Divining Dante

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy was the last thing I would’ve thought of last week – a week devoted largely to the more mundane concerns of academic administration like publication budgets and computer donations – but then I received an e-mail message from a reader in Cebu that swept me back into the 14th century, into a shadowy forest… "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la dirrita via era smarrita." So begins, in one of literature’s most memorable openings, the Inferno: "Midway upon our road of life I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been missed...," according to Charles Eliot Norton’s 1892 translation.

Shortly after Norton penned his translation, another man, halfway around the world, was struck by the same tercet, and would write his addressee in a hodgepodge of German, French, and English: "I should like to close this letter in the language of Dante but it seems to me that what I knew before I have now forgotten. Lucky are you who are in Europe, in correspondence with literary men and scholars you can exchange ideas whenever you please. As for me I am here… Nel nezzo del cammin’ della mia vita ini una selva oscura…." The imperfect Italian, or the imperfect memory, was understandable, given the letter-writer’s circumstances: He was Jose Rizal, writing his friend Ferdinand Blumentritt from Dapitan on July 31, 1894.

And long before I discovered this factoid, I had tacked onto the wall of my UP English department office a poster that some graduate-school friends and I had made up in the United States to announce a literary reading sometime in March 1991 – our graduation recital, as it were – which we had chosen to title (you guessed it) "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai…."

What strange coincidences kept drawing me back to this haunting line? Last week it was this e-mailed question from Jonel Abellanosa, a Cebu-based writer whom I’d met a few years ago during a visit to the University of San Carlos:

"In your opinion, is it possible to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy into Cebuano or Filipino, or more specifically – the fifth canto of the Inferno? I have this need, this itching need, to translate the said canto into either Cebuano or Filipino or even both. My knowledge of the Italian language is inadequate, that’s why I plan to utilize John Ciardi’s English translation as guide. Do I really have to master the Italian language before even toying with the idea of translation? Also, I am not a Dante scholar, although my knowledge of Dante as poet and person is, you can say, average. Would a translation from someone of my inadequate literary or educational background be credible, or for that matter successful?"

I have to confess that I haven’t touched the Divine Comedy since my undergraduate days, and even then I glossed over the fine details of that long poem, like most undergraduates did. Jonel’s question sent me scurrying for copies of and commentaries on the Inferno, and the more I read the more I remembered what I had missed, about the work itself and the bliss of pure learning.

But what can I tell Jonel? Although I write in both English and Filipino, I’m not a translator, and have never seriously attempted a translation of my own or someone else’s work – and perhaps I should tell Jonel why. I stand in awe of the good translator’s work; I think it requires a very special talent and expertise that even writers themselves may not necessarily have. It helps if the translator is himself or herself a creative writer (John Ciardi, who died in 1986, was one of America’s most eminent contemporary poets); but you have to be more – a scholar, a linguist, a reader of minds, a negotiator. You have to balance your own lively imagination with a healthy respect for the original text and its presumptive intentions. You have to be thoroughly familiar, in this case, not only with Italian, but with the Italian of Dante’s time, and with its regional nuances, if any.

That’s if you want to do a translation that’s up to professional, academic standards. For something less rigorous, like a personal exercise for the sake of pushing yourself to the limits of the languages you know, then a translation from a secondary language should be all right. To test the waters, you might want to try something easier and more familiar – say, one of Pablo Neruda’s more popular poems (e.g., "Tonight I can write the saddest lines" – then match it against the published translations of the same poem by people like Ben Belitt, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Bly.

In these days of globalized fiction, some translators have become stars in their own right, with the names of such as Eric Bentley, Gregory Rabassa, and William Weaver being almost synonymous with those of the writers they’ve serviced (Brecht, Garcia Marquez, Eco). It’s a full-time job, but – unless you’re one of these aforementioned stars – still quite often thankless. It doesn’t help much that many people will adamantly insist that literary beauty can never be transposed from one language to another. Dante himself was supposed to have maintained that "Nothing harmonized by a musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech without losing all its sweetness and harmony."

