The Trials of Translating Dante | Metaglossia: The Translation World | Scoop.it
From www.thecatholicthing.org - May 17, 12:02 AM
Jason M. Baxter: Dante loves the art of word play: rhetorical tropes and schemes from classical rhetoric that we find repellent, he adores.

"The Trials of Translating Dante
By Jason M. Baxter
SATURDAY, MAY 17, 2025


Flannery O’Connor once said this about writing novels: “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.” I don’t know of a better description of what it’s felt like as I translated Dante’s Purgatorio, which was just released by Angelico Press.


Every morning, during the final six-month stage of this project, I followed the same routine: wake up, get coffee, and build up some psychic reserves of energy for the massively depleting experience. Then I went upstairs, spread out my Italian text and commentaries, and attempt – over and over again – to render in English Dante’s dense web of music and meaning. And, for this reason, for six months (maybe longer: ask my wife), I’ve been a zombie, looking with eyes that don’t see, listening with ears that don’t hear.


Why is translating Dante so psychically depleting? Everyone knows that his poem is an inspiring journey from a “dark wood” that soars up to the Beatific Vision and God Himself. But his language is always working in multiple dimensions. On the most basic and obvious level, Dante is a musician, who wrote in hendecallyables (eleven-syllable long lines) captured well, by iambic verse that’s not too stuffy. Dante also uses rhymes, of course, which Dorothy Sayers went all out to capture. In addition to the rhymes, however, Dante used all kind of dense word play, which he can do, in part, because he’s working with an inflected language: he can leave the root stable – like an Aristotelian substance – while varying the accidents of his inflections.


But then, he also loves to use, on occasion, a maddeningly difficult syntax, a gnarled, thorny wood of grammar often made even more complicated because of the learned circumlocutions he employs. In all fairness, he warned us about such maddeningly difficult syntax and entangled cosmological grammar:


Reader, I know you see that I am raising
my subject, and thus you will not marvel”
if now I use more art (più arte) to reinforce my poem.
(Purg. 9:70 72)


And what does this look like? Dante loves word play and word art. Those rhetorical tropes and schemes from classical rhetoric that we find repellent, he adores. For instance, at one point, when Dante is being interrogated by Beatrice, “when, by her eyes, my eyes were struck” (33:18), the figure Dante quite deliberately uses is anadiplosis (a rhetorical “doubling back”). A modern translation, to make this line feel more natural for us, kills the rhetorical scheme by translating it: “when her piercing eyes met mine.”



Elsewhere, Dante uses chiasmus, an X-like pattern that sets one word on one side of the scale and then balances it out by putting a variant of it on the other side. For instance, at one point, Virgil has intuited that the pilgrim had within him more questions, and then generously proceeds to encourage him to speak forth those hidden doubts. Dante puts it this way: he “by speaking made me bold to speak.” (Purg. 18:7–9). That chiasmus becomes this in one recent translation: “that true father. . ./ spoke and gave me courage to speak out.”


But what is extraordinary is that Dante has the inverse tendency as well. After passing through the “refining fire” that cleanses the distorted love of the lustful, for instance, Dante, Virgil, and Statius have to pause to wait out the night, resting on the steps of a steep stairwell that goes right up the mountain:


And just like goats in tranquil rumination,
who had been rowdy, capricious among
the hills before they’d found repast,


but now in shade are quiet while the sun is hot,
now guarded by the shepherd, who leans upon
his staff and stands to watch their rest;


or like the watchman who sleeps outdoors
and spends the night beside a somnolent herd
and watches lest a beast should scatter them;


just so were we, all three together. And I
was like the goat: and they, the shepherds.
Flanked by walls of lofty rock on either side.


There, little of the outside world could be seen,
except a tiny patch where I could see the stars,
much brighter and larger than is their usual habit.


