You can’t translate poetry. Well, you can, but you end up producing something altogether different. That applies to some degree to prose as well, but it is especially true with poetry.
In poetry, words are pregnant with meaning. Their sound and rhythm evoke images in our head and feelings in our heart, which in turn might remind us of other words, and other images, and other feelings. It’s a unique experience.
A translation can produce something incredibly beautiful in its own right, but like I said, it will inevitably be something altogether different.
For example, many people fell in love with the 1859 translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat by Edward Fitzgerald, which has been described as “wonderfully unfaithful”.
Some of Fitzgerald’s quatrains can be seen (and indeed are seen) as exquisite examples of poetry in English, number 51 being a particularly famous one:
The moving finger writes, and having writ
moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
(The first sentence is often quoted to say that what’s done is done and cannot be undone.) That quatrain is beautiful. But unless you’re fluent in Persian, we'll never know the impact the original verses have for Iranian people. Edward Fitzgerald did, but we don't. Until we learn Persian we’ll have to make do with his interpretation.
You can learn other languages, thus increasing the number of works which you can appreciate, but given the uniqueness of poetry as a medium, the poems written in your native tongue will inevitably have a greater significance for you. Not out of some sort of chauvinistic, national pride.
We don’t choose our native tongue, and whatever language you grow up with, in a way you can say that you’re “stuck with it”, so to speak, for better or worse.
Italy’s greatest poet is, of course, Dante. The fact that he’s the only one referred to by his first name is testament to how much they love him. In fact Italians sometimes refer to him as il poeta, as if there’s no one else.
(Interestingly, the four people who could arguably be considered the four greatest Italians ever, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Galileo Galilei, were all from Tuscany. Was there something in the water?)
His masterpiece is known as Divina Commedia, divine comedy, but Dante never called it that. He just called it Commedia, for the simple reason (not a great one, in all honesty) that it starts badly (in hell) and ends well (in heaven), as opposed to a tragedia, which starts well and ends badly. In 1555 a Venetian publisher added the adjective “divine” to the title and it stuck.
The Divine Comedy has been translated into English more times than in any other language. English is the language with the most translations of it by far.
Every few years someone has a go. Since the end of WW2 there have been 37 English translations already, some trying to remain faithful to the original, some rather more free. That’s all fine, but to Italian ears Dante’s verses are music. (Of course the reverse is also true. When you translate Shakespeare’s sonnets into Italian something will be lost. It’s the way it is.)
To describe the Divine Comedy as a religious work would be simplistic and reductive. Yes, there are religious elements, but there’s so much more.
As everyone knows, Dante imagines that he’s travelling through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. In all three he meets people. He talks to them, and they talk to him. (More than half of all the lines in the poem are direct speech, dialogue.) The majority of those people are real people who lived during his time.
Inferno is the most read part. You would think Dante put in Hell all the people he didn’t like. There are certainly many of those, but he often encounters people he feels sorry for. (In fact the fictional Dante breaks down into tears several times when talking to the souls of the damned.) I’ll give you a few examples.
In Inferno 13 Dante and Virgil (his companion) meet Pier della Vigna. Pier della Vigna was a trusted minister and a close confidant of Frederick II, the Norman king of Sicily. (The Normans had wrested Sicily from the Arabs in 1091. And of course just a few years earlier they had successfully invaded England. The Normans were tough.)
Because of the usual intrigues and back-stabbing you always find in every court, other ministers, who were jealous to see how close Pier was to the king, accused him of treason on some fabricated evidence.
He was blinded and thrown into prison, where he committed suicide. Given that his cell was completely bare, the poor guy killed himself by smashing his head against the wall. True story.
Dante put him in Hell only because he committed suicide, a sin in Christian theology. (It’s interesting to notice that in the Classical world, both the Stoics and the Epicureans thought that suicide was a perfectly viable option. Maybe Shakespeare was right: there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.)
