Pound by Pound

Dante’s morals are almost sovietic in his location of the grafters who are lower down than even the simonists.  The English term barrator has been, I think, reserved for translations of Dante and occurs nowhere else outside the dictionary, the present legal sense being either different or specialized.  Baro is a cheater at cards, in Italian, and grafter is the exact equivalent of barattier, and if grafter is now a neologism, there are , despite Dante’s theorizing about aulic speech, several unparliamentary and uncurial terms in this section of the Inferno.  Meaning betrayer of public trust, the term is more exact than one used explicitly of appropriation of vessels at sea.  The word has applied to so many members of the social register, so many multi-millionaires, American presidents, French cabinet ministers, that it will probably have social if not literary status henceforward.

XX.  Whether anyone has noted the Spanish sound at the end of this canto, I don’t know, it is possibly a parallel for Arnaut’s passage in Provencal in the Purgatorio (Sobilia, ? Sibilia, nocque, introcque).

XXV.  These low circles are not for simple carnality, the damned here have always a strong stain of meanness, cheating though not, I admit, brought into strong relief: fraudulent homicide, Cacus for ‘furto frodolente‘.  It begins with the usurers in canto XI.  We have lost the mediaeval discrimination between productive and destructive investment, as we have lost the idea decay of intelligence re/ben del intelletto.

Though Dante’s sense of main construction is perhaps rudimentary in comparison with Flaubert’s, one might note definite parallels, or stays, tending toward general shape, apart from the diagrammatic or cartographic scheme, e.g. the Spanish suggestion, Ciampolo (XXII) against the honest Romeo, Agnel in the Ovidian metamorphosis (due e nessum) vs. Bertrand (ed uno in due).

The punishment of prophets and soothsayers seems overdone, but ‘wax image witchcraft’ is the clue, or at any rate the link between Dante’s attitude and our own, a common basis for revulsion.

(XX, 123).  ‘Fecer malie con erbe econ imago’

(XXV, 97.) ‘Nor Ovid more of Arethusa sing,

To water turned, or Cadmus to a snake.’

I give this alternative to show how easy it is to get a couple of word for word lines of smooth and liquid versification that are utterly un-Dantescan and translate much less than Binyon’s contortion.

After a comparatively dull stretch, canto XXV imposes Dante’s adjunct, the profounder metamorphosis of the nature (soul) agglutinous fluidity, and he calls specific attention to it, and to the fact that he is adding something not in Lucan and Ovid.  In fact after Guido and Dante, whatever there may have been in human mind and perception, literature does not again make any very serious attempt to enter these regions of consciousness till almost our own day, in the struggles of Henry James and of Ibsen (who has passed out of fad and not yet come back into due currency).  (Even Donne and Co. were engaged in something rather different.)

XXVI, moment fo inattention ‘winging the heavenly vault’ is nonsense, not in the original, out of place.

Re punishment of Ulysses, no one seems to note the perfectly useless, trifling unprovoked sack of the Cicones in the Odyssey.  Troy was one thing, they were inveigled.

Helen’s father was trying to dodge destiny by a clever combination, etc., but for the sack of the Ciconian town there was no excuse handy, it is pure devilment, and Ulysses and Co. deserved all they got thereafter (not that there is any certainty that Dante had this in mind).

It gives a crime and punishment motif to the Odyssey, which is frequently overlooked, and is promptly and (?) properly snowed under by the human interest in Odysseus himself, the live man among duds.  Dante definitely accents the theft of the Palladium, whereon one could turn out a volume of comment.  It binds through from Homer to Virgil to Dante.

XXVI.  Supposing this to be the first segment the translator attempted, his later work shows very considerable progress, and a much more vigorous grasp on his matter.

From here on there are one or two slack passages a matter of a line or two, there are few extra words and there are compensations as in XXVIII, plow still disinters being more specific than accoglie, camminata is corridor rather than chamber, and burella a pit-shaft.  One ends with gratitude for demonstration that forty years’ honest work do, after all, count for something; that some qualities of writing cannot be attained simply by clever faking, young muscles or a desire to get somewhere in a hurry.

