Vahni Capildeo reviews
Translated by David R. Slavitt
Vermilion is the
colour of the Seraphim in the angelic choir of Dante’s Paradiso; the burning, stinging ones, according to the likely
Hebrew root of their name. Red, too, is the colour of Dante’s robe or scarf, distinguishing
the poet of love, in so many of the anguished-yet-muscular portraits of this
man whose political life saw him driven into exile from his beloved city of
Florence. Slavitt’s new translation of Dante’s libello is itself a little book, and slips ardently into hand or
pocket: an ideal gift. The hardcover edition’s binding and endpapers are
cardinal red. Most disconcerting, the sweetly grave dark eyes of a young lady
all in shades of red and white and gold fix you with a quality that may soon
appear relentless. Her posture is open, yet she is ungraspable: this detail
taken from an Elisabeth Sonrel painting shows the right arm crooked around
saffron lilies, while the left arm, not shown here, disappears off the book’s
edge, buried perhaps in the pages or belonging altogether to the realm of the
invisible. This is a promising start. Already we are focused on the double
aspect of Dante’s intense devotion: the adorable Beatrice; the abstract Lady
Philosophy: which informs his philosophical and craftsmanlike account of love,
bereavement, memory and illumination.
Now, what of the
sheer harsh strangeness of the perhaps late thirteenth-century text, not always
easy for us to sense through the sugar incrustations on the nineteenth-century
lens, and the perennial temptation to level out the complexity of people, times
and places removed from ours? This takes us to the business of the translation
proper. How does it deal with the transformative scene that sets the medieval poet/lover
on his way?[1]
The flaming apparition of a glad, intimidating man, carrying a naked woman
draped in blood-red, tells Dante a lot of things the poet says he doesn’t
understand (and doesn’t repeat for the reader), except for the all-too-clear
Latin command: ‘Ego dominus tuus’ [I am your lord]. This character is holding
something that is on fire: ‘Vide cor tuum’ [Behold your heart], he informs
Dante. The poet again records a silence, a lapse of time, for what appalling
mutual contemplation it is left to us to imagine. Lording it yet more, the
masterful being — Love — wakes up the scantily clad creature in his arms and
coerces her into eating Dante’s heart (just as much on fire as ever); she does
so ‘dubitosamente’ and in the imperfect tense, i.e. she takes a while chewing
it over. ‘Dubitosamente’: ‘hesitantly’, translates Stanley Appelbaum in his
dual-language edition (New York : Dover
There is also,
however, no end to translating. Arguably, every translation involves a process
of re-envisioning, even if making no claim (true of some) about being a new work
in its own right. Even for a reader conversant with the source language, to
read an array of translations is both to have a series of conversations with
other, passionate readers (the translators) about what is at stake, and perhaps
to see ‘the original’ anew, rather like meeting a friend in a different country
or a different social rôle, or glimpsing a person thought familiar from a
suddenly revealing angle. Estrangement, provocation, invitation: literary
translation is not in the business of serving up a mere substitute. So what
does Slavitt do that is different enough to
justify the production of his beautiful libello?
Bringing La Vita Nuova to live again in our times
would be part of the answer. In the scene just cited, Slavitt has Love named in
English and speaking English. This evidences the translator’s commitment to
readability, to making the readers encounter the text as quick and vivid, not
an artifact: a laudable general aim. In my view, an important loss is incurred
in this instance. Love, if allowed a perfectly comprehensible identification as
‘Amor’, would have retained the essential otherness that marks his irruption
into the human dream; the Romance-language wordform could keep the reader alert
to the difference (not the remoteness, not the unreadability; the specialness)
of the ways of loving in Dante’s emergent world. Scraps of Latin text could
easily have been footnoted; Slavitt, in fact, ends this section with a
four-line historical footnote on Dante’s too-powerful poet-friend, Guido
Cavalcanti. We are, in everyday life, accustomed
to the Latinate languages of authority: medical, legal, bureaucratese, perhaps
ecclesiastical. We are also patient with (some of us, entertained by) the
antique-effect prestige gobbledygook spouted by fantasy and historical characters
in popular culture. The Harvard rendition is so keen to white out the opaque
language of authority that later, in section XII, it resorts to a clunky
in-line specification, ‘in Latin’, ‘in Italian’, during another originally
polyphonic dialogue. Can we not cope with a little Latin in La Vita Nuova, especially in a scene
that is all about forceful yet obscure communication,
a scene that sets us up for progressive revelation? And indeed, by section XXIV,
Amor is chatting away in the vernacular to Dante, speaking Tuscan into his very
heart and helping him interpret encounters and visions.
