Clive James takes on a verse translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
The perfect translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” remains one of literature’s holiest grails. Some translators have captured facets of the poem’s magic, but always at a cost: Charles Singleton conveys Dante’s erudition but flattens his poetry; John Ciardi recreates his music but takes mammoth liberties with the original; and John Sinclair’s “thees” and “thous” date his otherwise deft rendering. If the translator’s task is “to liberate the language imprisoned in a work,” as Walter Benjamin writes, then few literary strongholds come as heavily fortified as “The Divine Comedy.” Written in Dante’s native Tuscan instead of the more prestigious Latin, the poem and its earthy idiom, copious allusions and otherworldy precision burden translators, especially in rhyme-poor English, which struggles to match the momentum of Dante’s terza rima and internal rhymes. No wonder that Dante’s latest translator, the eminent Australian poet and critic Clive James, feared his task would be “thankless.”