Hell and Back Read online

  No tenderness for my son, nor piety

  To my old father, nor the wedded love

  That should have comforted Penelope

  Could conquer in me the resdess itch to rove

  And rummage through the world exploring it,

  All human worth and wickedness to prove.

  So on the deep and open sea I set

  Forth, with a single ship and that small band

  Of comrades that had never left me yet.

  How the timbers strain here. One suspects the hero’s oarsmen of being selected from among the worthy authors of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Rove and rummage as the translator might through the resources of Victorian verse, all too often the rhyme clangs like a buoy in fog, rather than quietly chiming the passage from one moment to the next.

  No stranger himself to rhymed narrative, Longfellow saw the danger and plumped for blank verse. Yet though this enables him to shadow the original more closely, he too often seems to offer little more than a review of nineteenth-century poetic diction. Here he is among the miseries of Canto 5 :

  And as the cranes go chanting forth their lays,

  Making in air a long line of themselves,

  So saw I coming, uttering lamentations,

  Shadows borne onward by the aforesaid stress.

  Whereupon said I: ‘Master, who are those

  People, whom the black air so castigates?’

  Over the thirty-four cantos and nearly five thousand lines of the Inferno>, the ‘aforesaid stress’ can only mount up.

  More recently, Robert Pinsky, remarking on how much more easily Italian can be rhymed than English and at the same time appreciating the importance of the terzct, vima in the poem, decided to go for a ‘terza half rima', as it were; this together with a versification so full of enjambment that the division into three-line stanzas often appears quite arbitrarily imposed on the sense. It seems appropriate to quote Pinsky as he deals with the subject of mangling. Here we are in Canto 28 presenting Mohammed at a time when there was no need to fear an ayatollah’s response.

  No barrel staved-in

  And missing its end-piece ever gaped as wide

  As the man I saw split open from his chin

  Down to the farting-place, and from the splayed

  Trunk the spilled entrails dangled between his thighs.

  I saw his organs, and the sack that makes the bread

  We swallow turn to shit.

  Despite Pinsky’s facility - and often the translation is fun - one is everywhere aware of the effort required to achieve even these half-rhymes, while in the process the focus of the verse is often obliged to fall on the most unlikely of words. ‘Bread’, for example, is not in the original and readers may be forgiven for having the absurd impression, if only for a moment, that the bread is made by ‘the sack’, the intestine. Then of course everything becomes clear as the word ‘shit’ pulls us up brutally mid line. But this is something Dante never does, for of course such effects break up the all-important flow.

  In 1993, a book mistitled Dantes Inferno presented the translations of twenty contemporary poets, each tackling two or three cantos. James Merrill’s introduction gives us a clue to the uneasiness one feels with so many contemporary translations, and not just of Dante. ‘The problem,’ he announces, ‘with most translators is their limited command of the language - their own I mean; they can always get help with the other. Hence the bright idea of asking some of our finest poets to weave this garland.’

  Leaving aside the self-congratulation and the inappropriateness, surely, of referring to any edition of the Inferno as a ‘garland’, the notion that one can get somebody else to tell you what the original means and how it feels, so that you can then rewrite it, is suspect to say the least. Why read poetry at all if someone else can tell you what it’s like? There is no substitute for an intimate experience of the original and long immersion in the culture that surrounds it. Invariably, the star poets work hard at evocation and drama in their various individual styles, almost always to the detriment of the overall rapidity and homogeneity of the narrative. Here is Mark Strand leaving us in limbo:

  There was no howling that I could hear,

  nothing but sighs that rose

  to shake the everlasting air

  sighs of painless woe

  from milling crowds of men and women

  and children who would never know

  relief.

  The subordinate clause, ‘who would never know relief, has been added to the original and creates a most dramatic and mannered stop right at the beginning of the next terzina. Meantime, the crucial information that the children are very young - infanti (they are the unbaptised) is omitted and instead we have a banal standard formula, ‘men and women and children’, as if merely to say, everybody. The danger of ‘poetic’ translations is that they risk losing both an accurate account of the scene and a rapid movement through it. When things go wrong we are up to our ears in poetic effect and misery.