But somehow I think I understand what’s been driving Jonel to dare and attempt what scores of writers and scholars before him have already done, with widely varying degrees of success. (Over the past century alone, at least 50 translations of the Inferno have been published.) It’s neither the prospect of fame or fortune nor the challenge of scholarly exactitude; it’s the love story in the poem, and the thrill of bringing it to life with a new vocabulary.

In the Inferno’s Fifth Canto, the poet Virgil leads the Pilgrim (Dante himself) through the second circle of Hell, where they encounter a whirlwind tossing about the souls of "carnal sinners" – among them, the illicit lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. (What Dante is actually saying is that wayward love is bad but not that bad; the next circle of hell is reserved for gluttons, and the very last one – the pits – for people who betray their relatives and friends.) In 13th-century real life, Francesca – the daughter of a nobleman – had been married off for political reasons to the hunchback Giancotto. But a powerful attraction soon arose between Francesca and Giancotto’s younger brother Paolo. One day, while reading a book on romantic love, Francesca yields to Paolo’s kisses; but Giancotto catches them and kills them both.

You’d think that Francesca and Paolo would be happy being together forever somewhere, albeit in Hell – but no: Francesca is so consumed with grief and shame that she cannot even mention Paolo’s name, and he is fated to remain naked by her side as an eternal reminder of that fatal moment. Their punishment is their togetherness in misery. She explains to Dante (in the translation of Allen Mandelbaum):

Yet if you long so much to understand
the first root of our love, then I shall tell
my tale to you as one who weeps and speaks.
One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot – how love had overcome him.
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.
And time and time again that reading led
our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,
and yet one point alone defeated us.
When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.
A Gallehault indeed, that book and he
who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.

It’s lines like these that cause me to give a translation perhaps the best accolade there is: It makes me want to learn the language of the original, so I can drink more, and more deeply, of that wine.

Possibly an even better alternative to translation – at least for poets, painters, and the creative lot – is to do your own adaptation, your own artistic response to someone else’s profoundly moving or troubling work. This is a time-honored way by which literature has progressed, and by which writers and artists have paid homage to (or obliquely derided) their predecessors’ work.

While the general or natural tendency might be for the tribute, the sequel, or the adaptation to be inferior in quality to the original, sometimes very interesting things can happen over several centuries and continents. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) evolved exactly 200 years later into Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) – and so taken was I by these two plays (you’ll know Threepenny by its show stopper, "Mack the Knife") that I would write my own version of the MacHeath story in Mac Malicsi, TNT, transporting Mackie into Midwestern America and recasting him as a nimble-footed Pinoy, circa 1990. I’m no Brecht and I’m not Gay (whether big or, ahem, small G), but I had loads of fun trying to do something new with something very old.

And let’s not forget George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1938), his take on the classic tale of the sculptor Pygmalion and his creation Galatea, which in turn became the basis for My Fair Lady (1964, film version). Just as famously, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (first published 1597) inspired West Side Story (1961, film version), not to mention all the stage and screen adaptations that were made of it, including Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version with Leonardo DiCaprio. (Shakespeare, of course, was the grandest adapter of them all, basing a host of plays – Romeo and Juliet among them – on pre-existent material.)

In fiction, I can’t think of a more durable template than James Joyce’s "Araby" (1905), the classic story of a young boy’s burning infatuation with an older girl and his crushing disillusionment. My writing students have it coming out of their ears, because "Araby" happens to be a personal favorite of mine (alongside Ernest Hemingway’s "Hills like White Elephants" – "Araby" for the sentiment and "Hills" for the technique). NVM Gonzalez’s "Bread of Salt" (1958) is also an "Araby" story, and in 1994, with trembling hand, I essayed my own version, the transparently reversed "Ybarra."

But to return to where we began, with Dante’s Fifth Canto of the Inferno, most worthy of note was the intensely lyrical John Keats’s response to it, a sonnet titled "After Reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca, A Dream" (1820). The poem takes its persona, as lovelorn and as miserable as Keats was, not to the heights of ecstasy but

…to that second circle of sad Hell,

Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw

Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell

Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,

Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form

I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose 1860s translation of the Divine Comedy set the standard for quite a while, wrote four sonnets to commemorate the experience of divining Dante. They’re of little but scholarly interest now, and my pedestrian sense is that Keats out-Dantes Longfellow by a shimmering mile.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.