While ruminating on them and marveling at them,
I was overcome by sleep, the sleep that often
knows the news before it even happens. (27:76–95)


This passage is extraordinary. Not only does it introduce a beautiful, prophetic dream, but uses concrete, bodily metaphor to describe what is, for us, merely an intellectual act. Dante “ruminates” (ruminando) on the beauty of the stars, feeds on them, tastes them, and draws their nourishment into his being by means of “marveling” at them, just as sheep and goats crop, chew, swallow, and digest grass. In other words, Dante here feeds on “the fire of love,” tastes it, chews it, ruminates on it, to absorb the nutritive power of beauty into his being.


 


This use of concrete, embodied metaphors for intellectual acts is something I have labored to bring out in this translation. Too often, even well-loved, best-selling translations of the Comedy, made by eminent scholars, have inadvertently killed these metaphors and thereby turned Dante’s poetry into something disembodied: too much in the head and too little rooted in the nerves and heartbeat.


One admired translation renders the passage I cited above by replacing the unusual and arresting metaphor of “ruminating” by means of “marveling” with this: “Amidst such sights and thoughts / I was seized by sleep.” At another point, the pilgrim tells his master that the answers he has received are so good that they create within him more questions: “Your words. . .have helped me to dis-cover love, / but this has made me pregnant with more doubts!” (Purg. 18.40-42). An eminent translator has rendered that line: “But that has left me even more perplexed.”


What was in the body – the “womb” of Dante’s mind was “pregnant” with doubts – turns into an intellectual phenomenon, all in the head (“perplexed”). On another occasion, when Dante is speaking with Marco Lombardo, who is disgusted by the world’s greed, the old cavalier experiences a visceral, bodily reaction upon merely hearing Dante’s question:


Deep sighs emerged, squeezed out by sorrow,
into an “Ohh!” then said: “Brother, the world
is blind. It’s clear you’ve come from it.”
(Purg. 16:64–66)


This somatic utterance is rendered by one modern translator: “He heaved a heavy sigh, with grief wrung to a groan.” Dante’s onomatopoeic, bodily grunt of pained exclamation turns into an objective description.


In another place, Dante says that what we could call our “curiosity” is sometimes not content until in confronts the truth eye to eye:


This put into my will a burning eagerness
to contemplate the one who spoke to me,
a will that cannot rest until it’s face-to-face.
(Purg. 17:49–51)


A respected translator puts it this way: “a will that cannot rest short of its goal.”


When Dante answers Guido del Duca obliquely, about where he’s from, the puzzled soul replies:


“If I have sunk my teeth (accarno) into your meaning
with my intellect,” the one I heard at first
replied to me, “you’re talking of the Arno.”
(Purg. 14:22–24)


The shocking word – accarno – was simply too perfect in Italian: it makes the whole argument in two words, by means of rhyming with the feral, brutal, savage “Arno.” An admired translator renders it this way: “If my wit has truly grasped your meaning.”


And finally, Dante says that, when they arrived within the unfamiliar landscape of purgatory, they “looked about confused, like someone tasting something new” (2:53-54), which a professional translator has put this way: “as though encountering new things.”


I could list at least two dozen more: Dante doesn’t “get answers,” he harvests truth or plucks good fruit from words. Meanwhile, because a particularly beautiful song makes him “g[i]ve birth” inside his heart to a mixture of joy and sorrow (23:12: as opposed to “[bring] … delight”); his conscience “bites” and he struggles to “disentangle” himself from the net of error.


As one Italian scholar matter-of-factly puts it: “Dante’s usual practice is to use a concrete verb in order to express moral or psychological conditions.” The point here is not to put down other translators, who are as scholars, in many ways, my betters (I didn’t cite the examples above: don’t look them up!); rather, my point is that I want to help my readers feel how rooted Dante’s poetry is in the humble experience of the body.


In sum, Dante wants a lofty, classical syntax (see 22:127–29), but he also wants a poetry that is embedded in the small, the lowly, the humble. For this reason, his poetry is like some Bach fugue, in which the chords in the right hand are ascending while those in the left hand are descending. Or maybe even better, what you would get if you mixed the Roman epic poet Statius and the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi.


In any case, this is the glory of Dante. It’s also why translators find it so hard, and also why I lost so much hair and so many teeth.


Jason M. Baxter
Jason M. Baxter is a college professor..."
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2025/05/17/the-trials-of-translating-dante/


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