  Trosa rimata’, Boccaccio called it, ‘rhymed prose’. One of the poem’s first and greatest admirers, the author of the Decameron praised Dante’s decision to write in the vernacular rather than in Latin, and likewise to avoid the temptation of lavish poetic effect. Hell is impressive enough without. It’s not surprising, then, to find Pinsky making the observation that some of the most effective translations of the Divina Commedia have been in prose. Certainly the 1939 prose translation by the scholar John Sinclair is still a very safe bet if you want to sit down, read the Inferno right through and then get up again. But doesn’t this contradict what I said earlier about the effect of the terza rima? ‘There are verses, in the genre called prose,’ said Mallarmé, ‘sometimes wonderful verses and in every rhythm.’ Here is Sinclair introducing us to the second circle:

  I came to a place where all light was mute and where was bellowing as of a sea in tempest that is beaten by conflicting winds. The hellish storm, never resting, seizes and drives the spirits before it; smiting and whirling them about, it torments them. When they come before its fury there are shrieks, weeping and lamentation, and they blaspheme the power of God, and I learned that to such torment are condemned the carnal sinners who subject reason to desire.

  A little later one of those sinners speaks: it is the charming adulteress, Francesca.

  O living creature gracious and friendly, who goest through the murky air visiting us who stained the world with blood, if the King of the universe were our friend we would pray to Him for thy peace, since thou hast pity of our evil plight. Of that which thou art pleased to hear and speak we will hear and speak with you while the wind is quiet, as here it is.

  These sentences have an austere rhythm of their own, while the archaic diction and phrasing seems more acceptable without the alarm bell of forced rhyme. Sinclair’s version is rapid, to the point, almost always close to the original, and yet … if only visually, there is something lacking. We miss the sense of constant even division, of opening and of closure, the reassurance of manifest artifice.

  The new translation by Robert and Jean Hollander is, as an introductory note tells us, a reworking in free verse of Sinclair’s prose, reinforcing its rhythms, removing archaisms and awkwardness, often altering the interpretation where Sinclair is not convincing. Here are their versions of the passages quoted above.

  I reached a place mute of all light,

  Which bellows as the sea in tempest

  Tossed by conflicting winds.

  The hellish squall, which never rests,

  Sweeps the spirits in its headlong rush,

  Tormenting, whirls and strikes them.

  Caught in that path of violence,

  They shriek, weep, and lament.

  Then how they curse the power of God.

  And again:

  Oh living creature, gracious and kind,

  That comes through sombre air to visit us

  Who stained the world with blood,

  If the King of the universe we
re our friend

  We would pray that He might give you peace,

  Since you show pity for our grievous plight.

  With any translation of the Inferno, one can quibble ad infinitum, if only because the original just will not stay still; it won’t be pinned down to any formula. That said, the Hollanders’ translation is definitely a welcome addition, and to my uncertain ear, coming to all these versions fresh from a rereading of the original, it certainly seemed the most accessible and the closest. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the commentary Robert Hollander offers to accompany the text is not so well pitched.

  Whenever Indiana Jones enters an ancient temple or burial ground, we know what is about happen. However much our hero respects and venerates an antique past, this sacred place, frozen in time, stacked with precious horrors and holy artefacts, is, nevertheless, going to be utterly destroyed. As the edifice comes crashing down, Jones, in the nick of time, will rush out of the crumbling portals into the fresh air of a world where nothing is sacred, except perhaps lucre and serial romance.

  Although it would be facetious, even blasphemous, to suggest that the same thing happens in the Inferno, still it has to be said that over the centuries the effect of Dante’s passage through Hell has been no less devastating. If the poet survives his journey unscathed, the same cannot be said of the infernal abode. Its ecology is too fragile for even this minimal tourism. While the souls of the dead float weightlessly over this most artificial environment, every step taken by the gravity-bound poet sets off a little landslide. And if the first scholarly commentaries on the Divina Commedia began to appear almost as soon as it was in circulation, that is partly because there was an immediate apprehension that the place of punishment was in urgent need of shoring up. Robert Hollander takes his turn at this ghoulish maintenance duty with remarkable vigour.

