IV Dante and His Latest Translators5
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“Ghosts and witches are the best machinery for a modern epic.” So said Charles Fox, who fed his imagination on verse of this aspiring class. Fox was no literary oracle, and his opinion is here cited only as evidence that the superearthly is an acknowledged element in the epopee. The term “machinery” implies ignorance of the import of the super-earthly in epic poetry, an ignorance attendant on materialism and a virtual unbelief. No poet who should accept the term could write an epic, with or without the “machinery.” Such acceptance would betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.
A genuine epic, of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depth and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epic poet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, together with such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls—
“Light half-believers in our casual creeds.”
Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active presence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had they not, there would have been no “Iliad,” no “Paradise Lost.”
Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of his time, fantastic, unfashioned—all this was his material. But all this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame. The true material of a poem is the poet’s own nature and thoughts, his sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations, his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him.
Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,—and literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,—no more broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed, moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for its play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a manly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to a stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italian scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict; and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy, while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled, the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times, contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.
Dante’s high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous initiator, the august father of modern poetry—all this has combined to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six centuries. But even all this would not have made him one of the three or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of universal European translation. What gave his rare qualities their most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven—of the world to come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured more or less ever since—the word-painter of that visionary, awful hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.
Those imaginations as to future being—to the Middle Ages so vivid as to become soul-realities—Dante, with his transcendent pictorial mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial superscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future, the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures of gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond the grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having them with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual prepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self, with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied state is an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes some power of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot be entered. In Dante’s time these attempts were common. Through his preëminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, the faculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, a unique success.
To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world, would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination. But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures, puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusion wherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, an illusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the opening of the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and every line of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, that is, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floats it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness, which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritual imagination.
Dante had it in him,—this hell, purgatory, and heaven—so full and warm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, with the keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, the griefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had a fellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and, added to this, an artist’s will and want to reproduce them, and to reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He need scarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits, relates to the passions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose a theme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave to himself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around the altitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches of famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and, along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its wraths and triumphs.
Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but, besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind of inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and yet the “Vicar of Wakefield” (not to go so high as “Tristram Shandy” and “Don Quixote”) is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put together. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement, and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception, does the framework of incident support and display? That is the æsthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this material inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build. The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions of the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” is not admirable for their mere exuberance and diversity,—for that might have come from a comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then were, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs,—but for the heart there is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as regards the epic quality of Dante’s poem, an important consequence, is that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention. Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each one awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, the attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure or group. We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits, classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and separated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on a weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person to person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey, although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great unity, the “Divina Commedia,” as an organic, artistic whole, is inferior to the “Iliad” and “Paradise Lost,” and to the Grecian and Shakespearean tragedies.
The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and, with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his page—fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Among the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most active is that of form. Goethe says of him, “The great intellectual and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that just in his life-time—Giotto being his contemporary—was the re-birth of plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous, form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante, too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline. Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it were, after nature.” In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, “In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the ‘Divina Commedia.’”
Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his strongest side: he is preëminently a poet of form. In his mind and in his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his intellect is more specific than generic. His subject—chosen by the concurrence of his æsthetic, moral, and intellectual needs—admits of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected delineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of the other, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound in transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance, more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider: he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion. Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,—
“As when the sun new risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations,”
Setting aside the epithets “horizontal” and “disastrous,” which are poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,—not involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely between physical, not between subtle, relations,—that Dante chiefly deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet, but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination. The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the reader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the passage—
“and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.”
This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire; this gives its greatness to the passage.
Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more to the reader’s senses and perception; Milton rouses his higher imaginative capacity. In the whole “Inferno,” is there a sentence so aglow as this line and a half of “Paradise Lost”?
“And the torrid clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire.”
Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout of Milton’s demon-host—
“That tore Hell’s concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night”?
Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur and breadth.
Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means proves poetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similes than one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this command than Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely often to put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments and facilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy with the divine doings, there will be at times a flashing fitness in his similitudes, which are then the sudden offspring of finest intuition. In citing some of the most prominent in the “Divina Commedia,” we at once give brief samples of Dante and of the craft of his three latest translators, using the version of Dr. Parsons for extracts from the “Inferno,” that of Mr. Dayman for those from the “Purgatorio,” and that of Mr. Longfellow for those from the “Paradiso.”
“As well-filled sails, which in the tempest swell,
Drop, with folds flapping, if the mast be rent;
So to the earth that cruel monster fell,
And straightway down to Hell’s Fourth Pit he went.”
Inferno: Canto VII.
“Swept now amain those turbid waters o’er
A tumult of a dread portentous kind,
Which rocked with sudden spasms each trembling shore,
Like the mad rushing of a rapid wind;
As when, made furious by opposing heats,
Wild through the wood the unbridled tempest scours,
Dusty and proud, the cringing forest beats,
And scatters far the broken limbs and flowers;
Then fly the herds,—the swains to shelter scud.
Freeing mine eyes, ‘Thy sight,’ he said, ‘direct
O’er the long-standing scum of yonder flood,
Where, most condense, its acrid streams collect.’”
Inferno: Canto IX.
“When, lo! there met us, close beside our track,
A troop of spirits. Each amid the band
Eyed us, as men at eve a passer-by
’Neath a new moon; as closely us they scanned,
As an old tailor doth a needle’s eye.”
Inferno: Canto XV.
“And just as frogs that stand, with noses out
On a pool’s margin, but beneath it hide
Their feet and all their bodies but the snout,
So stood the sinners there on every side.”
Inferno: Canto XXII.
“A cooper’s vessel, that by chance hath been
Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft,
Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin
I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft.”
Inferno: Canto XXVIII.
“We tarried yet the ocean’s brink upon,
Like unto people musing of their way,
Whose body lingers when the heart hath gone;
And lo! as near the dawning of the day,
Down in the west, upon the watery floor,
The vapor-fogs do Mars in red array,
Even such appeared to me a light that o’er
The sea so quickly came, no wing could match
Its moving. Be that vision mine once more.”
Purgatorio: Canto II.
“And thou, remembering well, with eye that sees
The light, wilt know thee like the sickly one
That on her bed of down can find no ease,
But turns and turns again her ache to shun,”
Purgatorio: Canto VI.
“’T was now the hour the longing heart that bends
In voyagers, and meltingly doth sway,
Who bade farewell at morn to gentle friends;
And wounds the pilgrim newly bound his way
With poignant love, to hear some distant bell
That seems to mourn the dying of the day;
When I began to slight the sounds that fell
Upon my ear, one risen soul to view,
Whose beckoning hand our audience would compel.”
Purgatorio: Canto VIII.
“There I the shades see hurrying up to kiss
Each with his mate from every part, nor stay,
Contenting them with momentary bliss.
So one with other, all their swart array
Along, do ants encounter snout with snout,
So haply probe their fortune and their way.”
Purgatorio: Canto XXVI.
“Between two viands, equally removed
And tempting, a free man would die of hunger
Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.
So would a lamb between the ravenings
Of two fierce wolves stand fearing both alike;
And so would stand a dog between two does.
Hence, if I held my peace, myself I blame not,
Impelled in equal measure by my doubts,
Since it must be so, nor do I commend.”
Paradiso: Canto IV.
“And as a lute and harp, accordant strung
With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make
To him by whom the notes are not distinguished,
So from the lights that there to me appeared
Upgathered through the cross a melody,
Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn.”
Paradiso: Canto XIV.
“As through the pure and tranquil evening air
There shoots from time to time a sudden fire,
Moving the eyes that steadfast were before,
And seems to be a star that changeth place,
Except that in the part where it is kindled
Nothing is missed, and this endureth little;
So from the horn that to the right extends
Unto that cross’s foot there ran a star
Out of the constellation shining there.”
Paradiso: Canto XV.
“Even as remaineth splendid and serene
The hemisphere of air, when Boreas
Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest,
Because is purified and resolved the rack
That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs
With all the beauties of its pageantry;
Thus did I likewise, after that my lady
Had me provided with a clear response,
And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen.”
