The supreme translator honors the supreme poet. It is the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri‘s death – and Robert Chandler, who has translated Vasily Grossman‘s Life and Fate and Stalingrad, among other Russian stunners, turns his attention from the Russian classics to Dante’s Italian masterpiece.
The occasion for the article is a new translation of The Purgatorio, by poet D.M. Black, published by New York Review Books with a preface by Robert Pogue Harrison, who estimates that there are more than a hundred translations of The Divine Comedy into English already. So why do we need a new one? Because The Purgatorio is special.
If Russia seems a long way from Florence, Chandler threads the connections together in his new article, “Divinity and Damnation: Why Dante Still Matters,” at The Financial Times: “Anna Akhmatova’s last public appearance was in October 1965, during a celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. In a moving affirmation of loyalty, she wrote in her preparatory notes that the deepest bond between her and her fellow-poets Nikolay Gumiliov and Osip Mandelstam, both killed decades earlier by the Soviets, was ‘love for Dante.’” (Mandelstam described the Divine Comedy as a perfect crystal with 14,233 facets – the number of lines in the poem.)
Readers are generally drawn to the Inferno, partly because of the set pieces like Paolo and Francesca, but also for the same reason people prefer horror films to mid-century musicals.
“Some have see Dante as a vengeful sadist, while for T. S. Eliot he was an epitome of classical restraint. Some see Dante as a mystic visionary; others see the Divine Comedy as Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian Catholicism put into verse,” Chandler writes. “In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Judith Thurman has described him, during his long exile from Florence, as ‘an itinerant diplomat and secretary for the lords of northern Italy’ and as an ’embittered asylum-seeker.’”
I’ll plump for The Purgatorio too. It has more movement. But Stanford’s William Mahrt would also point out that it is the only one of the three sections of the Divine Comedy that has music. There is no music in The Inferno – just noise and wails and grunts. The Paradiso leads us beyond music. But the Purgatorio rings with hymns and psalms and chant. Chandler adds: “The Purgatorio, however, is a more satisfying whole. The structure is more meaningful, the verbal music more delicate – and, above all, it is more human. In Hell and Paradise everyone is fixed in their despair or bliss; in Purgatory everyone and everything is in flux. Sinners struggle to resolve their inner conflicts. Above all, there is a sense of freshness and hope.”
Chandler concludes: “The Purgatorio is, above all, a search for meaning, and in the final cantos Beatrice enables Dante to understand that the only source of meaning is love. One of Black’s previous publications is titled Why Things Matter: The Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis and Religion (Routledge, 2011). Both in this translation and in his afterword Black shows us why Dante matters, and how, 700 years after his death, he can still help us to understand what may give meaning to our own lives.”
Read the whole thing here.
Tags: Anna Akhmatova, D.M. Black, Dante Alighieri, Judith Thurman, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Chandler, Robert Pogue Harrison, T.S. Elot, Vasily Grossman, William Mahrt
October 2nd, 2021 at 10:51 am
What marvelous topics you choose, Cynthia Haven! I find your blog truly a literary treasure trove. I carried around with me for quite a long time and still have my copy of Robert Chandler’s beautiful translation of Grossman’s Life and Fate, and I have such admiration for Osip Mandelstam
so bringing these threads together as you have in your introduction to the review by Robert Chandler of the new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio
is just the most sparkling autumnal panoply one could even expect in a literary sense.
I do favor, speaking for myself, of course The Paradiso but all of Dante is of course, of one piece. The quote from Mandelstam is
so exhilirating and I have thought a good long while about the apocryphal anecdote of Osip taking with him to the transit camps his worn copy of The Divine Comedy. It makes me weep to think of that. And whether that is true or not, it is for certain he carried in his heart, to his doom.
Looking forward to reading the review in full and the new translation in full but I just wanted to write in this way to say I truly appreciate
the things you say, the things you introduce and the way that you expess these things. It is astonishingly beautiful and cogent and I do with you, in all things, the very best.
October 2nd, 2021 at 10:59 am
P.S. Sorry for typos above;of course I mean, I WISH you well not”with’.
This is a poem I wrote in 2005 I wanted to share as it is my personal reflection on Osip Mandelstam, his fate and his love for Dante…
OSIP MANDELSTAM
he sewed Dante
into his breast pocket
perhaps
and carried a bucketful
of stars
and clouds made way for
him but the others did
not
in the last days of
a held-over doom-
leaving behind
an inconsolable future
and
as many scanless notebooks;
or were they also
taken into custody?
rustling a coded matchless snow:
oh worldwide language distressed-
the more-than-widowed questions-
on the way to
who knows what
I hope
snow-blindness
saved him
from complete collapse
and that he entered
Heaven like a bridal
page on which
only light could be written
surely there was
a point of endless rescue,
of a thousand angels whirling
when he heard:
the diamond waves crashing
on a finer shore,
and felt on his back
the black sun, infinitely
illuminated.
may children stitch together,
barely understanding orders:
new notebooks from
the periphery of that rose
mary angela douglas 19 september 2005/2 december 2005
October 2nd, 2021 at 12:39 pm
You’re welcome, Mary Angela. It’s a pleasure to have you here!