But suicide aside, Dante clearly thought that Pier was innocent. By including him in the poem, and by making him talk, Dante gives Pier a chance to tell his side of the story, a chance to profess his innocence and clear his name for posterity.
After telling his story to Dante and Virgil, Pier concludes his defence with these words:
“E se di voi alcun nel mondo riede,
conforti la memoria mia, che giace
ancor del colpo che ’nvidia le diede.”
“And if one of you goes back to the world,
restore my memory, which still suffers
from the blow that Envy dealt it.”
Once Pier has finished talking, Virgil encourages Dante to ask him a question (bear in mind that the narrator here is Dante, and when he says the poet he refers to Virgil):
Un poco attese, e poi “Da ch’el si tace”,
disse ’l poeta a me, “non perder l’ora,
ma parla, e chiedi a lui, se più ti piace”.
He waited a little, and then “Now that he is silent”,
said the poet to me, “don’t waste time,
but speak, and ask him, if you’d like to know more.”
But Dante is so taken by grief after hearing Pier’s story that he is barely able to talk, and he asks Virgil to ask questions on his behalf.
Ond’ io a lui: “Domandal tu ancora
di quel che credi ch’a me satisfaccia,
ch’i’ non potrei, tanta pietà m’accora”.
And I to him: “You question him
about what you think will interest me,
for I could not, so much pity fills my heart.”
Beautiful stuff.
In Inferno 15 Dante and Virgil meet Brunetto Latini, a renowned scholar who was Dante’s guardian and teacher after Dante’s father passed away when he was young.
Dante doesn’t spell out why Brunetto is in Hell, but it’s pretty clear that he was homosexual (once again a sin in Christian theology but not such a big deal during Classical times).
But while Dante put Brunetto in Hell, he is thrilled to see him, and Dante’s words reveal how much he admired and respected his old teacher, and how much he misses him:
“Se fosse tutto pieno il mio dimando,”
rispuos’ io lui, “voi non sareste ancora
de l’umana natura posto in bando,
“If my wishes were completely fulfilled,”
I replied to him, “you would not yet
be banned from human nature,
(i.e. you wouldn’t be dead)
ché ’n la mente m’è fitta, e or m’accora,
la cara e buona imagine paterna
di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora
for in my memory is fixed, and now fills my heart,
the dear and kind paternal image
of you when, in the world, time and again
m’insegnavate come l’uom s’eterna,
e quant’ io l’abbia in grado, mentr’ io vivo
convien che ne la mia lingua si scerna.”
you taught me how man makes himself eternal,
and how grateful I am for that, and as long as I live
it must be discerned in my words.”
(i.e. I’ll keep saying it)
Again, beautiful stuff.
One of the most famous episodes in the whole poem is the story of Paolo and Francesca, found in Inferno 5. (The gruesome, harrowing story of Ugolino della Gherardesca and his children, which I won't be touching upon here, is another famous one.)
In medieval times, the love story between Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta was well known throughout northern Italy. People didn’t have Hello! magazine back then, but they still liked to gossip, and as we all know gossip spreads fast. (Confucius said that gossip travels faster than mail.)
In fact I think people gossiped even more back then. I mean, they didn’t have Netflix, what else were they going to do in the evening? There’s only so much shagging you can do, whereas gossiping doesn’t tire you.
Francesca da Rimini was married to Gianciotto Malatesta (medieval names sound so wonderfully weird), who was Lord of Rimini and happened to be an ugly bastard. Of course it was an arranged marriage. That was the norm with the nobility. (In fact she saw him for the first time on the day of the wedding. Again, not unusual back then.)
Gianciotto had a younger brother, Paolo, who was actually quite handsome (or at least was better-looking than his older brother). Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Again, true story.
Predictably, Paolo and Francesca ended up playing that age-old game known as hide the pickle. Gianciotto caught them in flagrante (i.e. butt-naked) and killed them both on the spot with his sword.