Paradiso: Canto XXVIII.
The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Is it poetical? Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heightening of the reader’s mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarification of the medium through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play of light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the object before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could be called more than conventionally poetical—if this be not a solecism. To illustrate one sensuous object by another does not animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions. Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is through them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion. They may help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do not make the feeling a party to the movement. When this is done,—as in the examples from Canto XV. of the “Inferno,” and Canto VIII. of the “Purgatorio,”—what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!
But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for bright as in the best of Shakespeare’s. As one instance out of many: towards the end of the great soliloquy of Henry V., after enumerating the emblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues,—
“No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave;
Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,
Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell;
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set,
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse”
What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty and healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination, that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid rustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning. It is by this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity with brilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures, denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feel after Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on saying more and better,—it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teeming fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws a farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante’s page glisten, as Shakespeare’s so often does, with metaphor, or compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a circuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come up from the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten,—a sign of life, power, and abundance.
Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from want of humor. Neither had any fun in him. This was the only fault (liberally to interpret Can’s conduct) that Dante’s host, Can Grande of Verona, had to find with him. The subjects of both poets (unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) were predominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of their times, was crude and cruel. The deep, sympathetic earnestness, which is the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an illustration of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,—a great feat, only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom, and, with the fool in “Lear,” forces you, like a child, to smile through warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy to tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults and follies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enough to sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compassionate, tearful delight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter.
Of pathos Dante has given examples unsurpassed in literature. By the story of Ugolino the chords of the heart are so thrilled that pity and awe possess us wholly; and by that of Francesca they are touched to tenderest sympathy. But Ugolino is to Lear what a single fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with a hundred flashes.
All the personages of Dante’s poem (unless we regard himself as one) are spirits. Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a few glimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these few is the imagination expanded. Clarence’s dream, “lengthened after life,” in which he passes “the melancholy flood,” is almost super-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearful foretaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth. And the great ghost in “Hamlet,” when you read of him, how shadowy real! Dante’s representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, too palpable, not ghostly enough, not spiritualized with hope and awe.
Profound, awakening, far-stretching, much enfolding, thought-breeding thoughts, that can only grow in the soil of pure, large sensibilities, and by them are cast up in the heave and glow of inward motion, to be wrought by intellect and shaped in the light of the beautiful,—of these, which are the test of poetic greatness, Dante, if we may venture to say so, has not more or brighter examples than Milton, and not so many as Goethe; while of such passages, compactly embodying as they do the finer insights of a poetic mind, there are more in a single one of the greater tragedies of Shakespeare, than in all the three books of the “Divina Commedia.”
Juxtaposition beside Shakespeare, even if it bring out the superiorities of the English bard, is the highest honor paid to any other great poet. Glory enough is it if admiration can lift Dante so high as to take him into the same look that beholds Shakespeare; what though the summit of the mighty Englishman shine alone in the sky, and the taller giant carry up towards heaven a larger bulk and more varied domains. The traveler, even if he come directly from wondering at Mont Blanc in its sublime presence, will yet stand with earnest delight before the majesty of the Yungfrau and the Eigher.
But it is time to speak of Dante in English.
