medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dante, for some reason, might be of interest to some here.
i have no idea why that might be the case.
i tried to read him once and found him to have no sense of humor at all
--about a hundred pages in, without a single laugh, i just Gave it Up.
perhaps it was the translation.
might make a good movie, though, with the right director and Special Effects
man.
and if Tony Hopkins were cast as Dante and Kate Blanchette as Beatrice.
c
------ Original Message ------
Received: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:49:18 AM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TMR 11.12.12 Durling, The Divine Comedy (Benfell)
Durling, Robert M., ed. and trans. Introduction by Durling, notes by
Durling and Ronald M. Martinez. <i>The Divine Comedy of Dante
Alighieri: Paradiso</i>. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 873. $39.95. ISBN: 0195087429, ISBN-13:
9780195087420.
Reviewed by V. Stanley Benfell
Brigham Young University
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It is obvious that Dante has for centuries been one of the great
canonical poets of western, indeed of world, literature. But even
with attacks on the traditional canon, over the last few decades
Dante's stature has, if anything, increased while the critical
attention devoted to him and his work has accelerated. One sign of
his prominence is the proliferation of English translations of Dante,
and of the <i>Comedy</i> in particular, over the last several years.
Verse translations predominate; those by Mandelbaum, Musa, and the
Hollanders are among the best known of complete translations. Some
practicing poets have produced translations of individual canticles--
one thinks of Merwin's <i>Purgatorio</i> and Pinsky's <i>Inferno</i>.
But this list only scratches the surface. Indeed, when I told a
fellow medievalist that I was reviewing a new translation and
commentary of the <i>Paradiso</i>, his response was, "oh, just what we
need--another translation of Dante." But in fact, the final volume of
this complete translation and commentary by Durling and Martinez is
much anticipated and, in the view of this student of Dante, needed, as
it will complete what is sure to become a standard English edition of
the <i>Comedy</i>.
Durling and Martinez have been long at work on their three-volume
translation and commentary, and Dante scholars in the English-speaking
world know the first two volumes well. (The first volume, the
<i>Inferno</i>, which was published in 1996, was reviewed very
favorably in <i>The Medieval Review</i> in 1998. (See
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/4529/98.12.09
.html?sequence=1.) And for those familiar with the first two, a
sufficient review of this final volume may be simply that it does not
disappoint. But for those less familiar with the earlier volumes of
this translation and commentary, further details are in order.
First, let's turn to the translation. Durling is well known for his
prose renderings of Italian poetry (his volume of Petrarch's poetry,
published as <i>Petrarch's Lyric Poems</i> by Harvard University Press
in 1976, remains standard). The decision to translate a poetic text
into prose involves certain tradeoffs. The greatest advantage is that
it allows the translator the leeway to strive for a greater fidelity
to the sense of the original than is usually possible for a translator
who seeks to create an English poem and is thus constrained by the
demands of meter and, perhaps, rhyme.
Durling's translation is accurate, most often scrupulously so. His
accuracy even extends to one of the features of Dante's language that
is most difficult to render into another language--his neologisms.
There are neologisms in the previous canticles, but in the
<i>Paradiso</i> they proliferate, as Dante stretches his language in
an attempt to convey his transcendent vision. One example may help
illustrate what is involved. At 28.39, the poet describes his vision
of an infinitely small point that is nevertheless infinitely bright
and that is surrounded by nine circles of light, a vision that
symbolically represents the metaphysical reality of the universe. The
poet notes that the first circle--that closest to the center point--
moves the most rapidly and has the "purest flame," because, "credo
però che più di lei s'invera." Durling translates this line as
follows: "I believe because it more fully entruths itself therein,"
which literally translates Dante's invented word, <i>inverarsi</i>.
Mandelbaum certainly gets the sense right but normalizes Dante's
language by rendering the line, "because it shares most deeply that
point's truth." Durling's rendering is unquestionably the most
faithful, but it does also result in some awkwardness.
