Dante Translated

The word “Inferno”  is the Italian for Hell, an imaginary creation by the 14th-century poet Dante. The Inferno is the first part of the Divine Comedy, followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. One of the most therapeutic books of the world, it is about a hero’s journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is “the realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen".Since its publication, over 129 translators have shared their creative attempts in translating the work, and more frequently these attempts were translations into English. 

With us today is Prof. Marco Sonzogni from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand who will talk about how different versions of translation highlight the thematic tension of Inferno.

Recommended Readings:
Dante, Inferno
Marco Sonzogni & Timothy Smith, To Hell and Back: An Anthology of Dante's Inferno In English Translation
—— Quantum of Dante

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Transcript

The word “Inferno”  is the Italian for Hell, an imaginary creation by the 14th-century poet Dante. The Inferno is the first part of the Divine Comedy, followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. One of the most therapeutic books in the world, it is about a hero’s journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is described as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is, to quote the original, “the realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen".Since its publication, over 129 translators have shared their creative attempts in translating the work, and more frequently among these translations are English.  With us today is Prof. Marco Sonzogni from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand who will talk about how different versions of translation highlight the thematic tension of Inferno. Hi Marco, so excited to have you join the show. Could you please introduce yourself to our listeners?

Yeah, so my name is Marco and I studied languages at university, I always loved languages. I did my undergraduate studies in Italy. And then I did my postgraduate studies in Ireland, where I was for 12 years, I also started my academic career there. And then life circumstances a job came up in New Zealand, I applied, and I pretty much did what Dante does as at the end of inferno, a somersault, and I came out the other side, and in the other in the other hemisphere, and I've been here now 16 years, and recently, somebody called me a literary trickster, and a cultural activist, I like to think of of those two terms as describing me accurately, I love my job, my passion is to share cultural patrimony that has been shared with me and pass it on for future generations. So I think, and I do that with a slightly counter, I like to look at things from a different perspectives and coming to New Zealand in a way I know it sounds may sound cheap, but coming on the other side of the planet, literally, as well as allegorically did changed my view of things, you ask questions in a different way, you look at them in a different way, the sky moves in a different way, you open the tap the water circles in a different way. So that's very refreshing. And it's also very humbling. You stop your prejudices, you leave your baggage, and you look afresh. And I think that's exactly what Dante does. When he lifts up his head out of ale, he looks up at the sky, you see. So, you know, so this is different than he sees the Southern Cross, which I see every day. So every day that I see the southern cross, I think of that. There you go.

That sounds great. So let's start with the context. Could you talk a bit about why Dante was exiled? And how this painful experience and philosophical reflection on it shaped the narrative structure of the poem?

Yes. Now, you know, we sometimes we think of the Middle Ages, as you know, very, very distant from us. But I think one of the things that that Dante's the reason why Dante 700 years after his death, 701 year after his death is still there is it was a, a 360 degree human, he came into life at a time of turmoil in the Middle Ages, a lot of things were changing. Italy was a collection of, of states, of languages, of cultures of currencies. And his family, I think, when Dante's born, He's born into Florence, in one of the rare occasions where the ghibelline party is in power, and I think he is from a Guelph family, not not too influential. So he, he is there. And he finds himself aware of, if you, like, change, change about to happen, or a chain, you know, when those moments where you're on the crisp of change. And I think it's an exciting moment. And I think, as we, as we're trying to come out of a pandemic, big crisis, are always a prelude for big changes. So that is  I think, is a principle man is what I like to think of as a committed civilian. He cares about the city cares about the state, he cares. And he cares about values. And he's an intellectual, he probably reads everything that he can say designs on, he reads a lot in translation. Mostly no, like he couldn't speak Greek. So everything that you read, would have come to him through Latin translation. And then you know, he starts thinking, you know, what, what makes us a society what makes us a place what makes us people, and language and literature ,  important and politics are an important part of it. And he's his political views, I think it is I don't want to call it political views because to this day, there are people The question was, well, for ghibelline other people saying one side of the story, people saying one other side story, what I'd like to say is that he was 100% aligned with his values. And of course, that created tension. So he probably got on the wrong side of the stick with many people. And he had to leave. And I think the exilic experience we may, I might fast-track a bit and I'm thinking of a similar experience, for example, the poet Muchini,  when he left Northern Ireland  was liberating he started writing, it gave him a sense of the country, essentially, Italy is this constellation of languages and state. He also experienced patronage. So he experienced help, but he also experienced you know, how salty the bread that is cooked by others is, as he says,  and it I think, through that kind of challenge, he he fortified his own beliefs, but also his own literary mission. And he gifted us this wonderful, wonderful poem. I think it's actually yeah, it's actually the story of everybody's life. You know, we go to hell, we have to go. We have to go to hell. I mean, it's not a coincidence that the Italian gove.., Italian people and Italian government chose the end of the Inferno, when locked down when we came out of lockdown. Inferno is a very advanced form of literary lockdown. If you allow me to use this, you know this expression.

