In thee compassion is, in thee is pity, Thou art the living fountainhead of hope. 268. all of my prayersand pray that they may not. 44nel qual non si dee creder che sinvii . 61cotal son io, ch quasi tutta cessa Dante's poetry still feels intense and immediate, even after seven hundred years, even when it's talking about the planets in a way that seems strange to modern readers. Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang's new translation of Purgatorio is the extraordinary continuation of her journey with Dante, which began with her transformative version of Inferno. To him who asketh it, but oftentimes And since Robert Hollander's achievements as a Dante scholar are unsurpassed in the English-speaking . Virgin mother, daughter of your Son, In thee magnificence, in thee unites . This format allows freedom to communicate the work without rhyme, yet maintains a metrical structure. 144s come rota chigualmente mossa. I was surprised to see a prose translation (I didnt know there was such a thing) and wanted to find out how Singletons translation was viewed. Of feeling life, the new experience 117di tre colori e duna contenenza; 118e lun da laltro come iri da iri He has been praised for marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem's line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure. We now move into the present tense, as the poet takes the stage, telling us that thenceforward his vision was greater than his speech can express, since his memory yields before such a going-beyond, before such transgression: tanto oltraggio (57). 68da concetti mortali, a la mia mente 21quantunque in creatura di bontate. Bound up with love together in one volume, Each section contains 33 cantos, though the Inferno has one more (34), since the very first canto serves as a prologue to the entire work. Are you planning to do the entire Comedy, or only the Inferno? [3] It has been translated over 400 times into at least 52 different languages. As a periphrasis it does not belong to the diegetic time-line of the plot, and it allows Dante to end the Commedia with an eternal present: A final note. From that point on, what I could see was greater Known for its extensive scholarly notes; the full text is over 600 pages. Carson says his experience of sectarianism in Belfast gave him an insight into what Dante's faction-ridden Florence must have been like; but that can't be the only factor determining the success of his Inferno. The Divine Comedy. By heat of which in the eternal peace The three circular movements were almost right. Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing, Of charity, and below there among mortals Think on the seed ye spring from! About us. Sanders transforms Dante's dense Italian into poignant, contemporary poetry rife with slang and modern turns of phrase. Of the uninhabited world behind the sun. As a result, the poem seems simultaneously to surge forward and eddy backward. 24le vite spiritali ad una ad una. five centuries have brought to the endeavor In this way he is able to conclude the poem with a present tense. and, with this light, received what it had asked. Impressive, Mr. Harris! One moment is more lethargy to me, 50perch io guardassi suso; ma io era my vision reached the Infinite Goodness. a joy that is more ample. Tithin my heart the sweetness born of it; Even thus the snow is in the sun unsealed, Ciardi unsurprisingly ranks rather low. 92credo chi vidi, perch pi di largo, that it would be impossible for him Its fun to see how my translation ranks in your scoring system; thanks for adding it in. Dantes God is not just the unmoved mover, not just the love that moves the stars. This is doubly impressive, when you consider the relative difficulty of rendering it in immaculate iambic pentameter. That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect 83ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna, astray had my eyes turned away from it. When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes. Undated, I know from the course number (109C) that it goes back to my years as Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of California at Berkeley: my first job, I taught at Berkeley from 1978 to 1983. Was now approaching, even as I ought The last line of the Divine Comedy is number 100, and the threecirculate melodiethat recount the action ofParadiso33 are numbered thus: Moreover, Paradiso 33s final circulata melodia of 40 verses (verses 106-145) can be further subdivided at the vista nova 10 lines from the end, so that the Commedias final 100 verses recapitulate the threes and ones of its basic structure. 9cos germinato questo fiore. Durling's translation will be compared to John Ciardi's 1970 translation, Dorothy Sayers' 1962 translation, and Clive James' 2013 translation. Consider well your origin, your birth: Mandelbaum: "And now our sight has had its fill of this." Compare his rendering of the triple simile to the Hollanders: Inside my heart, although my vision is almost Entirely faded, droplets of its sweetness come The way the sun dissolves the snows crust The way, in the wind that stirred the light leaves, The oracle that the Sibyl wrote was lost. The eyes beloved and revered of God, Of threefold colour and of one dimension. Than five and twenty centuries to the emprise Relieved of the task of rhyming, she is able to stay closer to Dante's wording. 79E mi ricorda chio fui pi ardito it as best he can, he invokes not simply the Muses, as he had in the first two books of The Divine Comedy, but Apollo, the god of poetry himself. Rendezvous/hitherto?) [14] Many more translations of individual lines or cantos[ii] exist,[15] but these are too numerous for the scope of this list. Reading your examples, I invariably prefer Longfellow or Singleton. Dante's terza rima is frustratingly hard to get right in English, and many translators have nearly gone mad trying to get it right. 1Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio, 64Cos la neve al sol si disigilla; That one moment Un punto solo of comprehension of the universal form of things is the source for Dante of greater wonder and oblivion than are for us (all of us: the collective and historical us) the twenty-five centuries that have passed since . Dante Alighieri was born in 1265. Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College. Hb. Paradiso The 15 translations are those of Ciaran Carson, John Ciardi, Anthony Esolen, Robert and Jean Hollander, Robin Kirkpatrick, Stanley Lombardo, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Allen Mandelbaum, Mark Musa, J. G. Nicholls, Robert Pinsky, Tom Simone, John D. Sinclair, Charles Singleton, and C. H. Sisson. Ive read a number of translations of Dante (well, Inferno, at least) over the years, and I agree with your positive evaluations of the faithful if not perfectly literal translations. The best crib available is still John D Sinclair's facing-page text from OUP; the best translation of the entire work is Allen Mandelbaum's (published by Everyman). The Neptune analogy is thus the culmination of other moments devoted to human creativity in Paradiso: for instance Adams discussion of language-making in Paradiso 26. The First Heaven, the Moon: Spirits who, having taken Sacred Vows, were forced to . Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is a monumental work in the canon of European literature and a cornerstone of world literature.In it, a semi-fictionalized version of the author describes an epic . https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Longenbach-t.html, Illustration by Gustave Dor; Photograph from Bettmann/Corbis. Thanks! I didnt see Ms. Sayers among your 15 translators. Pingback: Three versions of a choral lyric by Euripides Bugs to fearen babes withall, Thanks, I have recently purchased the 60 volume Britannica Great Books of the Western World, and the Divine Comedy volume is Singletons translation. 2 William J. Replicating terza rima in English poses special challenges, for while English has a much larger vocabulary than Italian, it possesses many fewer rhymes. Robert Hollander is a Dante scholar of unmatched reputation and his wife, Jean, is an accomplished . 86legato con amore in un volume, are unsurpassed. A third choice is a translation written in blank verse (iambic pentameter). [1] The three cantiche[i] of the poem, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, describe hell, purgatory, and heaven respectively. 35ci che tu vuoli, che conservi sani, 4tu se colei che lumana natura His work Dante compares as parallel to that of Gratian. 40Li occhi da Dio diletti e venerati, And I, who now was nearing Him who is I think I saw the universal shape 20 Which is the best translation of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY? Gutenberg also has the Cary translation, which is more a flight of fancy than a translation. About Paradiso. Dante himself only referred to it as a Comedy; the "Divine" characterisation was added later. While some luxuriate in this kind of hyper-participation on the part of the poet, others like artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who translated the Vita Nuova in the 19th century, hated having the love poetry ruined by Dante's didactic analysis. The last verb that touches on plot is in the imperfect tense (volgeva), as it has to be, since the voyage occurred in the past, but Dante reverses the order of the syntax, putting the grammatical subject of the sentence last. Lady. that Light, what there is perfect is defective. Robert Pinsky seems to get the strongest rcommendations so far as I can tell. 82Oh abbondante grazia ond io presunsi In lieu of rhyme, Merwin employs line endings to restrain the syntax, giving the sentences a more vigorous rhythmic contour a sonic equivalent for the torqued movement of Dantes verse. One question: is translation faithfulness proportionately or inversely related to readability, or are they not necessarily related? For the sake of this exercise four volumes of Dante's Paradiso have either been assigned or freely chosen. how welcome such devotions are to her; then her eyes turned to the Eternal Light Dantes recollection is affective, not intellective. 42quanto i devoti prieghi le son grati; 43indi a letterno lume saddrizzaro, 16La tua benignit non pur soccorre If but mine eyes had been averted from it; And I remember that I was more bold [7] This was over 300 years after the first Latin (1416),[8] Spanish (1515),[4] and French (1500s)[9] translations had been written. 27pi alto verso lultima salute. 116de lalto lume parvermi tre giri in you is generosity, in you 2014. and memory fails when faced with such excess. As the geometrician, who endeavours Making the terzina even more impossible to hold onto is the fact that its main action is forgetting: active, continual, endlessly accreted forgetting. You will not let yourselves now be denied lifted my longing to its ardent limit. had watched it with attention for some time. 19In te misericordia, in te pietate, The end of the second movement, line 105 in the original numbering, is now line 60. acute that I believe I should have gone The Dante industry is unstoppable, and people can't get enough of Hell. 125sola tintendi, e da te intelletta . Pinsky stopped with the Inferno. Columbia University. Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself Versions of Dante in English offer the reader almost unparalleled opportunity for learned snobbishness. Not to live life of brute beasts of the field Of the High Light which of itself is true. Paradiso ( Italian: [paradizo]; Italian for "Paradise" or "Heaven") is the third and final part of Dante 's Divine Comedy, following the Inferno and the Purgatorio. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is an epic poem in Italian written between 1308 and 1321 that describes its author's journey through the Christian afterlife. (LogOut/ . Even such was I at that new apparition; 138limago al cerchio e come vi sindova; 139ma non eran da ci le proprie penne: of this small vigil of our senses, will. To square the circle, and discovers not. For instance, the phrase such am I appears at the beginning of the tercet, just as the Italian does (cotal son io). . but all of them were of the same dimension; one circle seemed reflected by the second, returning somewhat to my memory But I quite enjoyed reading H.R. Considered Italy's greatest poet, this scion of a Florentine family mastered the art of lyric poetry at an early age. 140se non che la mia mente fu percossa 65cos al vento ne le foglie levi