  Dante is sent through Hell in order to gain ‘greater knowledge, as Virgil says. Thus much of the poem is made up of question and answer. As each new horror unfolds, we must ‘understand’ it. So we learn that on crossing the Acheron each soul is assessed by the monster Minos who indicates which circle he or she must go to by arranging his tail in the appropriate number of coils. How Minos distinguishes, in the case, for example, of the eighth circle, between the ten very different ditches that await the dismayed sinner on arrival, we don’t know. Does he uncoil and re-coil? It is a peculiarity of explanations that they tend to invite further questions.

  Meanwhile, other information is coming in thick and fast. We learn that milder sins are punished in the upper circles and more heinous crimes below, in the city of Dis whose gates in the fifth circle mark the descent into ‘nether hell’. We learn that sins of incontinence are less wicked than sins of will; that the sins of sodomy, blasphemy and usury are punished together because they all involve violence against God or His natural order. Who would have thought? We learn that the dead are granted knowledge of future events on earth, but not of the present situation. Such a state of affairs involves the drawing of some difficult lines, does it not? Presumably as time progresses and the future becomes the present the dead must now forget what shortly before they knew. Is this really an imaginable world?

  But all these are minor points. Most importantly, and exhaustively, we learn that each and every sinner is punished by being subjected to a sort of intensification or symbolic inversion of his dominant crime. Being eternally boiled in pitch, for example, John Sinclair’s notes explain, is an appropriate punishment for those who have accepted bribes in public office, because pitch is sticky, prevents clarity of vision and rarely allows the sinner to surface. Diviners, on the other hand, who usurped God’s power by looking into the future, are properly served by having their heads reversed on their shoulders so that they are constantly looking backwards. On three or four occasions the poet wonders at this appropriateness:

  O Supreme Wisdom, what great art you show

  in heaven, on earth, and in the evil world,

  and what true justice does your power dispense!

  How reassuring, or at least distracting, such symmetry is. Then, in so far as each crime can be presented as a breaking of bonds, within family or society, or more seriously between creature and creator, our exploration of hell’s bureaucracy leads quite naturally to a discussion of the state of Italy, and in particular Florence, where all these crimes, the poet assures us, are daily being committed. Indeed Dante’s Florence and Dante’s Inferno often seem contiguous in the poem, as if Hell were nothing more than one more busy Tuscan metropolis.

  So it is that among the underworld’s gay community, Dante can profit from a long discussion on Florentine politics, past and future. Since such matters, together with all the other Italian gossip, are a key subject of the poem, the inclusion of informative notes at the end of each canto is useful and welcome. In this regard Hollander is impeccable. The text is presented generously spaced - Italian on the left, English on the right - and with ample commentary easily and unobtrusively available at the end of each canto. As neatly organised as Hell itself.

  Still, we should not lose sight of the fact that the attention to current affairs, like the enchantment of the verse and the intriguing topography of infernal justice, are part of a series of strategies for preventing us from being overwhelmed by the suffering of the damned. With similarly anaesthetic intent, Dante likes to toss in the odd conundrum from time to time to tease the lively intellect. Sinclair, for example, becomes concerned because he can’t quite see the appropriateness of the punishments of the tenth ditch of the eighth circle. Hollander shares with us his perplexity that a character in the fifth ditch seems to have come straight to Hell, bypassing Minos’s sorting procedure. How can this be? Screams of torture fade away behind the clamour of such intriguing questions.

