Cloud Nine.(Paradiso)(Book review)

If you haven't yet read the Divine Comedy--you know who you are--now is the time, because Robert and Jean Hollander have just completed a beautiful translation of the astonishing fourteenth-century poem. The Hollanders' Inferno was published in 2000, their Purgatorio in 2003. Now their Paradiso (Doubleday; $40) is out. It is more idiomatic than any other English version I know. At the same time, it is lofty, the more so for being plain. Jean Hollander, a poet, was in charge of the verse; Robert Hollander, her husband, oversaw its accuracy. The notes are by Robert, who is a Dante scholar and a professor emeritus at Princeton, where he taught the Divine Comedy for forty-two years.

Dante's poem is fiendishly difficult to translate into verse, partly because of its lovely, garlanded rhyme scheme, terza rima--or aba, bcb, cdc. To reproduce the Comedy in English terza rima, it has been calculated, approximately forty-five hundred triple rhymes are needed. In Italian, where almost every word ends in a vowel, you can come up with such a number. In English, it is next to impossible, as can be seen in the frequency of ridiculous forced rhymes in terza-rima translations. Some translators have compromised on aba, cdc--in other words, rhyming in twos, not threes--but that's not easy, either, if you're trying to be faithful to Dante's text.

Jean Hollander made a bigger compromise. She has used blank verse, primarily: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Relieved of the task of rhyming, she is able to stay closer to Dante's wording. Nevertheless, her translation is a poem, and it sounds like one. Robert Hollander says that it is heavily indebted to John D. Sinclair's prose translation of 1939-46. (This was the pony of choice when I was in school.) He is being modest. Here is Sinclair's rendering of the opening of the Paradiso:

The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and in another less. I was in the heaven that most receives His light and I saw things which he that descends from it has not the knowledge or the power to tell again; for our intellect, drawing near to its desire, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it.

Here is Jean Hollander's version:

The glory of Him who moves all things, pervades the universe and shines, in one part more and in another less., , I was in that heaven which receives, more of His light. He who comes down, from there, can neither know or tell what he has, seen,, , for, drawing near to its desire, , so deeply is our intellect immersed, that memory cannot follow after it.

Many of her word choices repeat Sinclair's, but her English is both easier to read (notice how she unties the knot in "I saw things which he that descends") and more artistic. She sings; Sinclair doesn't.