Purgatorio: A New Verse Translation (English and Italian Edition) - Hardcover

Dante Alighieri; Merwin, W.S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375409211 ISBN 13: 9780375409219

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

At the pinnacle of a grand and prolific career, W. S. Merwin has given us a shimmering new verse translation of the central section of Dante's Divine Comedy -- the Purgatorio.
  
Led by Virgil, inspired by his love for Beatrice, Dante makes the arduous journey up the Mountain of Purgatory, where souls are cleansed to prepare them for the ultimate ascent to heaven.  Presented with the original Italian text, and with Merwin's notes and commentary, this luminous new interpretation of Dante's great poem of sin, repentance, and salvation is a profoundly moving work of art and the definitive translation for our time.

About this title

Review:

In the foreword to his version of the Purgatorio, W.S. Merwin dwells on the quasi-insuperable hurdles that any translator of Dante must face. Choosing just a single line from the first canticle, he asks: "How could that, then, really be translated? It could not, of course." This makes Dante's masterpiece sound like the literary equivalent of Mission: Impossible ("Your mission, Mr. Merwin, should you choose to accept it...") Happily, however, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet decided to give it a try. He spent several years wrestling with Dante's inexhaustible tercets, and rather than applying himself to the fire-and-brimstone-scented thrills of the Inferno, Merwin turned to the middle and most humane portion of the entire work: Purgatorio. It's here, in a kind of spiritual halfway house between heaven and hell, that the poem reaches a peak of tenderness and regret--and rises quite literally from the dead.

Merwin's version must be measured against a good many predecessors, from John Ciardi's reader-friendly approach to Allen Mandelbaum's free-versifying to Charles Singleton's prosaic trot. How does this Purgatorio stack up? Very decently indeed. Merwin is something of a strict constructionist, who wants to hew as closely as possible to the syntax and sound of the original Italian. Yet he's no Nabokovian naysayer, slapping himself on the wrist every time he deviates from Dante's text, and he's wisely thrown the rhymes overboard. That leaves him with enough flexibility to echo some of the poem's loveliest effects:

A sweet air that within itself was
unvarying struck me on the forehead,
a stroke no rougher than a gentle breeze,

at which the trembling branches all together
bent at once in that direction where
the holy mountain casts its first shadow,

without ever leaning over so far from
the upright as to make the small birds stop
the practice of their art in the treetops...

Merwin also does a good job capturing Dante's asperity, including his near-proverbial response to a rebuke from main squeeze Beatrice in Canto XXX: "As a mother may seem harsh to her child, / she seemed to me, because the flavor / of raw pity when tasted is bitter." There are moments, of course, when the translator's taste for literalism gets him in trouble. When, for example, Dante is surrounded by a crowd of souls in the second canto, who are astonished to see one of the living among them, he describes them as "quasi oblïando d'ire a farsi belle." A difficult phrase to translate, yes, but Merwin's solution--"forgetting, it seemed, to go and see to their own beauty"--makes it sound as though they're late for an appointment at the hairdresser's. Still, these are minor flaws in a major and often marvelous piece of work. Can we look forward to a paradisiacal follow-up? --James Marcus

From the Publisher:

"Forty years of producing highly reliable renderings of French and Spanish poetry and drama have culminated in what is bound to be hailed as Merwin's grandest translational accomplishment. Following on the heels of last year's The River Sound and the verse-novel The Folding Cliffs comes this deft and smooth interpretation of Dante. . . .This translation is something of a companion volume to Robert Pinsky's Inferno in the many ways it supercedes in elegance those of Singleton and Sinclair, which had been the last century's standards."
-- Publishers Weekly

"At last the Purgatorio can be read in English as a work of art. Art, including the art of poetry, is an important presence in this the central book of Dante's Commedia, and W.S. Merwin's gorgeous, accurate rendering is worthy of its great original."
-- Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States

"It is only justice that Merwin should translate this cantica dedicated to 'natural' powers, the most human narrative of Dante's enterprise, 'remade in the way that trees are new, made new again when their leaves are new.' It is the absolute of transience both poets are caught up in, a mortal communication which has entangled Merwin in that certain twist of idiom we recognize as the style of solicitude: affectionate, absorbent, ardent. What better preparation for the absolute of Paradise than these mortal lights that must yield to eternal?"
-- Richard Howard

"W.S. Merwin's Purgatorio is a wise and eloquent version of what seems to many of us the most welcoming part of the Commedia. Once again Merwin demonstrates that he is a courteous and generous troubadour whose poetic gift is copious and heartening."
-- Harold Bloom

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375409211
• ISBN 13: 9780375409219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 359