The Divine Comedy: Inferno
by dante alighieri, translated by jason m. baxter
angelico, 260 pages, $19.95
Jason M. Baxter, author of A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Introduction to Christian Mysticism, and The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, has undertaken his most daunting task yet: translating Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first canticle of the comedy, the Inferno, was published last September and is equipped with a compelling new introduction that distills the last seven hundred years of interpretation to reveal Dante’s three big influences. Dante is, first, a Franciscan: one who sees the corruption of the world and prophetically denounces it in the hope of a new age of the spirit. He is, second, a Boethian: one who unites poetry and philosophy, such that the microcosm of poetic numbers leads us to the perception of the macrocosm, of the well-ordered world, which brings us to the contemplation of the divine intelligence who created it. Dante is, third and finally, a Dominican: a scholastic philosopher and a builder of elaborate and rich intellectual systems. None of this is new, but Baxter’s ordering—Franciscan, Boethian, then Dominican—gives his translation a unique emphasis.
Most American readers will think of Dante chiefly in his Dominican dimension, as a poet who constructed his epic on the cosmic model in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa. Several prominent Italian scholars sweep the theology aside and attend only to Dante’s verbal revenge against his political enemies. Baxter suggests that both these approaches distort the poem. Dante’s political attentions are fundamentally religious in nature—less like the partisan grudges that led to his exile and more akin to abbot Joachim of Fiore’s eschatological vision (which was popularized by a fundamentalist wing of the Franciscan order). The poem is a prophetic cry, and only within that Franciscan context do the Dominican scholasticism and Boethian aesthetics come into play.
Dante knew how to be eloquent and smooth, even in the “vulgar” Tuscan dialect, but on Baxter’s account, this was not Dante’s priority in the Comedy. He wanted to be “raw, sincere, blood-warming,” and “humble.” Dante has become a “Great Book,” Baxter tells us, where the cosmic vision is sublime, but some translations can be monochromatic and frigid. Baxter’s translation aims for a “blend of textures,” with a special emphasis on the “jagged” aspects of Dante’s poem. Baxter aims to give us a translation that is, in his word, “iconoclastic.” The result is generally faithful in its accuracy. Like Robert and Jean Hollander’s earlier edition of the Comedy, Baxter translates the poem line-for-line; his individual verses correspond almost exactly in their meaning to the Italian.
To offer one example of this jaggedness, consider the line where Dante asks the damned pimp Venedico Caccianemico, “Ma che ti mena a sì pungenti salse?” Baxter gives us the line unfiltered: “What brings you here, into such a spicy sauce?” The Hollander translation flinches away from the metaphor and renders the line with a literal, but therefore less exact, phrase: “What has brought you to such a stinging torture?” Allen Mandelbaum embraces the metaphor but attempts to render it in decorous and elevated blank verse: “But what brings you to sauces so piquant?” On the one hand, we may well understand why the Hollanders flinched and Mandelbaum sublimated: Dante’s metaphor anticipates the Elizabethan colloquialism of referring to an insouciant, lascivious, or ill-humored person as “saucy.” In our day, that term is at best an archaism and at worst a cliché. Baxter’s line is awkward, but it is mostly Dante’s purposeful awkwardness, not his.
Translators of poetry, if they intend to be faithful to the meaning, are faced with two distinct but related choices, one of style, and the other of form. Baxter’s decisions on both these points are bound to be controversial. As we just saw, the Hollander translation plays freely with Dante’s original trope. But most translators respect their source’s original phrases, just as Baxter does, and so limit their inventiveness to that other part of figurative language, the scheme. To change a trope directly changes the meaning; to work liberally with scheme, that is to say, with word-figure (or what Baxter calls the “word art” of syntax), may shift emphasis, but is more respectful of the original meaning. Baxter’s iconoclasm is conspicuous here. Unable to reproduce Dante’s Italian, with its subtle but meaningful uses of assonance and consonance—his movements from smooth to rough language—Baxter makes free use of various schemes to render Dante’s verses more jagged. Here are a few examples:
I’m in a circle—third—where rain comes down
Eternal, cursed, cold. Heavy precipitation (6.7–8)
“Who’s that one—there—my master, who—it’s excruciating!—
is squirming more than any of his comrades?” (19.31–32)
Grave dropsy. Disparity
of body parts. A liquid incapable of integration.
Face disproportionate with massive belly. (30.52–54)
This kind of verbal chopping and interpolation happens again and again. Sometimes, Baxter is bringing out the precise qualities of Dante’s rhetoric. More often, he is making the poem rougher, more halting, than it is in Dante’s original. Late in the Inferno, Dante writes, “If I had rhymes sufficiently hoarse and harsh / to be a fitting match for this sick hole . . .” Baxter has not given him the rhymes, but he has certainly given him the rhetoric in spades. Probably the closest analogy to Baxter’s poetic practice, curiously, is the early poetry of Ezra Pound, where Pound personifies Dante’s characters and contemporaries in dramatic monologues similarly harsh and elliptical, as the dramatized voices break apart under the pressure of heartache.
My reservation is not just that these rhetorical schemes appear in the translation and not in the original, but that the same constructions appear so frequently. But my reservation really is just that—a reservation. On several occasions, Baxter’s translation made me conscious of aspects of Dante’s language that I had glided by on past readings. He knows what he is doing.
The second choice a translator faces is that of form. In a late canto, Dante begins with the following question:
Who could ever—even in words unbound by meter—
speak forth in full the blood and wounds
that I saw now, even if narrating it at length?
Dante’s terza rima has long posed a problem for those who would give us a proper verse translation of the poem. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Laurence Binyon, Mandelbaum, Ciaran Carson, and others, simply rendered the poem in “heroic verse,” that is to say, in blank iambic pentameter. John Ciardi put it in rhymed tercets, where the first and third lines rhyme, while the middle one is blank—a sort of cheap parody of Dante’s actual form. Others have simply thrown up their hands and translated the poem in free verse. Michael Palma’s new translation (which I have not yet read) is currently winning praise for realizing the terza rima in English. As far as I know, only Dorothy Sayers and Robert Pinsky have tried as much before, but their rhymes are generally slanted rather than full. Baxter’s poem is largely in iambic measure, but with lines ranging from four to eight metrical feet and with such a liberal sprinkling of anapests that one cannot use the meter as a guide to the recitation of the poem. So many of his best lines are iambic hexameters that I half wish he had done the whole thing in that measure, but in that case he would have forfeited his rigorous line-for-line translation.
As it is, one can almost sense Baxter nudging us as we move through the verses, making sure we take notice of things to which much familiarity has inured us. Because his knowledge of the poem has come through such patience and labor, we can be sure that his guidance is worth accepting.
James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston.
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