  In Canto 29, when Dante mischievously tells us that the inner part of the eighth circle is twenty-two miles in circumference, Hollander manfully resists the temptation to engage in the agitated algebra that has produced so many scale maps of the poet’s Hell. But a few cantos on, an obscure reference to the physical stature of Satan has our commentator rising beautifully to the bait. Dante writes: “I in size am closer to a giant than giants are when measured to his arms.’ Hollander informs:

  That is “I am, proportionally, closer in size to a giant than a giant is to Lucifer’. For the size of the giants, ca. Seventy feet, see the note to Inferno XXX 58-66. Let us, merely for the purposes of calculation, agree that Dante was six feet tall. The equation is simple: 6/70=70/x; x = 817. Thus Lucifer is at the very minimum 817 feet tall. Since both the giants and Satan are only halfway out of the ice that leaves him towering from the waist up, over the ice by at least 409 feet.

  Fascinating, isn’t it, how mathematics can contribute to matters metaphysical! But if we don’t want to concentrate on mutilations and misery, we needn’t limit ourselves to elaborating internal textual references. Dante knows he has set in motion a system here that will amuse ad infinitum. This morning, for example, my newspaper offers the announcement:

  ASTRO CARTOMANTE Alessandra riceve pomeriggi serate distintissimi. (Fortune teller - tarot and astrology - receives real gents only afternoons and evenings.)

  I ask myself: assuming Alessandra doesn’t repent, where is she going to lodge in hell? If she is indeed a diviner, the fourth ditch of the eighth circle and an eternally twisted neck await her. But in the argot of Italy’s classified ads, cistrocartomante is code for prostitute. This would put her in the sins of the flesh, perhaps, somewhere in the milder upper rooms of Hell.

  On the other hand, there is hypocrisy here, is there not? Alessandra is a whore passing herself off as a fortune teller. Hypocrisy would plunge her way back to the eighth circle, but the sixth ditch this time, where she will drag her heels eternally under the weight of a leaded mask with gilded surface. Dante, as I recall, includes but one prostitute in the Inferno inserting her, rather surprisingly, into the ditch where the flatterers wallow in shit. Why? Because when a lover would ask he
r, ‘Have I found favour with you?’, the lady would reply: ‘Beyond all measure.’ Our poet is nothing if not witty.

  ‘Beyond all measure.’ It is measure and measurement that make Hell ‘not a bad place once you get used to it’. The many pleasing symmetries, between crime and punishment, between landscape and spiritual reality, between life and afterlife, give us a sense that all, even in Hell, is well.

  Well, it isn’t. Suddenly, and dosing out the encounters with great cunning, Dante brings us up against an individual. A figure detaches itself from the crowd and tells a story of intense personal experience. It is Francesca recalling her passion for Paolo, or it is the noble Farinata rising erect from a scorching tomb. Pier delle Vigne gives an account of his tragically blighted career and suicide. His damnation seems incidental. Ulysses wonderfully recreates the folly of his last and most glorious exploit. Who cares what circle he is in?

  At these and other moments, as pity, sympathy or even admiration swell in the poet’s breast, we know that for all the satisfactions of moral pigeon-holing, nothing has been explained. The individual, for better or worse, treacherous, Promethean or merely unreasonable, is so much more than a single sin. There is a fierce tension here. Hell’s ramparts tremble. Sensibly, Virgil hurries us on.

  Not so Hollander. Ominously, in his introduction, he has already told us that: ‘Dante, not without risk, decided to entrust to us, his readers, the responsibility for seizing upon the details in the narratives told by the sinners, no matter how appealing their words might be, in order to condemn them on the evidence that issues from their own mouths.’

  But if, after reading this, you are concerned you might get it wrong, not to worry. Hollander, unlike Dante, won’t let you. He uses his commentary not just to give us valuable information but to make sure that we do indeed add our weighty condemnation to God’s. Again and again he tells us what the poem means and how we should feel about it. In his view of things this inevitably means feeling rather less than we felt when we read the poem. Ulysses, for example, Hollander tells us, despite being admired for his Promethean spirit by so many poets and thinkers (Tennyson, Benedetto Croce and Primo Levi are briefly listed) is “in common parlance, a con artist, and a good one too. He has surely fooled a lot of people.’ But not our commentator. Of Francesca, he warns us that, however poignant her words, she is in fact entirely calculating; she just wants to win our pity while in fact “it is pity itself that is here at fault’.