The Portable Dante by Dante Alighieri

massive poem must try, with humility and flexibility, to be as faithful as possible. He should do what Jackson Mathews recommends to the guild of translators in general—“be faithful without seeming to be”—and he adds in regard to this type of faithfulness: “a translator should make a good lover. ”
    Perhaps it must always be the voice of Dante’s translator that we hear (if we have to hear an intervening voice at all), but he should have listened most carefully to Dante’s voice before he lets us hear his own. He should not only read and reread what he is translating, in order toknow what it is about (know a whole canto thoroughly before translating a line), but he should also read Dante aloud, listening to the rhythm and movement within the lines and the movement from line to line. Consider, for example, line 63 of the famous canto V of the
Inferno
(Paolo and Francesca’s canto), where Virgil points out to the Pilgrim the figure of Cleopatra among the lustful souls of Dido’s band, and characterizes her with one word that caps the line:
    Poi è Cleopatràs lussurïosa
    (And there is Cleopatra, who loved men’s lusting)
    This epithet, epitomizing the whole career of the imperial wanton, serves to remind us of the technical nature of the sin being punished in the second circle, the circle of the lustful:
i lussuriosi.
And in the movement of the word
lus-su-ri-o-sa
(Dante forces us to linger over the word this way; otherwise the verse would be a syllable short) there is an important anticipation of a movement in the second part of the canto: the dovelike movement that starts with the actual descent of Francesca and Paolo, a gentle movement that becomes the movement of the entire second half of this canto and offers such a contrast to the wild buffetings of the winds we hear in the first half, where we see the damned dashed along by the tempestuous storm. The sensitive translator must stop to question (then to understand) the rhythm of
lussuriosa
at this point in the canto: to sense how this diaphanous word in this melodious line stands out against the howling noises in the background. This seductive rhythm applied to Cleopatra’s sin anticipates not only the gentle movements but the seductive atmosphere of the second half of the canto, when Francesca is on stage and melting the Pilgrim’s heart. No translator I have read seems to have made any attempt to reproduce the effect intended by the line in the original: the simplicity of the first half of the line (
Poi è Cleopatràs
…) and the mellifluous quality of the epithet (
lussuriosa
) in final position, with its tapering-off effect.
    Again, the translator should study Dante’s use of poetic devices such as enjambment and alliteration. This does not mean that the translator should always use such devices when Dante does and only when he does, but that he should study the effects Dante has achieved with these devices—and his economical use of them. Dante is a greater poet than any of his translators have been or are likely to be. A translator using the English iambic pentameter may even learn from Dante’s flowing lines to use better the meter he has chosen. It is true that Dante’s hendecasyllabic verse is quantitative and not accentual; still, the words of the Italian language have their own natural accent. In reading aloud Dante’s lines with their gentle stress, one can hear the implicit iambs and trochees and dactyls and anapaests. And one may learn to achieve the same effect of “implicitness” to counterbalance the natural tendency of English meters to have too insistent a stress.
    Finally, there is the matter of diction. Here the translator must be
absolutely
faithful, choosing words and phrases that have the same tone as those of the poet. They must obviously suggest solemnity when he is solemn, lightness when he is light; they must be colloquial or formal as he is colloquial or formal. But, most of all, the diction should be simple when