So how is the poetic fashion of courtly love, and especially Dante's own courtly love with his childhood lover, Beatrice reflected in the poem? And how does the figure of Beatrice help the hero's journey in the poem?

It's very, very, very good question. Now, among the many things that were that were that were changing at the time, there was this kind of new new school of poetry. I'm using the School, which was the Dolce Stil Novo , which wasn't just a school of poetry was a school of thinking school of life. And the origin of Italian poetry is in music isn't singing, you know, troubadours singing, and you need an inspiration, you're not necessarily singing for yourself. So the idea of some sort of enhancing and heightening form of inspiration, and the Dolce Stil Novo believed in courtly love. And in my years in Ireland, I realized that there was you know, there are various forms around in World Literature where courtly love, a sort of Platonic love that is not physical, it's not sexual, but it is an instrument for elevation for spiritual elevation. And so Dante in this is not alone. There are a lot of poets that he learned from and writes the same time, right to in the same fashion. And I think, when he meets Beatrice, like when Petrarch meets Laura, whether it fictional or allegorical, there is this sort of intervention of a muse that is codified as female and beautiful. And she could be real, she could be allegorical, but that's an opportunity to undertake a journey of elevation. And that's exactly what Dante does, i mean, she only comes in towards the end of the book. And he chooses, he chooses a fellow poet to do the dirty work and be ready for when when she's when she's, you know, when he's ready to meet her, then she becomes an instrument for further elevation. So that's not a bad, it's not a bad way of figuring out a muse, you know, again, whether, you know whether we want to believe in Beatrice or Laura as real people or imagined personified values. Never bad. It never bothered me, but I like to think of that. And I'll tell you the story, I read a wonderful book about him. It's a fictional book by Julio Leone, I think, and it's one of the finest books on fictionalized account of Dante's life that I've ever read, is, is, is also emit, if I remember correctly, in Arabic looking mooks Muslim woman in a tavern, and he's completely seduced by her. So this is the most anti dantian account of Dante have ever come across. But he makes him real. And that's what I love about the poet. This poet was, you know, he was a man at a time engaged with the politics paid a higher price, he was in battle.  He saw what man is capable of, for better and for worse, and then went off and wrote 100 cantos of a poem that is edifying is universal is is is eternal in the way that the charts, every humans, opportunity to grow intellectually and spiritually if we want to. I mean, people will say this is very Christian and it's very hellish, and it's very, you know, Dark Ages. We don't write in isolation.  Dante is a product of his own time, and of his own readings and his own ideas. But as I told you before we went on air. When people say that my answer would be where will you be in 700 years will anybody talk about you and me in 700 years? Probably not. So if 700 years on, we're still here talking about Dante, it means that he struck some chords that are universal, and that attach, you know, every humans life question very deeply.

That's right. That's right. What language is this Tuscan that Dante adopted to write the poem? And how different is it from Virgil's Latin, which was then considered a highly respected language of the elite society, right? And how the vernacularism of Tuscan describing a once obselete worldview made the poem become what is now a celebrated iconoclast and linguistic invention?