In most cases, however, Durling avoids the clumsiness that attends a
slavishly literal translation and attains fluidity and readability
without sacrificing accuracy, and this is no small feat for Dante's
poem, especially its final third. There are existing prose
translations--most notably John Sinclair's, originally published over
60 years ago. (Charles Singleton's is quite close to Sinclair's.)
But Durling's seems to me the most accurate without being less
readable. In addition, Sinclair's translation often has an archaic
flavor that Durling typically avoids. One of the advantages of
Durling's translation is that it is accurate enough to allow those
with a smattering of Italian, or with knowledge of another Romance
language, to work with the translation and examine (and start reading)
the original text, which is found on the facing page. The
translation, then, will be particularly useful to advanced students
and scholars from other fields who would like to read Dante in the
original but need some help.
The facing-page Italian text is based on the edition of the poem
edited by Giorgio Petrocchi, long the standard critical edition of the
poem. There are a few textual variants in this new edition, which are
detailed on pages 762-63. I took two cantos at random (11 and 24) and
compared the Durling/Martinez text to Petrocchi's. I found, in
addition to a number of differences in punctuation (in the discussion
of textual variants, Durling notes that changes in punctuation, "where
they do not affect the sense" are not noted), nine differences in
spelling between the two cantos. It's possible that some of these
differences are editorial (many of these readings are found in the
manuscript tradition; others, such as "l'amasssero" at 11.114, are
clearly typographical errors), but they are not listed as variants
with the others. Of course, in a work that exceeds 800 pages, some
mechanical errors inevitably creep in, and I have sent a list of the
errors that I found to Professor Durling so that they may be corrected
in future editions.
Now we turn to the commentary. Whereas Durling seems responsible for
the translation, and he is given sole credit for the Introduction, the
commentary is equally divided between Durling and Martinez, and they
are careful to detail which scholar is responsible for which part of
the commentary (signaled by initials in the Table of Contents). And
while the attentive reader can discern some distinguishing interests
between the two, the result is a unified commentary with a coherent
view of the poem.
As in the previous volumes, the commentary for each canto follows the
text and translation for that canto. It is organized by line numbers
and is quite detailed, much more so than the commentaries attached to
the recent translations mentioned above. In fact, the commentary
usually exceeds the length of the text--a fairly typical practice in
most Italian editions of Dante. To take one canto at random--canto 13
has eight pages of text and translation (four of each), while the
commentary runs to ten pages. In addition, topics that require
lengthier treatment and that prove relevant to more than one canto are
given added space at the end of the commentary in the form of
"additional notes," each of which is also credited to either Durling
or Martinez. These, in fact, form brief articles, and they can stand
on their own as excellent works of scholarship.
The Additional Notes in this volume include: "The Figure of Beatrice,"
"The <i>Paradiso</i> and the <i>Monarchia</i>," "The Primacy of the
Intellect, the Sun, and the Circling Theologians," "Dante and the
Liturgy," "The Religious Orders in the <i>Paradiso</i>," "The
Threshold Cantos in the <i>Comedy</i>," "The Fate of Phaeton in the
<i>Comedy</i>," "Circle--Cross--Eagle--Scales: Images in the
<i>Paradiso</i>," "The Final Image," "The Neoplatonic Background,"
"Dante and Neoplatonism," "Dante's Astrology," "The Heavens and the
Sciences: <i>Convivio</i> 2," and "The <i>Paradiso</i> as Alpha and
Omega of the <i>Comedy</i>." Among these notes, Martinez's on Phaeton
stands out as a masterful overview of the presence of that Ovidian
figure within the poem and how he relates to Dante's pilgrim.
Durling's note on "The Neoplatonic Background" is a model of concision
and clarity. All of the notes are useful and merit careful attention.
