Dante Still Sings… via John Ciardi

  I got ’round to Dante in fine translation

  by John Ciardi, translator senza peer.

Ciardi had a songsmith’s ear and keen appreciation

  for the lilting Italian that served Alighieri

  so well in narrating his trek of salvation —

a vernacular narration to more widely carry

  Dante’s Trinitarian faith, plus his fey

  socio-political commentary.

Many translations capture his content, and convey

  his visionary Catholic genius, unfurled

  so confidently; and some find the way

to paint the pictures that leave your toenails curled

  in Hell, then Purgatorio and Paradi-

  so, guided by Virgil through the otherworld.

                                                                 

But most others lack Dante’s harmony:

  thirty-three cantos, forty-some tercets each,

  all rhymed ABA BCB CDC DED —

a music unattainable in English speech

  with its polylingual roots and rhyme-poverty.

  Ciardi gives words and music, though the reach

is but ABA CDC EFE GHG —

  unweaving the master’s onrushing braid.

  Still, his translation fairly sings to me.

(You must also check out Ciaran Carson’s A-grade

  Inferno of Dante, in true terza rima,

  plus Pinsky’s prizewinner — neither of which I’d trade

for a dozen prose versions with their scheme o’

  tuneless literalism, like flightless birds,

  uplifting as George W. Bush’s FEMA —

                                                                                                                                 .

but those two stray further from Dante’s words.)

  Dancing through the Boot in public squares and songs,

  the Commedia was for everyone, not just nerds —

Dante attacks human failure hammer-and-tongs,

  pounding pagan, papist, Paduan, Pisan,

  for subversion, treason, and ninety other wrongs.

He tours Hell’s tiers at the Easter season,

  listing sins and sinners by offense or by name;

  with unredeemed Virgil (symbol of Human Reason)

helping to ascribe the right degrees of blame,

  Dante settles scores, giving fiends a shove

  toward fearsome beasts, or pit, or eternal flame.

From Hell he climbs to Limbo, then to spheres above,

  from damnation to contingency to the last incline

  where the pious soul is saved by faith and love.

                                                                                                                  .

In due course, reading line and inter-line,

  we know of Dante’s losses, and the yang and yin

  of his love for Beatrice at the age of nine:

that’s when the sacred vision-songs begin,

  the haunting Christian triptych melodies

  that crack the heart and leave it cleansed of sin.

A master of so many varied harmonies,

  Dante sings of faith while revering science,

  juxtaposing marvelous antipodes

of a near-Shakespearean globe in keen alliance:

  the brain and heart, the soul and sex — undeterred

  opposites embraced in holy defiance.

T.S. Eliot believed, though it may sound absurd,

  that the literary world divides between

  Dante and Shakespeare — “and there is no third.”

                                                                                                           .

Dante-era politics pitted merchant Ghibelline

  factions against the papist Guelphs in a fight

  for regions Roman, Venetian, Florentine.

The gifted Dante led a midlife bright

  with promise as a Guelph in Guelph-led Florence.

  But the triumphant Guelphs splintered Black versus White;

the blood of both ran in competing torrents;

  and while Dante, a White, was dispatched to the Pope

  the rival Blacks indicted him on false warrants.

To avoid the pyre he wanders homeless; his scope

  shifts from politics, to how great souls intersect

  in damnation, repentance and, sometimes, hope.

Poet-translator Ciardi feels high respect

  for the humble poet-narrator, and even more

  for the cathedral-poem and bold poet-architect.

                                                                                                                       .

Take Book 2, Canto 8, Line 34.

  Ciardi’s preface shows me and my son what weds

  translated content with music and with amor.

“Well did I discern the blondness of their heads

  but in their faces my eye was dazed

  like an overstimulated sense confounding itself.”

Ugh! My little boy gives a shrug, his eyes glazed.

  But at Ciardi’s re-re-vision, the nine-year-old

  perks up, his eyes alight, animated and amazed:

“I could see clearly that their hair was gold,

  but my eyes drew back bedazzled from their faces,

  defeated by more light than they could hold.”

Yes! We almost dance as Ciardi first replaces

  Dante’s words with gray verbatim, then adds streaks

  as brilliant as the original in some cases.

                                                                                                                        .

Dear Dantista friends: this verse homage took weeks,

  though at 99 lines it’s but two percent the size

  of just one of Alighieri’s three astounding peaks

that reach into the earth, and touch the skies,

  and, as Eliot asserted, rival the Bard’s

  gift to both transcend and universalize.

Both familiar and divine — think Venus, Mars —

  familiar and distant as the nighttime sky

  with its reassuring albeit unknown stars.