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Sandro Botticelli. The Drawings of Dante's Divine Comedy. Edited by Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg. Harry N. Abrams 2000. 360 pp. $75.00 Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by C.H. Sisson. Oxford University Press 1993 [first published 1980]. 741 pp. $17.95 (paper) Dante Alighieri. Inferno. A verse translation by Robert Hollander Jean Hollander. Doubleday 2000. 668 pp. $35-00 Dante Alighieri. Inferno. A new verse translation by Michael Palma. WW Norton & Co. 2002. 392 pp. $35.00 Dante Alighieri. The Inferno of Dante, A new verse translation by Robert Pinsky. Farrar, Straus Giroux 1994. 451 pp. $20.00 (paper) Dante Alighieri. Inferno. A new verse translation with notes an introduction by Elio Zappulla. Vintage Books 1999. 330 pp. $20.00 (paper) Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio. A new verse translation by W S. Merwin. Alfred A. Knopf 2000. 389 pp. $30.00. Dante Alighieri. Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy: Purgatory. Italian text verse translation commentary by Mark Musa. Two volumes. Indiana University Press 2000. 334 pp. (text translation) 341 pp. (commentary) $89.95 Peter S. Hawkins Rachel Jacoff. The Poets' Dante. Twentieth Century Responses. Farrar, Straus Giroux 2001. 432 pp. $30.00 Robert Hollander. Dante: A Life in Works. Yale University Press 2001. 224 pp. $25.00 R.W.B. Lewis. Dante. Viking 2001. 224 pp. $19.95 Tim Parks. Hell Back. Reflections on Writers Writing from Dante to Rushdie. Arcade Publishing 2001. 341 pp. $25-95 The Princeton Dante Project. www.princeton.edu/dante Brenda Deen Schildgen. Dante the Orient. University of Illinois Press 2002. 173 pp. $34.95 If the shade of Dante Alighieri still lingers in purgatory, purifying his irascible soul of a lifetime of anathemas, that refining fire, like other speaking flames in the Commedia, may writhe as stammers out the latest versions of certain of his American translators. Only thus, perhaps, could the notorious arrogance of the greatest of Western literature be adequately humbled made fit for beatitude: To hear his incomparable lines transmogrified into doggerel should provide the ultimate corrective to unseemly pride. Of course, translation from any language is riddled with pitfalls; but Dante seems especially vulnerable to the ambitions of the inept. Almost six hundred years ago, his compatriot, the great Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni, warned against incompetent translation, his words hold true today: These are the vices of a translator: to understand badly what is to be translated, or to badly; to translate in such a fashion that the beauty precision of the original author is rendered clumsy, confused, ugly. The man whose ignorance of learning literature is such that he cannot avoid all those vices, is rightfully criticized condemned when he tries to translate. By mistaking one thing for another, he leads men into divers errors, by making him seem ridiculous absurd he threatens the majesty of his original author. [Translated by James Hankins] Currently the translator who most threatens the majesty of Dante is W S. Merwin. This, for example, is how Merwin renders the opening lines of Canto XXVII of Inferno (included in the foreword to his translation of Purgatorio): Now the flame burned straight upward was still, saying no more, now from us went with the consent of the gentle when there arrived another from behind that made us our eyes to the top of toward a confused noise that came out of it. This is about as infelicitous as a translation could possibly be. Notice the ugly repetitions of which end four of the lines and, even uglier, the off-rhyme with poet (po-it?). Notice too the grotesque gaucherie of the phrasing: and now from us it or turn our eyes to the top of it. …
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