In other words, an
evolving relationship with Amor himself (itself?) is a vital part of Dante’s
awakening to his new life. This is marked by a move from Amor’s unreported
speech and deployment of magisterial Latin towards a kind of ordinary involvement
(you know, those girls you saw in the
street, well, think about it this way...). Taking this further, the
linguistic hint to us as readers is that Dante the Tuscan vernacular writer is
becoming the authoritative speaker on Love, and his local tongue an adequate
vehicle for the highest thought. The evolution of this relationship and Dante’s
status within the narrative is quite something to see diminished in the
translation’s undue efforts not to alienate modern readers by presenting an
approachably Englished Love from the start. A quibble over detail often yields a
clue to the greater movement of reinterpretation incrementally caused by subtle
repositionings of the reader.
Let us turn again to
Slavitt’s libello. What are the ways
in that it offers? The Translator’s Preface distances the word ‘translation’,
preferring ‘rendition’, winning closeness to us by throwing in a jokey modern
aside about interrogation centres. The translator claims that most of the
‘versions’ of La Vita Nuova that he has
seen are in prose, ‘accurate betrayals’ failing to convey the character of the
mixed prose and verse text, or prosimetrum.[2]
This reviewer’s experience differs, even without recourse to small press
publications or library relics. Both Reynolds for Penguin and Musa for Oxford
World’s Classics make a good stab at translating the poems as poems. Reynolds
is particularly eloquent about the poetic authorship, audience and subject of
the treatise; about her joy before the, to her, necessary task of attempting a poetic
translation that aims at ‘lucidity as well as strictness of form’. She calls
our attention to Dante’s own not-to-be-betrayed love of concatenatio pulcra (the ‘beautiful linkage’ of rhyme), and the
surprising plenteousness of rhymes in English.[3]
By contrast, Slavitt’s Preface declares that he is guilt-free about cutting out
without notice a lot of Dante’s prose explanations of his poems. Slavitt views these
as ‘unnecessary’ and ‘boring’ ‘Cliffs Notes’-style encumbrances likely to cause
anxiety except to academic readers, who anyway are not reading for poetic
enjoyment.[4]
So the pre-Raphaelite flavour of the cover art continues into the translation; Dante
Gabriel Rossetti is Slavitt’s grand predecessor in viewing Dante’s analyses
with distaste. (The need for dissociation may partly motivate Seth Lerer’s
explicit praise, in his Introduction, for Slavitt’s rendition as being far from
the Pre-Raphaelites and truly of our time). Reynolds, on the other hand, is
moved to wonder whether Dante’s intention was to give a musical guide for
composers or reciters, as he takes apart his poems in ways corresponding more
to sense than structure. Certainly this reviewer had enjoyed both in Italian
and various translations the way Dante’s own comments increase our sense of
intimacy with the restless, almost geekily obsessive lover/author at work.
Dante’s divisions are sometimes shockingly non-correspondent to the
standardizing descriptions of the parts of a sonnet or canzone that one might
find in a creative writing textbook nowadays. As only an author can, he makes
us know how his poems kindle to kinetic life: a reader who bothers to add up
the line references in the commentary with the lyrics commented on will find
the poetry spring apart, join, echo, sink, expand, appeal, and flow in
unexpected and moving numbers. These line references no longer work in the
Harvard rendition, and Slavitt is ‘not unhappy’ about this.[5]
It would not have been mannerly to dwell on this Preface — the rendition should
speak for itself — were it not for the startling rhetorical move whereby the
existence of the original and so-called ‘literal translations’ (dismissed, as
seen above, somewhat without respect to their own creative claims) justifies a
make-it-new slash-and-burn approach, whose cheekiness, passion and sense of
entitlement are (dare one say) reminiscent of the enfant terrible persona available to popular lecturers in that very
academic setting so keenly disavowed. Slavitt
clearly loves La Vita Nuova in his
way, and wants a fresh and widening audience to love it too. On now to the
pleasures of the text.