The lines move to their end, that is, draw along the eye of the reader, instead of cradling him in a hammock.  The main import is not sacrificed to detail.  Simple as this appears in bald statement, it takes time to learn how to achieve it.

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MINUTIA: Canto I, freckled not very good for gaetta.

III.  Not having worked into the idiom one is annoyed by inversions and extra words.  Shadwell, if I remember rightly, tried an eight syllable line to get a weight equal to the Italian.  I don’t know that anyone has thought of attempting the poem in terza rima, but with fewer English lines than the Italian.  It would breed, probably, considerable confusion, it might cause a denseness that would defeat the main end: penetrability.

III.  134, crimson for vermiglia, given the context this is Binyon’s worst oversight, or in strict sense lack of sight.

Canto V.  Inspects, good.  I mean for dico, excellent.  Scrutinize, excellent; row on row, excellent and not literal.  Desire and Reason, with caps, a little out of style; rapt in air, excellent.

And comest journeying through the black air, good.  Caina is Cain’s hell, rather than place.

VI, line 3, which (printer’s error?), 1. 28, faint Miltonism.  Muddy for tinta, good.

For thou wast made before I was unmade, good.

VII, from class to class, modern and not trecento.  But very interesting as lyric insertion from the translator.  Certain glints or side lights, have value as comment.

IX.  I don’t know that it is necessary to assume that Dante’s Medusa is the strictly classical female.  Bunting has perhaps pierced deeper with his ‘Come, we’ll enamel him’.  Enamel is both stone and fusing heat.  Frogs don’t run through water.  Not quite sure re spaldi, it is a gallery; I dare say it might be a closed gallery under battlements (as at Assisi).

X.  I don’t think slaughterous helps; nato has gender, and would allow son as equivalent.

XI.  Of all malice, passage, rather modern in attitude, not quite the odio in cielo acquista.

XII.  Excellent example Binyon’s understanding of the difference between the Dantescan line and english ‘pentameter’”

Running as in the world once they were wont.

There is an excellent slight distortion making for greater vividness and forcing the reader to think more about the exact meaning of the original in:

Who live by violence and on other’s fear.

On the next page, a very clear example of quality of motion in the original

che mori per la bella Deianiral

Figliastro, usually step son (printer’s error?).

XIII, fosco, dark, and schietto not so much smooth as clean or straightish; polsi, boht wrists and vigour; becomes the grain, excellent and dthe kind of thing Dante liked.

XIV, tames for maturi, not so felicitous.

1. 92.  Dante’s metaphor (pasto) about all the traffic will stand, but to seek light, as well as to have taste vouchedsafe, is ‘uno di piu’.

XV, avventa? sea forced in by the wind; nervi, a word one could wrangle over; fiera, possibly more proud than fierce.

This minor contentiousness is not impertinent if it emphasize the progressive tightening of poet’s attention from Homer to Ovid, to Dante.  Durer’s grasshopper in the foreground will serve for visual comparison.  Durer is about the most helpful source for optical suggestions that I can think of.  One might also note the almost uninterrupted decadence of writer’s attention for centuries after dante, until the gradual struggle back toward it in Crabbe, Stendhal, Browning and Flaubert.

XVIII.  Coming back again to the rhyming, not only are we without strict English feminine equivalents for terminal sounds like ferrigno, rintoppa, argento, tronca, stagna, feruto, but any attempt at ornamental rhyme would be out of place, any attempt at explosive rhyme a la Hudibras, or slick epigrammatic rhyme a la Pope or trick rhyme a la Hood, or in fact any kind of rhyming excresence or ornament would be out of place in the Commedia, where Dant’es rhyme is but a stiffer thread in the texture, to keep the whole from sprawling and pulling out of trim shape (cf. weave of any high grade trouser material).

One advantage of having the book in penetrable idiom is that we (one, I) see more clearly the grading of Dante’s values, and especially how the whole hell reeks against the natural increase of agriculture or of any productive work.

deep hell is reached via Geryon (fraud) of the marvellous patterned hide, and for ten cantos thereafter the damned are all of them damned for money.