“It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as to seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.” Thus writes a great poet, Shelley, in his beautiful “Defense of Poetry.” But have we not in modern tongues the creations of Homer, and of Plato, who Shelley, on the same page, says is essentially a poet? And can we estimate the loss the modern mind would suffer by deprivation of them in translated form? Pope’s Homer—still Homer though so Popish—has been a not insignificant chapter in the culture of thousands, who without it would have known no more of Hector and Achilles and the golden glowing cloud of passion and action through which they are seen superbly shining, than what a few of them would incidently have learnt from Lempriere. Lord Derby’s Iliad has gone through many editions already. And Job and the Psalms: what should we have done without them in English? Translations are the telegraphic conductors that bring us great messages from those in other lands and times, whose souls were so rich and deep that from their words their fellow-men, in all parts of the globe, draw truth and wisdom forever. The flash on which the message was first launched has lost some of its vividness by the way; but the purport of the message we have distinctly, and the joy or grief wherewith it is freighted, and even much of its beauty. Shall we not eat oranges, because on being translated from Cuba to our palates they have lost somewhat of their flavor? In reading a translated poem we wish to have as much of the essence of the original, that is, as much of the poetry, as possible. A poem it is we sit down to read, not a relation of facts, or an historical or critical or philosophical or theological exposition,—a poem, only in another dress. Thence a work in verse, that has poetic quality enough to be worth translating, must be made to lose by the process as little as may be of its worth; and its worth every poem owes entirely to its poetic quality and the degree of that. A prose translation of a poem is an æsthetic impertinence, Shakespeare was at first opened to the people of the Continent in prose, because there was not then culture enough to reproduce him in verse. And in Shakespeare there is so much practical sense, so much telling comment on life, so much wit, such animal spirits, such touching stories so well told, that the great gain of having him even in prose concealed the loss sustained by the absence of rhythmic sound, and by the discoloration (impallidation, we should say, were the word already there) of hundreds of liveliest tinted flowers, the deflowering of many delicate stems. Forty years ago, Mr. Hay ward translated the “Faust” of Goethe into prose; but let any one compare the Hymn of the Archangels and other of the more highly-wrought passages, as rendered by him, with any of the better translations in verse,—with that of Mr. Brooks for example,—to perceive at once the insufficiency, the flatness and meagreness of even so verbally faithful a prose version. The effect on “Faust,” or on any high passionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to what would be the effect on an exquisite bas-relief of reducing its projection one half by a persevering application of pumice. In all genuine verse (that is, in all poetic verse) the substance is so inwrought into the form and sound, that if in translating you entirely disregard these, rejecting both rhyme and measure, you subject the verse to a second depletion right upon that which it has to suffer by the transplanting of it into another soil.
The translator of a poem has a much higher and subtler duty than just to take the words and through them attempt passively to render the page into his own language. He must brace himself into an active state, a creative mood, the most creative he can command, then transport himself into the mind and mental attitude of the poet he would translate, feeling and seeing as the poet saw and felt. To get into the mood out of which the words sprang, he should go behind the words, embracing them from within, not merely seizing them from without. Having imbued himself with the thought and sentiment of the original, let him, if he can, utter them in a still higher key. Such surpassing excellence would be the truest fidelity to the original, and any cordial poet would especially rejoice in such elevation of his verse; for the aspiring writer will often fall short of his ideal, and to see it more nearly approached by a translator who has been kindled by himself, to find some delicate new flower revealed in a nook which he had opened, could not but give him a delight akin to that of his own first inspirations.
A poem, a genuine poem, assumes its form by an inward necessity. “Paradise Lost,” conceived in Milton’s brain, could not utter itself in any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to our language a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserian stanza. What would the “Fairy Queen” be in blank verse? For his theme and mood Dante felt the need of the delicate bond of rhyme, which enlivens musical cadence with sweet reiteration. Rhyme was then a new element in verse, a modern æsthetic creation; and it is a help and an added beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if it be not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog to freedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that are offensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden in leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover of words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressible strokes of a melodious pulse at the heart of the verse.
The terza rima—already in use—Dante adopted as suitable to continuous narrative. With his feeling and æsthetic want rhymed verse harmonized, the triple repetition offering no obstacle, Italian being copious in endings of like sound. His measure is iambic, free iambic, and every line consists, not of ten syllables, but of eleven, his native tongue having none other than feminine rhymes. And this weakness is so inherent in Italian speech, that every line even of the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri ends femininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In all Italian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable, moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too much rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect, the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable.
In these two prominent features English verse is different from Italian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes are masculine; and it has fewer than Italian. This second characteristic, the comparative fewness of rhymes, is likewise one of its sources of strength: it denotes musical richness and not poverty, as at first aspect it seems to do, the paucity of like-sounding syllables implying variety in its sounds. It has all the vocalic syllables and endings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonants for condensation, vigor, and emphasis.