The cultural
translation that inevitably takes place sometimes gives us an articulate
American Dante, very refreshing to encounter, sure that Love ‘wasn’t merely
being cute’ in his fancy advice.[6]
As with all such pioneering efforts, a lot of the time this works; occasionally
it does not. This Dante ‘wanting to have the feel of my pen in my hand again’
has acquired a post-Freudian (post-George Barker?) phallicism.[7]
Sometimes there is a levelling out of the plain weirdness (half symbolic, half
real) of the medieval landscape. Our American Dante is not on the path of
sighs, cammino de li sospiri; he’s
‘on the road’ with no further ado.[8]
Tuscan Dante veers away from a path molto
inimica, very hostile, towards him; ours says with Robert Frost-like
laconicism, ‘that was a road I did not wish to take’.[9]
This focuses us on the poet in his journey rather than immersing us in the
texture of his world; a valid way to guide us into the experience of La Vita Nuova. The translation is often
very smart in refusing to engage with the untranslatable, e.g. ‘before he takes
his leave’ is an excellent solution to avante
che sdonnei (‘before he dis-ladies himself’? No!).[10]
Slavitt (or his
rendition) are, again sometimes but not always, nifty at dealing with unwanted
cultural spectres. He cleverly avoids ringing a heavy Proustian bell of
anachronistic allusion by rendering Dante’s remembrance of passato tempo, time past, simply as ‘my loss’.[11]
Abandoning Dante’s poetic self-image, in one sonnet, as sole survivor of a
battlefield and putting in its stead the image of an incarcerated ‘madman or
simpleton’ repeating one phrase over and over is a temporal as well as cultural
refocusing through the Victorian monomaniac-in-love (cf. similar self-images
for characters in Dickens and C. Brontë). This keeps our minds away from a
perhaps distracting link with the so technologically different war zones of our
day. [12]
So far so good. The Victorian returns, however, in a phrase perhaps better lost
in translation, as Slavitt is well daring enough to have done — anyone who
fails to mourn Beatrice’s early death ‘has a heart of stone’, a cliché which
raises the ghost of Little Nell and Oscar Wilde’s quip.[13]
Slavitt takes poetic license to intensify the real-world-turned-horrible feel
of Dante’s dream prefiguration of Beatrice’s death, steering us towards
materiality and away from watching it like cinema spectators: when birds fall
from the sky, he adds the simile in ‘dead as stones’.[14]
The only glaring instance of cultural mistranslation comes in section VII p.
39, where American Dante apparently borrows from queer slang. To conceal his
devotion to Beatrice, he has been pretending to court a lady as a ‘screen’
(Slavitt’s accurate, neutral lexical choice elsewhere). The screen lady leaves
town; whereupon the poet laments the loss of his ‘beard’! A ‘beard’, correctly
enough, used to be the term in both hetero- and homosexual contexts for a fake
lover conscripted (consciously or no) to hide some real, less socially
acceptable involvement. Nowadays the reference belongs very much more to queer
culture. In either case, it is misleading; Dante is trying to cover up fidelity, not adultery, and at these
moments he is, loverlike, too earnest to apply a self-directed wit of ironic
reversal.
The action and pace
of the rendition are in some instances dreamier or less obsessive than the
source text. Beatrice’s verbal greeting, which gives a new push to the whole
courtly-to-spiritual love drama, strikes Dante for the first time, la prima volta ,
in the opening scene of section III. We do not know if he really never spoke to
her before (Florence was a small place and the families frequented the same
narrow streets) or whether this is the ‘first time’ in the sense of ‘first
meaningful’ encounter; cf. our own more recent debates about love at first
sight — which may signify ‘first random sighting’, or ‘first instance of truly
appreciative beholding’. This detail, or rather this spring, simply is absent
in the rendition. Direct speech, staged exchanges, direct reported speech are
often present in the source text, both in the poems/songs and in the body of
the narrative. This is one of the stylistic features consistent between Dante
the intense individual poet of La Vita
Nuova and Dante the eventual author of the grand, theatrically peopled
whirl of the Commedia. Such dramatic
exchanges are often paraphrased or dropped from the rendition, which loses the
plurality of voices, the performance aspect that can stir from a polyphonic
page and bring closer the sense of the possible recitation context. The result
is a book much more of the brooding self; indeed, pensare is translated more than once as brooding, rather than
thinking. This is fair enough perhaps, as it conveys lyric identity in
accordance with our post-Romantic ideas, compensating for the tricky river of
chimes and liquids lost with the move from Tuscan to English. It is made clear
in the paratextual material that this rendition seeks to win a place among a
new readership for La Vita Nuova as
an independent achievement, not just a forerunner of the Commedia. This may be why the English rendition of the sonnet in
section IX gets rid of the faint semblance to the Inferno’s
middle-of-the-way-of-life opening line, and ‘trovai Amore in mezzo de la via’
is reduced to ‘I encountered Love’, which prevents inappropriate over-reading
and linking between the so different texts.
Dante’s La Vita Nuova employs a specialized
vocabulary of deceptively simple words. It is probably impossible and
undesirable to find consistent English equivalents for the key words such as gentilissima that, while forming part of
ordinary speech, encode a second, special meaning in Dante and his
contemporaries’ terminology proper to courtly and divine love. Slavitt fluently substitutes ‘glorious’, ‘gracious’,
‘gentle’, ‘noble’, ‘noblest’ and similar terms, sometimes simply Beatrice’s
name, to bring out the marked virtue and individuality of the lady as gentilissima rather than trying to
replicate a label for an elevated role that no longer exists in our modern
sensibilities. The slight archaism this sometimes produces is an effective
reminder of the formality and deeper significance of Dante’s adoration of the
beloved. This rendition resists cheap dealing in cognates, allowing nobilissima to stand forth in English as
‘marvelous’ rather than ‘most noble’.