In medieval times, because Paolo was Francesca’s brother-in-law, as far as people were concerned their relationship was considered not only adulterous but also incestuous (even though technically they were not blood-related), and that’s why we find them in Hell.
But once again, Dante gives the two lovers a chance to tell their side of the story, and he sympathises with them. (I’m telling you, he wasn’t such a bigot.) More specifically Dante wants to know how they fell in love:
Poi mi rivolsi a loro e parla’ io,
e cominciai: “Francesca, i tuoi martìri
a lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio.”
Then I turned to them and spoke,
and I began: “Francesca, your sufferings
make me cry, sad and full of pity.”
“Ma dimmi, al tempo d’i dolci sospiri,
a che e come concedette amore
che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri?”.
“But tell me, in that time of sweet sighs,
how and in what way did Love allow you
to recognise your hesitant desires?”
E quella a me: “Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria, e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.”
And she to me: “There is no greater pain
than to remember the happy times
in misery, and this your teacher knows.”
(the teacher being Virgil)
“Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice
del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
dirò come colui che piange e dice.”
“But if knowing the very root
of our love you desire so much,
I shall tell you as one who weeps and talks.”
At this point I need to take a step back. In medieval times there was a book that was quite popular. It was a French romance called Lancelot du Lac, Lancelot of the Lake.
It told the story of the adulterous love affair between the knight Lancelot and queen Guinevere, who of course was married to king Arthur. In medieval times this was highly erotic stuff. That book was the medieval equivalent of porn.
Francesca tells Dante how her and Paolo were reading that book together one day (already a very naughty thing to do, that's just asking for trouble), and when they reached the point where Lancelot and Guinevere kissed for the first time, they got turned on, looked at each other and kissed too, thus re-enacting the very scene they were reading.
“Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse.
Soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.”
“We were reading one day, for fun,
of Lancelot and how love possessed him.
We were alone and without any suspicion.”
“Per più fiate li occhi ci sospinse
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso,
ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.”
“Several times our eyes met while reading,
and all colour drained from our faces,
but it was one passage that got the best of us.”
I bet you’re getting a little bit turned on too right now, aren’t you? Anyway, in order to understand the next tercet I need to explain something.
In the book, Lancelot and Guinevere are brought together through the machinations of a knight called Galehault (Galeotto in Italian), a shady character and a bit of a shit-stirrer.
The same way Galehault could be blamed for that adulterous relationship, Francesca blames the book itself and its author, which she sees as her own Galehault, responsible for her downfall:
“La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse.
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”.
“He kissed my mouth, all trembling.
A Galehault was that book and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.”
Those are Francesca’s last words. What happened after they stopped reading is left to our imagination. That last line is a masterpiece of understatement, of things left unsaid. Brilliant.
I could go on and on. You could open pretty much any page of the Inferno or Purgatorio at random and find some beautiful passage. (Not so much in Paradiso. Paradiso is a bit boring. Way too many saints and angels there, and consequently hardly any shagging.)
Many Italians are put off from reading Dante for two reasons. One is that the language can be difficult. No one talks like that anymore.
(And that’s why I find modern English translations incredibly helpful. In Italy there seems to be a reluctance to translate Dante into modern Italian, as if it was a sacrilegious thing to do. Paradoxically, learning English has helped me to understand Dante better. Languages work in mysterious ways.)
But also, Dante keeps making references to people, places and events without offering too much explanation. His contemporary readers would’ve understood perfectly well what he was talking about, but 700 years later those references might be lost on us. How many people nowadays remember who Pier della Vigna or Francesca da Rimini were?
All the modern editions include extensive notes, of course, but most people can’t be bothered to read them. I can understand that. Extensive notes can be cumbersome. They do slow things down.
But if you’re willing to put in that extra bit of work, oh, what treasure awaits you. In fact, the harder you work for it, the brighter that treasure resplends.
M.
