoire.

As we saw in The Da Vinci Code, there is no thriller-plot convention, however well worn, that

Brown doesnt like. The hero has amnesia. He is up against a mad scientist with Nietzschean goals.

Hes also up against a deadline: in less than twenty-four hours, he has been told, the madmans black

arts will be forcibly practiced upon the world. Though this book, unlike The Da Vinci Code and

Browns Angels and Demons (2000), is not exactly an ecclesiastical thriller, it takes place largely

in churches and, as the title indicates, it constantly imports imagery from the Western worlds most

famous eschatological thriller, Dantes Inferno. Wisely, Brown does not let himself get hog-tied by

the sequence of events in Dantes poem. Instead, he just inserts allusions whenever he feels that he

needs them. There are screams; there is excrement. The walls of underground caverns ooze

disgusting liquid. Through them run rivers of blood clogged with corpses. Bizarre figures come

forward saying things like I am life and I am death. Sometimes the great poet is invoked directly.

The books villain is a Dante fanatic and the owner of Dantes death mask, on which he writes

cryptic messages. Scolded by another character for his plans to disturb the universe, he replies, The

path to paradise passes directly through hell. Dante taught us that.

The hellfire material makes the book colorful and creepy. It also sounds notes of conspiracy.

(The villain, with his Transhumanist philosophy, has many followers.) Religion and paranoia have a

lot in common: above all, the belief that something big is going on out there and also that everything

means something else. Further, both religion and paranoia are short on empirical evidence, so that


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greater faith is required. Finally, the conviction that everything refers to something else generates

codes and symbols, which is what generates Robert Langdon. As a symbologist, he can read these

runes. Often, the clue they give him does not point him to what hes looking for but rather to

something that will offer a further clue, which will get him a little closer to what hes looking for, and

so on, as in a treasure hunt.

That process is the plot, or at least the skeleton of it. It is then fleshed out with a million details:

dreams, murders, priceless paintings. There is a yacht lurking off the Adriatic coast, where, for vast

fees, sinister, tight-lipped men arrange for governments to change, wars to be hushed up, and the

like. Meanwhile, we are given lessons in how to do ancient mosaics and how to make a death mask.

We are introduced to products galore: Plume Paris glasses, Volvo motors, Juicy Couture sweatsuits,

even a Swedish Sectra Tiger XS personal voice-encrypting phone, which had been redirected

through four untraceable routers. Page after page, things keep coming at you. People who sit down

to read Inferno should bring a notepad.

The book has almost no psychology, because one of Browns favorite plot devices is to reveal,

mid-novel, that a character presented all along as a friend is in fact an enemy (see Leigh Teabing in

The Da Vinci Code), or vice versa. To do thatand its always pretty excitingBrown cant give

his characters much texture; if he did, they would be too hard to flip. Of course, without texture they

dont have anything interesting to say, except maybe Stop the plane there. The dialogue is dead.

As for the rest of the writing, it is not dead or alive. It has no distinction whatsoever. Because

Inferno transpires in so many glamorous places, Brown may rise to the grandiose. In Hagia

Sophia, he speaks of the staggering force of its enormity, and barely a page passes without italics.

But this is to relieve the general coldness.

No, Brown is a plot-maker, and only that. This story is a little more complicated than usual,because although Langdon, with his trusted Brooks, is looking for something, hes not quite sure

what it is. Meanwhile, from one side hes being chased by the storm troopersblack-clad thugs,

with umlauts over their namesand from the other by Vayentha, the lady with the Swedish Sectra

Tiger XS. Theres also a reconnaissance drone buzzing through the sky, telling them where to find

Langdon.

Too bad for them, because our hero knows more secret tunnels than you can shake a stick at. At

one point, it takes Brown twenty pages to get Langdon and Brooks, in Florence, up and down the

Palazzo Vecchios hidden passages: through the corridor behind the Armenia panel in the Hall ofGeographical Maps, into the cupboard in the Architectural Models room, down the Duke of Athens

stairway, and so on. Never does the story slow down, though. Brown gives us extremely short

chapters (often just two or three pages) and constant cross-cutting. He also adores cliff-hangers. One

of the storm troopers calls his superior: Its Brder, he said. I think Ive got an ID on the person

helping Langdon. Who is it? his boss replied. Brder exhaled slowly. Youre not going to believe

this. Cut to Vayentha, who thinks shes been fired for failing to kill Langdon and is revving her

motorcycle disconsolately. Shes not the person helping Langdon, though. Shes something else,


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which you have to figure out.

The book ends weakly, because Langdonand Brown, too, clearlyactually sympathizes with

the villain, or at least with his motives. And those who are familiar with Browns previous books will

not be surprised that the boy doesnt get the girl. Brooks clearly wishes it were otherwise. Youll

know where to find me, she says, as she and Langdon part, and then she kisses him on the lips. He

gives her a big hug and puts her on the plane. In The Da Vinci Code, Langdons companion,

Sophie Neveu, turned out to be a descendant of Jesus, and this made the question of a romance

between them a tricky business. Brooks is free, though. Maybe Langdon is gay.

For all its absurdities, Browns book is a comfort, because it proves that the Divine Comedy is

still alive in our culture. The same is true, on a higher level, of the James and the Bang translations.

Take James. He probably gave us more odditiesoutrages, eventhan he would have with a less

famous text. Surely he knew the number and the excellence of his predecessors. But he is

seventy-three and ailing, so, if he said to himself, What the hell, lets just do it, you can see why.

As for Bang, shes not seventy-three (shes sixty-seven), but if she has taught the Divine Comedy she

has unquestionably faced a lot of young people saying, What? What? You cant blame her for

trying to do something about that. At least she cares. All of us should worry about her students,

though. Theyre going to go off thinking that Dante wrote about meringue-pie mountains, and this is

wrong. Furthermore, there is no reason that they couldnt have faced the mountain without the pie,

and the fourteenth century without the twenty-first.

Thankfully, because the original text survives more faithful translations will keep coming. Indeed,

they have. The edition by Jean and Robert Hollander (2000-07) is both accurate and beautiful. I

dont think any general reader, or any student of Mary Jo Bangs, needs more than this. But if

Bangand James, and even Browndisagrees, so be it. As long as Dante is here, and the text isavailable, why shouldnt they have some fun?

ILLUSTRATION: JOHN ELLIOTT, DANTE IN EXILE (1904)/PRINT COLLECTION/NYPL

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Critica de Inferno