Dear Laurie, dear all,
I suppose that Danilo Romei's helpful coiffure of the text has already
clarified most of the eventually dubious points. Yet I have to confess that
I am still not sure of my understanding of the last tercet. Maybe it will
prompt Danilo or others to add further clarifying comments if I venture a
tentative translation (with the usual apologies for my English to our more
truely anglophone members):
>'Hor che ‘l ciel et la terra e ‘l vento tace,'
>incomincio colei che l’aria molce
>con angelici accenti, e in lingua dolce
>rischiara secchia con la tosca face.
1: "Now that the sky and the earth and the wind become silent",
2: began she who soothes the air
3: with angelic accents, and [who] in sweet tongue/language
4: illuminates Secchia with the Tuscan torch.
>Sentiam [read: senti(v)an(o)] gli spirti altrui beata pace;
>tutto l’amar si trammutava in dolce.
>E giva al ciel (che piu l’alma soffolce)
>mio cor, che via da lei morendo giace.
5: The spirits of others felt blissful peace,
6: all the loving [or rather: the bitter] transmuted into sweet,
7-8: and my heart, which far from her lies dying, went to heaven which
sustains the soul better.
>
>Che poi se i moti de['] suoi tersi avori,
>de’ vaghi lumi e del leggiadro viso,
>l’occhio vedea ch’or vana vista intrica;
9-11: So if the eye, which is now entangled by vane views [literally:
'which now vane view entangles'], did behold the movements of her pure
ivories [i.e. teeth] and of the lovely eyes and of the graceful face;
>che poi s’un dì mi spiega [i] bei tesori,
>o del nome Tiran degn’et nemica,
>o qua giu cieli aperti, o paradiso.
12: So if one day she unfolds [in the sense: will unfold] to me the [i.e.
her] beautiful treasures,
13: Oh she who is worth of the name[s] tyrant and foe,
14: Oh heavens unlocked here below, oh paradise!
The main difficulty for me consists in what I take to be a double
hypothetical opening "che poi se... vedea...; che poi se... spiega...",
which remains an anakoluth without conclusion and which because of its
switch from the past to the present tense is not clearly resolved by the
final verse, even if we somehow understand this final verse in the sense
"Oh how will then be/were then the heavens unlocked here below, oh what a
paradise will then be/was then here below!"
I have fiddled around with other possibilities like reading "spiega" v.12
as an imperative (and resolving "s'un" as "si' un" instead of "se un"), and
also have tried to make sense of Danilo's reading of the "o" v.13 as a
conjunction (if this is what his distinctive spelling of "o" v.13 and "oh"
v.14 means to imply), but so far to no avail. So what did I get essentially
wrong?
Otfried
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Otfried Lieberknecht, Schoeneberger Str. 11, D-12163 Berlin
Tel.: ++49 30 8516675 (fax on request), E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Homepage for Dante Studies:
http://members.aol.com/lieberk/welcome.html
ORB Dante Alighieri - A Guide to Online Resources:
http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/culture/lit/Italian/Danindex.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|