Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor

not something we experience in the imagination?
    You know what it reminds me of? I said, ignoring his question. It reminds me of poets who translate other poets, not because they’re interested in the original, but because they want to turn it into something that looks like them . Dante says his world revolves around Beatrice, but in fact, it revolves around him—his longing, his words, his precious emotions. You can’t be faithful if you think only of yourself.
    You think fidelity is possible? he asked.
    In a translator or a man? I said before I realized what I was saying.
    Either, he replied. Both.
    Andi was making a show now of picking up her good school dresses one by one with two fingers and letting them drop, like smelly garbage, into the give-away pile.
    I shook my head at her and crossed the living room to the study.
    You mean absolute fidelity? I asked, as I sat on the loveseat. Pure translation, pure unwavering love? Of course not. There’s always a rupture, always an abandonment. The translated one is always betrayed.
    Yes, he said. I am reading this essay—how you put it—of the traduttore/traditore .
    I blushed. He was referring to the essay, published when I quit grad school, in which I railed about the impossibility of translation, the age-old notion that she who translates is both translator and traitor. I waited for the obvious: If you hate Dante and you don’t believe in translation, why did I hire you? Instead, he said, And why you think he do this, Miss Greene?
    This?
    Why you think he not get close to Beatrice?
    Is it important?
    To me, yes it is.
    I think he cares more about his Beatrice poems than he does about Beatrice. He cares about art, not love. Vita Nuova is not a romance, it’s a manifesto explaining Dante’s shift from lyric to narrative .
    I think is not this. He not get close to Beatrice because he is fearful, as you say. Of rupture, abandonment, betrayal. Is simple.
    Maybe, I said, though I’d never found psychological analysis allthat compelling. And thought: Fancy words for a guy who speaks only pizza-man English .
    And the new life, Miss Greene? What are you thinking? What is this?
    Andi had arrived in the study and was doing jumping jacks in front of the loveseat.
    The new life? I asked, trying not to laugh. Grad students everywhere, footnote on the apex of the ridge of the postmodernist canon .
    Yes, what are you thinking?
    It’s not clear what Dante means by new life , is it? I said. As you know, the Italian words vita nuova don’t appear anywhere in the text, just the Latin vita nova . You remember the first lines: “In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, one finds a heading that says, Incipit vita nova . Under that heading I find written the words that I intend to transcribe in this little book—if not all, then at least those that are significant.”
    I recited the lines in Italian, to show him I could.
    Some say this new life refers to a sexual or moral awakening in boyhood. Others say it refers to a shift of poetics occurring in mid-life.
    Yes, Miss Greene, he said impatiently, but what is your feeling?
    My feeling? I asked.
    This is what I am asking.
    I think we have to credit Dante with his new life precisely when the text announces it, which is to say, when he first encounters Beatrice. But a new life at eight and three-quarters can hardly be new to an author of thirty. Or can it? Can a “new” life span an entire lifetime? What kind of “new life” is that? The new life, we realize, coincides with the onset of memory. Before it, little can be recalled; after, much is remembered. Memory equals awareness of self in time—self plunged into narrative, if you will, self become both object and observing subject. For Dante, then, the new life is nothing less than the life of consciousness—activated by love, empowered by imagination, moderated by reason. Understood this way, a new life experienced in childhood can still be new at