The filth heaped upon Thais seems excessive, and Binyon here might have given us a note indicationg the gulf between Francesca, or Rahab, and the female who persuaded Alexander to burn the Palace of Persepolis.  The allusive bit of conversation doesn’t explain this, though I suppose it occurs in whatever account Dante knew.

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Literature belongs to no one man, and translations of great works ought perhaps to be made by a committee.  We are cut off (by idiotic economic system), etc. from the old habit of commentary printed WITH a text.  Up to canto VIII or IXI was torn between wanting Binyon to spend the next ten years revising his Inferno and the wish he should go on to the end of the Commedia, and then, if he had time, turn back for revision.  I now think he has earned his right to the pleasures of the Purgatorio and the third section of the poem.  Some, perhaps most of the strictures made on particular passages, might better be made privately to the translator were there such opportunity or any likelihood that my opinion would be well received.  It is nearly impossible to make the RIGHT suggestion for emending another man’s work.  Even if you do, he never quite thinks it remains his own.  This ulcerated sense of property might disappear in an ideal republic.  At most, one can put one’s finger on the fault and hope the man himself will receive inspiration from the depths of his own personal Helicon.

Dante’s Inferno Part Two

‘Not a Dull Moment’.

(Kensington billboard)

If any of the following citations seem trifling or carping let the reader think how few contemporary works merit in any degree this sort of attention.

For most translation one would merely say, take it away and start again.  There is nothing in the following list that couldn’t be dealt with in a second or third edition.

An imaginary opponent might argue that Binyon had given us ‘penny plain’ for ‘twopence coloured’.  Sargent used to do coloured impressions of Velasquez, but so far as I know he didn’t try the process on Durer.  If Binyon has given us an engraving, he has put the original in its own colour on the opposite page.

If the opponent think Binyon somewhat naif not to try to hide the defects of Dante, this also has its used and its interest, at least as preparation for understanding subsequent Italy.  At last one sees what Petrarch was trying to get away from, and why the Italians have put up with Petrarch.

Minor truimph, in 1932: I drove an Italian critic, author of seven volume history of Italian literature, to his last ditch, whence he fially defened Petrarch on the sole ground that ‘one occasionally likes a chocolate cream’.  A literary decadence can proceed not only from a bad colossal author, but from a small ma’s trying to avoid the defects in the work of a great man.

Returning from relative to intrinsic value: We owe Binyon a great debt for having shown (let us hope once and for all how little Dante needs NOTES.  The general lay reader has been hypnotized for centuries by the critical apparatus of the Commedia.  An edition like Moor’s with no notes, especially if approached by a young student, is too difficult.  One was thankful in 1906 to Dent for the Temple bilingual edition, it saved one from consulting Witte, Toynbee, God kows whom, but at any rate from painfully digging in with a dictionary, a Dante dictionary, etc…. and one (I believe MORE-I cannot believe my experience unique) never got through to the essential fact that it is really THERE ON THE PAGE.

One got interested in the wealth of heteroclite material, incident, heteroclite anecdote, museum of mediaeval history, etc.  Whenever there was an immediate difficulty one looked at a note, instead of reading on for ten lines and waiting for Dante to tell one.

Binyon’s canto headings average about half a page.  Up to canto XIII I can think of only one item necessary, or at least that one wanted, for the understanding of the text, which he hasn’t included in his summaries.

This is really an enormous benefit, avery great work of clearance and drainage.  And it ought not to pass without gratitude.  It is partly due to this clearance that the version leaves one so clear headed as to the general line of the Cantico.

At the start the constant syntactical inversions annoy one.  Later one gets used to the idiom and forgets to notice them.  In any case there is nothing worse than Dant’s own:

‘gia mai non vada,

di la piu che di qua essere aspetta.

There are however during the first dozen cantos a number of alterations from singular to plural, or vice versa, which do no good whatever.

In the main Binyon’s having his eye on the word and not the thing makes for the honesty of the version, or transparency in the sense that one sees through TO the original.  Later the translator gets his eye on the object without losing grip on the verbal manifestation.

