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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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
W. S. Merwin has been awarded most of the principal prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry. He lives and works on Maui, where he maintains a garden of rare palm trees.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
From the Hardcover edition.
FOREWORD
If a poem is not forgotten as soon as the circumstances of its origin, it begins at once to evolve an existence of its own, in minds and lives, and then even in words, that its singular maker could never have imagined. The poem that survives the receding particulars of a given age and place soon becomes a shifting kaleidoscope of perceptions, each of them in turn provisional and subject to time and change, and increasingly foreign to those horizons of human history that fostered the original images and references.
Over the years of trying to approach Dante through the words he left and some of those written about him, I have come to wonder what his very name means now, and to whom. Toward the end of the Purgatorio, in which the journey repeatedly brings the pilgrim to reunions with poets, memories and projections of poets, the recurring names of poets, Beatrice, at a moment of unfathomable loss and exposure, calls the poem's narrator and protagonist by name, "Dante," and the utterance of it is unaccountably startling and humbling. Even though it is spoken by that Beatrice who has been the sense and magnet of the whole poem and, as he has come to imagine it, of his life, and though it is heard at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, with the terrible journey done and the prospect of eternal joy ahead, the sound of his name at that moment is not at all reassuring. Would it ever be? And who would it reassure? There was, and there is, first of all, Dante the narrator. And there was Dante the man living and suffering in time, and at once we can see that there is a distinction, a division, between them. And then there was, and there is, Dante the representation of Everyman, of a brief period in the history of Italy and of Florence, of a philosophical position, a political allegiance -- the list is indeterminate. Sometimes he seems to be all of them at once, and sometimes particular aspects occupy the foreground.
The commentaries date back into his own lifetime -- indeed, he begins them himself, with the Vita Nuova -- and the exegetes recognized from the beginning, whether they approved or not, the importance of the poem, the work, the vision, as they tried to arrive at some fixed significance in those words, in a later time when the words themselves were not quite the same.
Any reader of Dante now is in debt to generations of scholars working for centuries to illuminate the unknown by means of the known. Any translator shares that enormous debt. A translation, on the other hand, is seldom likely to be of much interest to scholars, who presumably sustain themselves directly upon the inexhaustible original. A translation is made for the general reader of its own time and language, a person who, it is presumed, cannot read, or is certainly not on familiar terms with, the original, and may scarcely know it except by reputation.
It is hazardous to generalize even about the general reader, who is nobody in particular and is encountered only as an exception. But my impression is that most readers at present whose first language is English probably think of Dante as the author of one work, The Divine Comedy, of a date vaguely medieval, its subject a journey through Hell. The whole poem, for many, has come to be known by the Inferno alone, the first of the three utterly distinct sections of the work, the first of the three states of the psyche that Dante set himself to explore and portray.
There are surely many reasons for this predilection, if that is the word, for the Inferno. Some of them must come from the human sensibility's immediate recognition of perennial aspects of its own nature. In the language of modern psychology the Inferno portrays the locked, unalterable ego, form after form of it, the self and its despair forever inseparable. The terrors and pain, the absence of any hope, are the ground of the drama of the Inferno, its nightmare grip upon the reader, its awful authority, and the feeling, even among the secular, that it is depicting something in the human makeup that cannot, with real assurance, be denied. That authority, with the assistance of a succession of haunting illustrations of the Inferno, has made moments and elements of that part of the journey familiar and disturbing images which remain current even in our scattered and evanescent culture.
The literary presence of the Inferno in English has been renewed in recent years. In 1991 Daniel Halpern asked a number of contemporary poets to provide translations of cantos of the Inferno which would eventually comprise a complete translation of the first part of the Commedia. Seamus Heaney had already published fine versions of sections from several of the cantos, including part of canto 3 in Seeing Things (1991), and he ended up doing the opening cantos. When Halpern asked me to contribute to the project, I replied chiefly with misgivings, to begin with. I had been trying to read Dante, and reading about him, since I was a student, carrying one volume or another of the bilingual Temple Classics edition -- pocket-sized books -- with me wherever I went. I had read parts, at least, of the best-known translations of the Commedia: Henry Francis Cary's because it came with the Gustave Doré illustrations and was in the house when I was a child; Longfellow's despite a late-adolescent resistance to nineteenth-century poetic conventions; Laurence Binyon's at the recommendation of Ezra Pound, although he seemed to me terribly tangled; John Ciardi's toward which I had other reservations. The closer I got to feeling that I was beginning to "know" a line or a passage, having the words by memory, repeating some stumbling approximation of the sounds and cadence, pondering what I had been able to glimpse of the rings of sense, the more certain I became that -- beyond the ordinary and obvious impossibility of translating poetry or anything else -- the translation of Dante had a dimension of impossibility of its own. I had even lectured on Dante and demonstrated the impossibility of translating him, taking a single line from the introductory first canto, examining it word by word:
Tant' ê amara che poco ê più morte
indicating the sounds of the words, their primary meanings, implications in the context of the poem and in the circumstances and life of the narrator, the sound of the line insofar as I could simulate it and those present could repeat it aloud and begin to hear its disturbing mantric tone. How could that, then, really be translated? It could not, of course. It could not be anything else. It could not be the original in other words, in another language. I presented the classical objection to translation with multiplied emphasis. Translation of poetry is an enterprise that is always in certain respects impossible, and yet on occasion it has produced something new, something else, of value, and sometimes, on the other side of a sea change, it has brought up poetry again.
