What a brilliant piece: comparing a variety of translations is difficult per se, and comparing it professionally is nearly impossible. Personally I am partially familiar with Singleton’s translation, but I simply cannot fathom the amount of work that should be done in order to approach an impeccable original.
Despite the seeming impossibility of translating Dante, so many feel compelled to try. Translation is a broad church, though, and applies across media as well. Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A biography gives a succinct sketch of Dante’s own afterlife – and literal sketches, at times, in the form of prints of Botticelli’s illustrations for the Commedia. (Viewers will be “swept away by the tidal force of Botticelli’s line”.) As one of the pre-eminent pop-dantisti, Luzzi does not have much to say – not to Dante scholars, at least – but he says it very well. His brushstrokes are predictably broad (“Most of the great Romantic readers of Dante were simply not interested in his Christian world”), while his examples are necessarily cherry-picked. But his later chapters especially give a rich sense of Dante’s presence in different forms, genres and media. When Victor Frankenstein rallies his pursuit force at the edge of the Arctic Circle, we are apparently reading an adaptation of the brilliant, disingenuous speech with which Ulysses urges his crew past the straits of Gibraltar (Inferno 26.112–120). ©
No comments :
Post a Comment