For those familiar with the earlier work of Durling and Martinez
(including the first two volumes in this series), the general
interpretation offered in the commentary will come as no surprise. In
<i>Time and the Crystal</i>, their earlier, valuable study on Dante's
<i>rime petrose</i> (University of California Press, 1990; they refer
repeatedly to this work in the commentary), we can already see the
main outlines of their approach to the <i>Comedy</i>. For them,
Dante's primary philosophical allegiance is to Neoplatonism, and they
see Dante the pilgrim as making a Neoplatonic ascent throughout the
<i>Comedy</i>. The <i>Paradiso</i> thus represents the culmination of
Dante's philosophical as well as his religious quest. They further
argue that a key, Neoplatonic influence on Dante and the poem (perhaps
the key influence) is the sixth-century <i>Consolation of
Philosophy</i> by Boethius, and especially the poem "O Qui Perpetua,"
from book 3 metrum 9 of that work. They refer to this poem often,
finding numerous parallels between it and passages in the
<i>Paradiso</i>. They helpfully include the Latin text of the poem as
well as Durling's translation and detailed commentary of it, on pages
686-94 of the edition, following canto 33. (It is immediately
preceded by the text and translation of the Nicene Creed, which is
accompanied by a brief explanatory note.)
The commentary proves to be extremely useful and illuminating, and it
is filled with suggestive and perceptive readings. One of the
highlights of the commentary for me was how frequently their
appreciation of the poem comes through, as they are filled with wonder
at Dante's extraordinary achievement, especially as the poem nears its
completion. In discussing the opening of the poem's final canto, for
example, Durling writes of how the canto's "preliminaries" serve to
"intensify the reader's anticipation of the remarkable climax and
culmination of the poem, which reaches a pitch of intensity unique in
all literature" (668).
Of course, scholars differ in their interpretation of the
<i>Comedy</i>, and I found a few places where I dissent from their
readings. Most significantly, perhaps, I do not find that
Neoplatonism explains as much of the poem as the commentary suggests,
nor do I see references to "O Qui Perpetua" as often as the Durling
and Martinez do. And indeed, it seems that this disagreement extends
to our respective views of late medieval thought. Durling's note on
"Dante and Neoplatonism" concludes that Dante's poem echoes many late
medieval texts where "the outward clothing of Aristotelian terminology
masks the more fundamental allegiance to the Platonic/Neoplatonic
tradition" (749), which strikes me as overstated.
In a position that relates to their emphasis on Dante's Neoplatonism,
the commentators argue that readers must not believe that Dante
intends us to think that the pilgrim made a bodily ascent to the
heavens, even if we treat such an ascent as part of the fiction of the
poem. Durling makes the point emphatically in the Introduction. In
discussing 1.73-75 (where the poet retrospectively wonders if, as he
ascended, he "was solely that part of me which you [God] created
last"), Durling writes: "This statement of the narrator should be
taken as a characterization of the intensity of the pilgrim's
imaginings; it is deeply misleading to suppose that Dante would claim,
even in his fiction, a status superior to saint Paul" (16). Certainly
there is a plausible case to be made here, but at times Durling and
Martinez write as if it were the only viable interpretation. At one
point in his commentary on the poem's final canto, for example,
Durling writes that the Italian critic Chiavacci Leonardi "usefully
reminds us that the pilgrim is seeing the blessed <i>as if</i> they
had bodies (as Beatrice observes in 31.44-45): they are only
appearances to his imagination" (672; emphasis Durling's). But the
second point does not necessarily follow from the first. The pilgrim
could be seeing the blessed as if they had bodies simply because they
do not have bodies prior to the resurrection and their appearance has
been accommodated to the pilgrim's mortal sight. Indeed, I wondered
if Durling's insistence on the imaginative status of the poem does not
occasionally influence his translation. He renders "fu viso a me
cantare essa sustanza" (7. 4-5), for example, as "this substance
seemed to me to sing," which would be more accurately translated as
"was seen by me to sing."
But such disagreements are, when seen from the perspective of the
achievement that this edition of Dante represents, minor quibbles.
Durling and Martinez have through their three volumes given to English
readers a lucid translation and a compelling commentary of one of the
greatest poems in world literature. These are volumes I will return
to many times, and it is difficult to believe that another English
edition of the poem will supersede the usefulness and authority of
this one any time soon. Dante scholars and medievalists in general
owe a profound debt to Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez for this
splendid accomplishment.
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