Primarily the translator has to consider the resources and individualities of his own tongue. In the case of Dante the rhythmical basis is the same in both languages; for the iambic measure is our chief poetic vehicle, wrought to perfection by Shakespeare and Milton. There only remains, then, rhyme and the division into stanzas. Can the terza rima, as used by Dante, be called a stanza? The lines are not separated into trios, but run into one another, clinging very properly to the rhymes, which, interlinking all the stanzas by carrying the echo still onward, bind each canto into one whole, just as our Spenserian form does each stanza into a whole of nine lines. Whether stanzas, strictly speaking, or not, shall we say our mind frankly about the terza rima? To us it seems not deserving of admiration for its own sake; and we surmise that had it not been consecrated by Dante, neither Byron nor Shelley would have used it for original poems. We are not aware that Dante’s example has been followed by any poet of note in Italy. Terza rima keeps the attention suspended too long, keeps it ever on the stretch for something that is to come, and never does come, until at the end of the canto, namely, the last rhyme. The rhymes cannot be held down, but are ever escaping and running ahead. It looks somewhat like an artificial contrivance of the first rhymers of an uncultivated age. But Dante used it for his great song; and there it stands forever, holding in its folds the “Divina Commedia.”
Now, in rendering into English the poem of Dante, is it essential,—in order to fulfill the conditions of successful poetic translation,—to preserve the triple rhyme? Not having in English a corresponding number of rhymes, will not the translator have to resort to transpositions, substitutions, forcings, indirections, in order to compass the meaning and the poetry? Place the passages already cited from Mr. Dayman beside the original, and the reader will be surprised to see how direct and literal, how faithful at once to the Italian thought and to English idiom in expressing it, Mr. Dayman is. His harness of triplets seems hardly to constrain his movement, so skillfully does he wear it. If we confront him with the spirited version in quatrains of Dr. Parsons, in the passages cited from the “Inferno,” or with those from the “Paradiso,” in Mr. Longfellow’s less free unrhymed version, the resources and flexibility of Mr. Dayman in handling the difficult measure will be again manifest. To enable our readers to compare the translations with the original and with one another, we will give the Italian, and then the three versions, of the latter part of the Francesca story, from Canto V. of the “Inferno:”—
“Poi mi rivolsi a loro, e parlai io,
E cominciai: Francesca, i tuoi martiri
A lagrimar mi fanno tristo, e pio.
Ma dimmi: al tempo de’ dolci sospiri,
A che, e come concedette Amore
Che conosceste i dubbiosi desiri?
Ed ella a me: nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria, e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.
Ma se a conoscer la prima radice
Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
Farò come colui che piange, e dice.
Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto
Di Lancilotto, come Amor lo strinse.
Soli eravamo, e senza alcun sospetto.
Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
Quella lettura, e scolorocci ’l viso:
Ma solo un punto fu quel, che ci vinse.
Qando leggemmo il disiato riso
Esser baciato da cotanto amante,
Questi, che mai da me non sia diviso,
La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse:
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
Mentre che l’uno spirito queste disse,
L’altro piangeva si, che di pietade
Io venni meno come s’io morisse,
E caddi, come corpo morto cade.”
Mr. Dayman:—
“Then toward them turned again: ‘Thy racking woe,’
I said, ‘Francesca, wrings from out mine eyes
The pious drops that sadden as they flow.
But tell me, in your hour of honeyed sighs,
By whom and how love pitying broke the spell,
And in your doubtful longings made too wise.’
And she to me: ‘No keener pang hath hell,
Than to recall, amid some deep distress,
Our happier time: thy teacher knows it well.
Yet if desire so strong thy soul possess
To trace the root from whence our love was bred,
His part be mine, who tells and weeps no less.
’T was on a day when we for pastime read
Of Lancillot, how love snared him to ruin:
We were alone, nor knew suspicious dread.
Oft on that reading paused our eyes, renewing
Their glance; and from our cheeks the color started;
But one sole moment wrought for our undoing:
When that we read of lover so kind-hearted
Kissing the smile so coveted before,
He that from me shall never more be parted
Kissed me with lip to lip, trembling all o’er.
The broker of our vows, it was the lay,
And he who wrote—that day we read no more.’
