Dante Refreshed.(Review)

The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Doubleday, 614 pp., $35)

When two lesser angels fail to recognize Milton's Satan, he replies scornfully, "Not to know me argues yourselves unknown." Culturally, Dante could say the same thing.

There is a kind of succession among the major translations of Dante. John D. Sinclair's prose version of The Divine Comedy (1939-1948) has been the one most in general use. It is perfectly serviceable, but a bit musty with Victorianisms such as "thee" and "thou," and Sinclair's explanatory notes lack the detail you need once you become serious about the poem. Charles Singleton's translation (1970), also in prose, built on and improved upon Sinclair's in some details. He also contributed a prodigious quantity of notes, many useful but some bordering on the fanciful. The Singleton notes are so extensive that each book of the Comedy requires a second bulky volume to accommodate them.

Now Robert Hollander, an immensely popular professor at Princeton who is perhaps our preeminent Dante scholar, and Jean Hollander, a poet and Robert's wife, have given us what will undoubtedly be the translation used for the foreseeable future. We now have their Inferno. The Purgatorio and Paradiso are due in 2002. The notes following each canto, besides being up-to-date in scholarly terms, and full of the insight produced by decades of teaching, reflection, and scholarship, are of genuinely useful length and pertinence. The decisions they made about translation seem to me completely successful.

The Hollanders chose verse rather than prose, using three-line stanzas that resemble the Italian verse on the left-hand page. But they wisely did not try to write terza rima in English, a language that has too few rhymes for that complicated and replicating rhyme scheme. Dante used it to impart a strong forward pull to his verse, and perhaps to suggest a comprehensive if intricate divine order. But the narrative itself has plenty of forward momentum, and the Hollanders have produced a beautifully lucid stanza, highly readable, in which the lines are nudged into poetry by economy of phrasing and a latent iambic rhythm.

To illustrate, let us compare two versions of the famous passage in which Francesca da Rimini describes for the pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil the circumstance in which she and her lover Paolo committed adultery (Canto V). First the Sinclair prose translation:

And she answered me: "There is no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery, and this thy teacher knows; but if thou hast so great desire to know our love's first root, I shall tell as one may that weeps in telling. We read one day for pastime of Lancelot, how love constrained him. We were alone and had no misgiving. Many times that reading drew our eyes together and changed the colour in our faces, but one point alone it was that mastered us; when we read that the longed- for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who never shall be parted from me, all trembling, kissed my mouth. A Galeotto [pander] was the book and he that wrote it; that day we read in it no farther."