October 2nd, 2021 at 2:58 pm
Thank you for sharing this, Mary Angela! The threads connecting Mandelstam and Dante (and Akhmatova) are fascinating.
October 2nd, 2021 at 4:13 pm
Thank you so much, Cynthia! I’m going to have to go back and reread Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs because I think I remember something
about at least, some of that re Akhmatova/O Mandelstam/Dante detailed there. I know I do remember reading it somewhere
knowing that in a glancing way. And i had a book of Osip’s prose and some letters (from Ardis) that had an English translation of Mandelstam’s Conversation on
Dante. So many times I have the experience with your blog of a kind of lovely renaissance of feeling and memory about certain topics I
had great emotional resonance with in past decades and it is sheer delight to then remember, to retrace those steps and most of all to see
all these things somehow continuing their literary, immortal life on earth.. Its like you bring news from the world of the beautiful in literature, the exact news I would want to hear but do not have your connections and consciousness to realize or find out about on my own.
I am really looking forward to your California book on C. Milosz. How joyful it is to hear to read further witness to so many noble people whom we thought would always be with us on the literary scene as if they had come back to say more;you truly have your finger always on the pulse of so many streams of beauty. I am just grateful for what you have done and what you continuing to do in this light.
October 3rd, 2021 at 7:59 am
I know I am overwriting comments here but I like to be thorough and if I’m not I will feel regretful. I also want to mention as a result
of your reference to R. Chandler’s review and the mention of D.M. Black a poet I have not heard of, that is yet another lovely thing about your work.
Not only that there are new echoes of lights on the literary scenes that may have faded for the reader from view but new lights and I know I should have known of the work of D.M. Black before now, being obviously a good part Scottish but I don’t and I didn’t and so I am also thankful for that, and truly Cynthia Haven, there can be no end to thank yous where your lovely work is concerned but I will stop commenting now and just think of the happiness of it. Have a lovely day.
October 3rd, 2021 at 6:07 pm
Thanks, Mary Angela! Let me know what Nadezhda Mandelstam says.
October 4th, 2021 at 10:13 am
I sure will, Cynthia Haven. Love how you phrased that in the present tense as though Nadezhda Mandelstam were still on earth and I
actually was able, plebian as I am to speak with her. But it’s true that whenever we open a book it IS in the present tense, all of it. What wonderful insight you have.
I will let you know even if I find out to my embarrassment that I just imagined something about Dante and Osip was in there.
But it will be a while because my tiny apartment is crammed with books in all nooks and crannies and I need some kind of magic Mandelstam magnet to find them (the memoirs). Hope someone invents one soon.
October 7th, 2021 at 7:25 am
Well, Cynthia Haven, I did find 1/2 of the memoirs of Nadezhda my copy of Hope Abandoned bought in a D.C. area bookshop in the late 1980s, hardback, printing date 1974, and at first, looking at the index was inspired to see three entries for Dante as well as some entries on Mandelstam’s conversation about Dante. But none of these revealed what I remembered that I know I read somewhere.
I remember that I read Nadezhda said that Osip and Akhmatova sometimes liked to converse in Italian. And I remember that somewhere in Nadezhda’s reminiscences she spoke about Akhmatova reading Dante in Italian to the usual crowd gathered at The Stray Dog where he was present and I remember there is a poem that starts out: “She half turned her head…’ which I think was him remembering that, I think, his feeling about the way she read Dante.
Something also I remember a poem about the senseless Soviet night and Mandelstam’s feeling about the beauty of the Italian language, in its music alone, the sounds of Italian words has merged in my head and emotions in a way that I know is somehow connected but I cannot really trace any of it and am as Edith Wharton confessed in her autobiographical book called Looking Backwards, that she had a brain like a sieve and only remembered the feelings that she had reading this or that. the net of emotions that arose from particular passages, and not the passages themselves.
October 7th, 2021 at 2:29 pm
oops. Edith Wharton’s book is called A Backwards Glance. Fare thee well, Cynthia Haven.I KNOW you have more astute readers than me but
you can’t possibly have one more enthusiastic about your work.
October 7th, 2021 at 2:41 pm
Mea culpa and I certainly hope I spelled that right. “I KNOW you have more astute readers than I”
not, “than me’. I really was an English major once. In high standing. Life now is like having frequent flashbacks to your answers on the multiple choice test you just took and realizing the answer you erased was the right one in the first place and you should have just left well enough alone.