Translation, no
matter how passionately or gleefully or carefully undertaken, is always a game
of both gain and loss. There is (intentional or not), another trend: the
removal of words that more explicitly have a religious meaning. Seth Lerer’s
Introduction identifies the road, the pathway, walking the line, as the central
image of La Vita Nuova. There is
another, equally strong: transfiguration (both trasfiguramento and trasfigurazione),
the startlement of becoming new in
life, love and understanding. Space here lacks to list the numerous instances
of this animating image being secularized out of the text, la nuova trasfigurazione incarnated in English as ‘this peculiar
experience’; suffice it to note the trend.[15]
We do not get to see Dante’s eyes
empurpled by weeping as encircled by martyrdom’s crown, corona di
martìri
.[16] Similarly, much that was miraculous, mirabile, softly vanishes away or dissolves into terms (‘paradoxically’, ‘remarkable’) less brightly Catholic. Little point in questioning the translator’s intention — to make the text an independent matter of literature? to render it more accessible to twenty-first-century readers who may not care to mix poetry and faith?
.[16] Similarly, much that was miraculous, mirabile, softly vanishes away or dissolves into terms (‘paradoxically’, ‘remarkable’) less brightly Catholic. Little point in questioning the translator’s intention — to make the text an independent matter of literature? to render it more accessible to twenty-first-century readers who may not care to mix poetry and faith?
What happens is a
censorship of this spiritual-philosophical memoir, which therefore relays its
love-message on a more human than angelic scale. In section III, the source lyric
celebrating the vision of the fiery, edible heart stars a Beatrice who nibbled
it humbly, umilmente pascea, where
her lamblike action shows her engaged in a rite of idealized Christian love.
The Harvard rendition just has her down as ‘frightened’ (p. 34). The delicate rewriting of this unruly, holy strand
continues throughout, and with skill. The penultimate section, XLI, celebrating
divinized love above the operations of the intellect (an even stronger measure
of the journey of understanding made by Dante in the Vita Nuova, had the poet’s intellectualizing insistence on
commentary been allowed to stand till finally overturned), has Dante speaking
of Beatrice’s ‘indescribable condition’, something of a shading of the eyes
before her source-text mirabile qualitade. This is Dante in the Auerbach line, poet of
the secular world.
Translations are
creations of their own time, even those that are presented as faithful to their
sources. This one truly records a widespread acute unease before the
overinterpreted, the transcendent, above all the godly, that which doesn’t let
the individual stay individual or slide away with postmodern provisionality
from What It Must All Add Up To In The End. The rendition achieves its sense of
finality by other means: from the Latin that has been removed from its dramatic
interventions in the body of the text, and reserved for use as if engraved upon
the portals of the physical book: within the beginning of the text, Incipit vita nuova (translation in
brackets); at the end, qui est per omnia
secula benedictus, translation footnoted, a solemn close. Slavitt’s bold
and abbreviating grasp pulls La Vita
Nuova into the twenty-first century by way of all the time between. This
beautiful little book does something different from its companions in other
translation series, and will find happy readers.
Vahni Capildeo arrived in the UK in 1991 from Trinidad, where she was born. After completing a DPhil in Old Norse at Oxford University, she held a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. Her first volume of poetry, No Traveller Returns (Salt) appeared in 2003, followed by several other critically-acclaimed publications. Her work has been anthologized in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (OUP, 2005) and appears in numerous literary journals. She was Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, 2010-11.
[1] Vita Nuova III.
[2]
Slavitt, p.
(ix).
[3]
Reynolds, p.
(xxxi).
[4]
Slavitt, pp.
(xii) and (xiii).
[5]
Slavitt, p.
(xii).
[6]
Slavitt, p. 98; Vita Nuova XXV.
[7]
Slavitt, p. 104;
Vita Nuova XXVI.
[8] Slavitt, p. 47; Vita Nuova X.
[9] Slavitt, p. 45; Vita Nuova XIII.
[10]
Slavitt, p. 54; Vita Nuova XII.
[11] Slavitt, p. 126; Vita Nuova XXXV.
[12] Slavitt, p. 67; Vita Nuova XVI.
[13] Slavitt, p. 116; Vita Nuova XXXI.
[14] Slvaitt, p. 88; Vita Nuova XXIII.
[15] Slavitt, p. 63; Vita Nuova XV.
[16] Slavitt, p. 137; Vita Nuova XXXIX.
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