Halpern did not dispute my objections, but he told me which poets he was asking to contribute to the project. He asked me which cantos I would like to do if I decided to try any myself. I thought, in spite of what I had said, of the passage at the end of canto 26, where Odysseus, adrift in a two-pointed flame in the abyss of Hell, tells Virgil "where he went to die" after his return to Ithaca. Odysseus recounts his own speech to "that small company by whom I had not been deserted," exhorting them to sail with him past the horizons of the known world to the unpeopled side of the earth, in order not to live "like brutes, but in pursuit of virtue and knowledge," and of their sailing, finally, so far that they saw the summit of Mount Purgatory rising from the sea, before a wave came out from its shore and overwhelmed them. It was the passage of the Commedia that had first caught me by the hair when I was a student, and it had gone on ringing in my head as I read commentaries and essays about it, and about Dante's figure of Odysseus. Odysseus says to Virgil:
Io e i compagni eravam vecchi e tardi
In the Temple Classics edition, where I first read it, or remember first reading it, the translation by John Aitken Carlyle, originally published in 1849, reads
I and my companions were old and tardy
and it was the word "tardy" that seemed to me not quite right, from the start. While I was still a student, I read the John D. Sinclair translation (Oxford), originally published in 1939, where the words read
I and my companions were old and slow
"Slow," I realized, must have been part of the original meaning, of the intent of the phrase, but I could not believe that it was the sense that had determined its being there.
The Charles S. Singleton translation, published in 1970, a masterful piece of scholarly summary, once again says
I and my companions were old and slow
That amounts to considerable authority, and it was, after all, technically correct, the dictionary meaning, and the companions surely must have been slowed down by age when Odysseus spoke to them. But I kept the original in my mind: "tardi," the principal sense of which, in that passage, I thought had not been conveyed by any of the translations.
When I told Halpern that I would see whether I could provide anything of use to him, I thought of that word, "tardi." It had never occurred to me to try to translate it myself, and I suppose I believed that right there I would have all my reservations about translating Dante confirmed beyond further discussion. As I considered the word in that speech it seemed to me that the most important meaning of "tardi" was not "tardy," although it had taken them all many years to sail from Troy. And not "slow," despite the fact that the quickness of youth must have been diminished in them. Nor "late," ...
If a poem is not forgotten as soon as the circumstances of its origin, it begins at once to evolve an existence of its own, in minds and lives, and then even in words, that its singular maker could never have imagined. The poem that survives the receding particulars of a given age and place soon becomes a shifting kaleidoscope of perceptions, each of them in turn provisional and subject to time and change, and increasingly foreign to those horizons of human history that fostered the original images and references.
Over the years of trying to approach Dante through the words he left and some of those written about him, I have come to wonder what his very name means now, and to whom. Toward the end of the Purgatorio, in which the journey repeatedly brings the pilgrim to reunions with poets, memories and projections of poets, the recurring names of poets, Beatrice, at a moment of unfathomable loss and exposure, calls the poem's narrator and protagonist by name, "Dante," and the utterance of it is unaccountably startling and humbling. Even though it is spoken by that Beatrice who has been the sense and magnet of the whole poem and, as he has come to imagine it, of his life, and though it is heard at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, with the terrible journey done and the prospect of eternal joy ahead, the sound of his name at that moment is not at all reassuring. Would it ever be? And who would it reassure? There was, and there is, first of all, Dante the narrator. And there was Dante the man living and suffering in time, and at once we can see that there is a distinction, a division, between them. And then there was, and there is, Dante the representation of Everyman, of a brief period in the history of Italy and of Florence, of a philosophical position, a political allegiance -- the list is indeterminate. Sometimes he seems to be all of them at once, and sometimes particular aspects occupy the foreground.
The commentaries date back into his own lifetime -- indeed, he begins them himself, with the Vita Nuova -- and the exegetes recognized from the beginning, whether they approved or not, the importance of the poem, the work, the vision, as they tried to arrive at some fixed significance in those words, in a later time when the words themselves were not quite the same.
Any reader of Dante now is in debt to generations of scholars working for centuries to illuminate the unknown by means of the known. Any translator shares that enormous debt. A translation, on the other hand, is seldom likely to be of much interest to scholars, who presumably sustain themselves directly upon the inexhaustible original. A translation is made for the general reader of its own time and language, a person who, it is presumed, cannot read, or is certainly not on familiar terms with, the original, and may scarcely know it except by reputation.
It is hazardous to generalize even about the general reader, who is nobody in particular and is encountered only as an exception. But my impression is that most readers at present whose first language is English probably think of Dante as the author of one work, The Divine Comedy, of a date vaguely medieval, its subject a journey through Hell. The whole poem, for many, has come to be known by the Inferno alone, the first of the three utterly distinct sections of the work, the first of the three states of the psyche that Dante set himself to explore and portray.