The other spirit, while the first did say
These words, so moanèd, that with soft remorse
As death had stricken me, I swooned away,
And down I fell, heavily as falls a corse.”
Mr. Longfellow:—
“Then unto them I turned me, and I spake,
And I began: ‘Thine agonies, Francesca,
Sad and compassionate to weeping make me.
But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs,
By what and in what manner Love conceded
That you should know your dubious desires?’
And she to me: ‘There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
But if to recognize the earliest root
Of love in us thou hast so great desire,
I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.
One day we reading were for our delight
Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall.
Alone we were, and without any fear.
Full many a time our eyes together drew
That reading, and drove the color from our faces;
But one point was it that o’ercame us.
Whenas we read of the much-longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne’er from me shall be divided,
Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein.’
And all the while one spirit uttered this,
The other one did weep so, that, for pity,
I swooned away as if I had been dying,
And fell even as a dead body falls.”
Dr. Parsons:—
“Then, turning round to them, I thus began:
‘Francesca! tears must overflow mine eyes:
My pitying soul thy martyr-throes unman;
But tell me,—in the time of happy sighs,
Your vague desires how gave Love utterance first?”
And she to me: “The mightiest of all woes
Is, in the midst of misery, to be cursed
With bliss remembered,—this thy teacher knows.
Yet, wouldst thou learn our passion’s root and head,
As one may speak whose eyes with tears are dim,
So will I speak. Together once we read
The tale of Lancelot,—how Love bound him.
Alone we were without suspecting aught:
Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue,
And oft our eyes each other’s glances caught;
But one sole passage ’t was which both o’erthrew.
At reading of the longed-for smile,—to be
By such a lover’s kissing so much blest,
This dearest—never shalt thou part from me!
His lips to mine, to mine, all trembling, pressed.
The writer was our Galeot with his book:—
That day we read no further on.” She stopped:
Meanwhile he moaned so that compassion took
My sense away, and like a corse I dropped.
Observe that Dr. Parsons has put Dante’s twenty-eight lines of eleven syllables into twenty-four lines of ten syllables; and this without losing a drop of the precious stream he undertakes to pour. But why does he make Francesca address her companion personally, instead of saying, “who shall never part from me?” And why does Mr. Dayman say, “pious drops,” instead of piteous? Mr. Dayman and Mr. Longfellow fill up the twenty-eight lines. In neither of the three is there any strain or wresting of the sense. But all three, and before them Lord Byron and Carey, mistranslate this passage,—
“Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
Quella lettura.”
All these translators interpret it to mean, that while they read, their eyes often met; whereas Dante says, they read that passage over more than once; or, literally rendered, several times that reading or passage drew to it their eyes. To restore the meaning of the original adds to the refinement of the scene.
Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as compassionate instead of pitiful or piteous, recognize for know, palpitating for trembling, conceded that you should know for gave you to know? By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties his poetic hands. The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige him to use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words, that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily to poetic expression. Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is free from this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himself that every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as its original, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow, to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian. And Dr. Parsons, who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, in several instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less than the Italian, and the XXXI. into nine lines less, might with advantage have curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines.
Do what we will, poetic translation is brought about more from without than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr. Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity, this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some pages, have—contrary to all good usage—the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as “Idyls of the King.” Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic endings—and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven syllables and on some pages more than a third—do a part in causing Mr. Longfellow’s Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are relaxed.
Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of the original, as in Mr. Dayman’s, one cannot fail to be struck with the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring and, and the often-repeated is, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter, e. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From this comparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can, bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like friends and straight, nor even words of six letters, like chimed, shoots, thwart, spring; nor does Italian abound as English does in monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or three letters. In combination its syllables sometimes get to four letters, as in fronte and braccia. As a consequence hereof, Dante’s lines, although always of eleven syllables, average about twenty-nine letters, while those of the three translators about thirty-three. Hence, the poem in their versions carries more weight than the original; its soul is more cumbered with body.
In order to the faithful reproduction of Dante, to the giving the best transcript, possible in English, of his thought and feeling, should not regard be had to the essential difference between the syllabic constitutions of the two languages, what may be called the physical basis of the two mediums of utterance? Here is the Francesca story, translated in the spirit of this suggestion:—
I turned to them, and then I spake:
“Francesca! tears o’erfill mine eyes,
Such pity thy keen pangs awake.