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SHIFT:

I remember Yeats wanting me to speak some verse aloud in the old out-of-door Greek theratre at Siracusa, and being annoyed when I bellowed the

[here Pound writes Greek but my keyboard can't]

and refused to spout English poesy. I don’t know how far I succeeded in convincing him that English verse wasn’t CUT. Yeast himself in his early work produced marvellous rhythmic effects ‘legato’, verse, that is, very fine to murmur and that may be understood if whispered in a drawing-room, even though the better readers may gradually pull the words out of shape (by excessive lengthening of the vowel sounds).

The musical terms ’staccato’ and ‘legato’ apply to verse. The common verse of Britain from 1890 to 1910 was a horrible agglomerate compost, not minted, most of it not even baked, all legato, a doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth, heaven knows what, fourth-hand Elizabethan sonority blunted, half melted, lumpy. The Elizabethan ‘iambic’ verse was largely made to bawl in theatres, and had considerable affinity with barocco.

Working on a decent basis, Binyon had got rid of pseudo-magniloquence, of puffed words, I don’t remember a single decorative or rhetorical word in his first ten cantos. There are vast numbers of mono-syllables, little words. Here a hint from the De Eloquo may have put him on the trail.

In the matter of rhyme, nearly everyone knows that Dante’s rhymes are ‘feminine’, i.e. accent on the penultimate, cruciata, aguzza, volge, maligno. There are feminine rhymes in English, there are ENOUGH, possibly, to fill the needs of an almost literal version of the Divina Commedia, but they are of the wrong quality; bloweth, knowing, waiteth.

Binyon has very intelligently avoided a mere pseudo or obvious similarity, in favour of a fundamental, namely the sharp clear quality of the original SOUND as a whole. His past, admits, checked, kings, all masculine endings, but all leaving a residue of vowel sound in state of potential, or latent, as considered by Dante himself in his remarks on troubadour verse.

I do not expect to see another version as good as Binyon’s, I can to a great extent risk being unjust to forty translators whose work I haven’t seen. Few men of Binyon’s position and experience have tried or will try the experiment. You cannot counterfeit forty years’ honest work, or get the same result by being a clever young man who prefers vanilla to orange or helioprope to lavender perfume.

‘La sculpture n’est pas pour le jeunes hommes’

(Brancusi.)

A younger generation, or at least a younger American generation, has been brought up on a list of acid tests, invented to get rid of the boiled oatmeal consistency of the bad verse of 1900, and there is no doubt that many young readers seeing Binyon’s inversions, etc., will be likely to throw down the translation under the impression that it is incompetent.

the fact that this idiom, which was never spoken on sea or land, is NOT fit for use in the new peotry of 1933-4 does not mean that it is unfit for use in a translation of poem finished in 1321.

Before flying to the conclusion that certain things are ‘against the rules’ (heaven save us, procedures are already erected into RULES!) let the neophyte consider that a man cannot be in New York and Pekin at the same moment. Certain qualities are in OPPOSITION to others, water cannot exist as water and as ice at the same time.

It WOULD be quite possible to conserve the natural word order, without giving up the rhymes used by Binyon, IF one used run-on instead of end-stopped verses. BUT Dante’s verses are mostly end-stooped. Various alternatives are offered at every juncture, but let the neophyte try half a dozen before deciding that Binyon has sacrificed the greater virtue for the less in a given case.

He has not made such sacrificed in his refusal to bother with feminine rhyme. Specific passages must be judged line by line. And this process I propose to illustrate by particular cases before falling into general statement.

In a poem 200 pages long, or more exactly in a poem the first third of which is 200 pages long, the FIRST requirement is that the reader be able to proceed. You can’t do this with Chapman’s Homer. You plunge into adjectival magnificence and get stuck. You have two or more pages of admiration, and then wait to regather your energies, or you acquire a definite impression of Chapman’s language, and very little of Ilion. There are even, and this is more pertinent, a great number of persons familiar with the Paolo and Francesca incident, and very muzzy about the Commedia as a Whole.