Pinsky's Hell of a Good Inferno

BOOK

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation

by Robert Pinsky

Illustrations by Michael Mazur

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $35

When Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) completed his Commedia sometime in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, he broke new literary ground by becoming the first Italian poet or produce a formal aesthetic work in the volgare, the native tongue of Tuscany.

While the French, Germans and even the English had vernacular literary forms with precedents dating back into the Middle Ages, no comparable literary tradition existed in Italy. Dante changed all that.

Accordingly, Renaissance historian George Holmes has written that through his Commedia Dante "establish [ed] the volgare as a great literary tongue" and in doing so committed "the most fundamental act of Italian self-assertion in the medieval and Renaissance period."

The bold symphony of Dante's volgare comes to life with renewed vitality in Boston University professor Robert Pinsky's new verse translation of Inferno, the first and mostfamous of the three cantiche of the Divine Comedy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35).

In Pinsky's translations, passion triumphs over literalness and the result is that Pinsky--the author of several poetry collections--reveals his true identity in his work: He is more a poet than a translator. The fruit of Pinsky's labor, a vivid and passionate Inferno, is the benefactor of this bias.

The author stresses accuracy of images, metaphors and tone over the conventions of form. He dodges anachronistic language in favor of conveying the true emotion of the text the modern day reader. His vocabulary reflects the meaning packed concision of Dante's own.

But this does not mean that the translator sacrifices accuracy in the name of making his lines rhyme. Working with a "more relaxed definition" of rhyme, Pinsky fills out the Inferno's tercets with `half rhymes," like "aim/come," as well as the more traditional "full rhymes,' like "plunder/under."

Pinsky's fresh, vital language doesn't wither in the face of Dante's infernal landscapes. Take, for example, the description of the myriad souls collecting at the river Archeron:

As leaves in quick succession sail down in autumn

Until the bough beholds its entire store

Fallen to the earth, so Adam's evil seed

Swoop from the bank when each is called, as sure

As a trained falcon, to cross to the other side

Of the dark water; and before one throng can land

On the far shore, on this side new souls crowd.

Even more impressive than PInsky's infusion of life into the translation is that fact that he is also faithful to the Inferno's original interlocking rhyme scheme, called terza rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc). Pinsky avoids he possible pitfalls of this demanding form and triumphs with crisp and inventive rhymes that not only meet the demands of form but also bring the poem to life.

The main draw of Dante's masterpiece remains the universal truth of its central story--that of finding oneself spiritually lost. Dante writes in the first tercet, the story of the pilgrim's journey is that of "nostra vita," "our life," not just his. And Dante's guide through hell, Virgil, observes in canto XII: "It is necessity,/And not just pleasure, that puts him on this road."

Pinsky's attention to the original language of the poem is notably apparent in canto XIII. In his description of the suicides--those condemned for being violent against themselves--Dante fills the canto with the language of negation.

Pinsky remains faithful to the importance of the canto's "negativeness," which stems from suicide's result--the negation of the soul. The repetition of "no"s and "not"s evokes Dante's contrapasso, his system of retributive justice in which sin is literalized.

Nessus had not yet reached the other side

When we moved forward into the woods unmarked

By any path. The leaves not green, earth-hued;

The boughs not smooth, knotted and crooked-forked;

No fruit, but poisoned thorns.

Pinsky's ability to convey the profound spirit of depression found in many of the Inferno's cantos supports his contention that the poem may be about the inner state of the soul in life, as well as after death.

But even as fine translator as Pinsky or Allen Mandelbaum (whose 1980 black verse translation of the Comedy is a Harvard classroom staple) cannot convey the full effect of Dante's dark anaphora that opens the thirteenth canto: six of the first eight lines begin with the word "Non," producing a hauntingly landscape of negation.

In addition to its vibrant language, students will find this edition of the Inferno helpful for its reference chart which serves as a key to Dante's plan of hell. The guide lists each canto, its locale in hell, the endemic demons, the classes of souls and the names of the individual sinners who reside there. Extensive notes by Nicole Pinsky, a daughter of the translator and thirty-five black-and-white monotypes by the illustrator Michael Mazur (a department) add to this edition's offerings.

A provocative foreword by Dante's doyen John Freccero is as much troubling as it is enlightening. Freccero makes some insightful observations, most notably about the tension between characters 'historical identities and their allegorical functions in the Comedy but his treatment of the administration of justice in hell is not fully developed.

Nearly 700 years ago, Dante broke with tradition by writing about such a weighty subject (i. e., salvation and the Christian afterlife) in the "low" style of Comedy; and, in doing so, produced a work in the vulgar tongue of his native Florence. That bold spirit of adventure now awaits the contemporary English reader, just as it once did the trecento Florentine.