There are surely many reasons for this predilection, if that is the word, for the Inferno. Some of them must come from the human sensibility's immediate recognition of perennial aspects of its own nature. In the language of modern psychology the Inferno portrays the locked, unalterable ego, form after form of it, the self and its despair forever inseparable. The terrors and pain, the absence of any hope, are the ground of the drama of the Inferno, its nightmare grip upon the reader, its awful authority, and the feeling, even among the secular, that it is depicting something in the human makeup that cannot, with real assurance, be denied. That authority, with the assistance of a succession of haunting illustrations of the Inferno, has made moments and elements of that part of the journey familiar and disturbing images which remain current even in our scattered and evanescent culture.
The literary presence of the Inferno in English has been renewed in recent years. In 1991 Daniel Halpern asked a number of contemporary poets to provide translations of cantos of the Inferno which would eventually comprise a complete translation of the first part of the Commedia. Seamus Heaney had already published fine versions of sections from several of the cantos, including part of canto 3 in Seeing Things (1991), and he ended up doing the opening cantos. When Halpern asked me to contribute to the project, I replied chiefly with misgivings, to begin with. I had been trying to read Dante, and reading about him, since I was a student, carrying one volume or another of the bilingual Temple Classics edition -- pocket-sized books -- with me wherever I went. I had read parts, at least, of the best-known translations of the Commedia: Henry Francis Cary's because it came with the Gustave Doré illustrations and was in the house when I was a child; Longfellow's despite a late-adolescent resistance to nineteenth-century poetic conventions; Laurence Binyon's at the recommendation of Ezra Pound, although he seemed to me terribly tangled; John Ciardi's toward which I had other reservations. The closer I got to feeling that I was beginning to "know" a line or a passage, having the words by memory, repeating some stumbling approximation of the sounds and cadence, pondering what I had been able to glimpse of the rings of sense, the more certain I became that -- beyond the ordinary and obvious impossibility of translating poetry or anything else -- the translation of Dante had a dimension of impossibility of its own. I had even lectured on Dante and demonstrated the impossibility of translating him, taking a single line from the introductory first canto, examining it word by word:
Tant' ê amara che poco ê più morte
indicating the sounds of the words, their primary meanings, implications in the context of the poem and in the circumstances and life of the narrator, the sound of the line insofar as I could simulate it and those present could repeat it aloud and begin to hear its disturbing mantric tone. How could that, then, really be translated? It could not, of course. It could not be anything else. It could not be the original in other words, in another language. I presented the classical objection to translation with multiplied emphasis. Translation of poetry is an enterprise that is always in certain respects impossible, and yet on occasion it has produced something new, something else, of value, and sometimes, on the other side of a sea change, it has brought up poetry again.
Halpern did not dispute my objections, but he told me which poets he was asking to contribute to the project. He asked me which cantos I would like to do if I decided to try any myself. I thought, in spite of what I had said, of the passage at the end of canto 26, where Odysseus, adrift in a two-pointed flame in the abyss of Hell, tells Virgil "where he went to die" after his return to Ithaca. Odysseus recounts his own speech to "that small company by whom I had not been deserted," exhorting them to sail with him past the horizons of the known world to the unpeopled side of the earth, in order not to live "like brutes, but in pursuit of virtue and knowledge," and of their sailing, finally, so far that they saw the summit of Mount Purgatory rising from the sea, before a wave came out from its shore and overwhelmed them. It was the passage of the Commedia that had first caught me by the hair when I was a student, and it had gone on ringing in my head as I read commentaries and essays about it, and about Dante's figure of Odysseus. Odysseus says to Virgil:
Io e i compagni eravam vecchi e tardi
In the Temple Classics edition, where I first read it, or remember first reading it, the translation by John Aitken Carlyle, originally published in 1849, reads
I and my companions were old and tardy
and it was the word "tardy" that seemed to me not quite right, from the start. While I was still a student, I read the John D. Sinclair translation (Oxford), originally published in 1939, where the words read
I and my companions were old and slow
"Slow," I realized, must have been part of the original meaning, of the intent of the phrase, but I could not believe that it was the sense that had determined its being there.
The Charles S. Singleton translation, published in 1970, a masterful piece of scholarly summary, once again says
I and my companions were old and slow
That amounts to considerable authority, and it was, after all, technically correct, the dictionary meaning, and the companions surely must have been slowed down by age when Odysseus spoke to them. But I kept the original in my mind: "tardi," the principal sense of which, in that passage, I thought had not been conveyed by any of the translations.
When I told Halpern that I would see whether I could provide anything of use to him, I thought of that word, "tardi." It had never occurred to me to try to translate it myself, and I suppose I believed that right there I would have all my reservations about translating Dante confirmed beyond further discussion. As I considered the word in that speech it seemed to me that the most important meaning of "tardi" was not "tardy," although it had taken them all many years to sail from Troy. And not "slow," despite the fact that the quickness of youth must have been diminished in them. Nor "late," ...
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- PublisherKnopf
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0375708391
- ISBN 13 9780375708398
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages400
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