But say: in th’ hour of sweetest sighs,
By what and how found Love relief
And broke thy doubtful longing’s spell?”
And she: “There is no greater grief
Than joy in sorrow to retell.
But if so urgently one seeks
To know our Love’s first root, I will
Do as he does who weeps and speaks.
One day of Lancelot we still
Read o’er, how love held him enchained.
Without mistrust we were alone.
Our cheeks oft were of color drained:
One passage vanquished us, but one.
When we read of lips longed for pressed
By such a lover with a kiss,
This one whom naught from me shall wrest,
All trembling kissed my mouth. To this
That book and writer brought us. We
No farther read that day.” While she
Thus spake, the other spirit wept
So bitterly, with pity I
Fell motionless, my senses swept
By swoon, as one about to die.
In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, rivolsi and parlai, are given in English with literal fidelity by two monosyllables, turned and spake. In the fourth observe how, in a word-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, without any forcing, eight English:
“Ma dimmi: al tempo de’ dolci sospiri:”
“But tell me: in th’ hour of sweet sighs.”
For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightly modified. Again, in the line,—
“Than joy in sorrow to retell,”
joy represents, and represents faithfully, three words containing six syllables, del tempo felice: retell stands for ricordarsi, and in sorrow for nella miseria, or, three syllables for six; so that, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and complete translation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the most simple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation of Dante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is the first fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing to the fundamental difference between the syllabic structures of the two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eight syllables the whole meaning of Dante’s lines of eleven. In the above experiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Dante are given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and this without any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the “this thy teacher knows,” which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannot agree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence be it said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form of Dante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, the iambic measure and the rhyme.
Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful when applied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over the gate of Hell, at the beginning of the third canto of the “Inferno”:—
Through me the path to place of wail:
Through me the path to endless sigh:
Through me the path to souls in bale.
’Twas Justice moved my Maker high:
Wisdom supreme, and Might divine,
And primal Love established me.
Created birth was none ere mine,
And I endure eternally:
Ye who pass in, all hope resign.
Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English? English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, does not the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subserve what ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely, along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original, fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator’s own tongue?
Here is another short passage in a different key,—the opening of the last canto of the “Paradiso”:—
Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son,
Meek, yet above all things create,
Fair aim of the Eternal one,
’Tis thou who so our human state
Ennobledst, that its Maker deigned
Himself his creature’s son to be.
This flower, in th’ endless peace, was gained
Through kindling of God’s love in thee.
In this passage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are converted into eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candid reader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has been sacrificed to brevity.
The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does not feel the want.
One more short passage of four lines,—the famous figure of the lark in the twentieth Canto of the “Paradiso”:—
Like lark that through the air careers,
First singing, then, silent his heart,
Feeds on the sweetness in his ears,
Such joy to th’ image did impart
Th’ eternal will.
This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but, nevertheless, we beg the reader’s indulgence for a few moments longer, while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirty lines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for that terrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end of lines.
When locked I heard the nether door
Of the dread tower, I without speech
Into my children’s faces looked:
Nor wept, so inly turned to stone.
They wept: and my dear Anselm said,
“Thou look’st so, father, what hast thou?”
Still I nor wept nor answer made
That whole day through, nor the next night,
Till a new sun rose on the world.
As in our doleful prison came
A little glimmer, and I saw
On faces four my own pale stare,
Both of my hands for grief I bit;
And they, thinking it was from wish
To eat, rose suddenly and said:
“Father, less shall we feel of pain
If them wilt eat of us: from thee
Came this poor flesh: take it again.”
I calmed me then, not to grieve them.
The next two days we spake no word.
Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope?
When we had come to the fourth day
Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet,
Saying, “Father, why dost not help me?”
There died he; and, as thou seest me,
I saw the three fall one by one
The fifth and sixth day; then I groped,
Now blind, o’er each; and two whole days
I called them after they were dead:
Then hunger did what grief could not.