That's a very good question. You could be talking about this for like a week. Now. If you're, if you're a writer, you're a writer, you start thinking, Okay, what do I what I want to do? How do I want to write? What language am I gonna write? And then at some point, you got to ask the question, okay, if I want to get a job, what language I'm going to use and Latin was the language and every learned person at the time would write, you know, so, but then then you start thinking, Okay, I'm writing in this language, will I be understood by how many? What are the options? I mean, that question, what we call in Italian we call "la question de la lingua", which continue to come right away to you know, people think of it that way, you know, by the people associate Italy, you know, as we've always been there, but the truth is, we've been there as Italy only since 1861. Before then we were a culture northstate each of which had its own language, its own dialect, its own currency, its own politics, its own way of doing things. So partly through exile. It's interesting because Daniel writes this book called De Vulgari Eloquentia, which is  a treaty on the purposes of having a sort of announced vernacular as a shared language and he abruptly, he finished his book, he wanted to write four books. And then he gets chapter 14, Book Two, and he starts very abruptly, scholars are trying to figure out what happened there. But I think it's a it's a legitimate question. I, I'm, I'm answering you so a little bit by detour. So Petrarch writes 365 sonnets for Laura and he says, sort of say, I'm very sorry, folks. This is now a hideous piece of work, because I'm using the vernacular. And then everybody remembers in forever vanacular, nobody knows. I mean, unless you're a scholar, of better it's not  right. So something sometimes things happen for a reason. You want to unify in a in a group of people in society, you want to find a way to be readable and accessible. As a writer, myself, I want to be read by as many people as possible and I have a choice, am I going to read and write in a language that only a certain group will will read? And then the other question would be, you know, I think Dante had a pretty learned reader in mind when he when he wrote the Commedia because all the allusions all the potential, so the references to the sources that are now made explicit in footnotes, so weren't exactly they're at the time, so he sort of assumed that people would recognize them. I remember a scholar, we shall leave him nameless, because he was one of my mentors, and I love them dearly said, you know, the Divine Comedy is an appendix to the Aeneid. I think it's a bit of a, it's a bit of an a, it's a bit of an exaggeration. But you know, there are a lot of there are a lot of similarities. And you can see that but so the question is, you know, you want to be learned, you want to be read, you want to be accessible, you want to make money, you want to become famous, you want the court to love you, these are all the questions and I think, at some point you, you go around, you find and that's what Manzoni also did Manzoni wrote,  I promessi sposi , which is another love story, if you like. And he wrote it in Milan, it is set in Milan, and then some point he says  let me go to Florence. He says, To wash to wash my clothes in the Arno. So to purify the language so that he loses dialectal and sort of foreign influences, and it becomes more accessible and readable by everybody now, that's what 1840 So that's 20 years before Italy has anything but a geographical unification. So the ante in a way sets in motion La question de la lingua, what is the language we're gonna write about end? Just before i think a little bit before, you know this, you know, the poets were writing in various forms of proto Italian. And if you ask me, it is very different from Latin is certainly very different from Virgil's Latin, but language evolved, like we do language age, you know, every language ages through time to get in contact with other languages it gets. I don't like to use the word corrupted, it gets contaminated or it gets, you know, gets yeah into contact with our linguistic possibilities. And who else but a writer can understand those points of contact better. And every serious writer will ask themselves the question, which language am I going to write now? If we want to make it make it an issue in a political issue? Yeah, let's make it a political issue. You know, at some point, it becomes an issue of power balance, you know, indigenous people, the Maori here in New Zealand, some of them right in Maori. and they have a very limited readership, others they do a counter colonial, post colonial revenge, they take English and making English become their voice. So the question of which language I'm going to write in and why will always going to be there. And I think someone like you with a hyphenated identity having, you know English and Chinese, you'll be voicing different issues or different missions or visions about what you want to do and who you want to be through  language. We are using this language with literary intentions, you're making a statement, and then people will say, all right, why. So then from then on, Italian, develops out of literary Tuscan. But if somebody else had said, and they could have said, I mean, you know, where poetry is born poetry was born in the country of Frederick the second in Sicily, the first sonnet, cello dahl come before all these people there, they're there, if somebody there said, Alright, this is the Italian literal language from now on, we're using this one. But anyway, so that's how we started. I think that's why I love Italian so much, because there are multiple, multiple origins and languages in it that have made it what it is. And yes, we descend from Latin, but it's a long journey that is still continuing today.

In your opinion, why does Divine Comedy and especially inferno attract Anglophone translators most?

It's a very good question. I mean, for starters, it's what I call, it's a three dimensional book, you know, you like this idea of, of, we all like a bit of Crime and Punishment stuff, you know, if you have, if you speak too much, you're going to be burning in hell and not being able to speak, you know, if you had too much sex, or if you were adulterous, then you're going to be chasing the person you want to be and you're never touched. So this idea of, you know, sort of Manichaean black and white good, right and wrong, and we are all sort of very feel very human, every single possible aspects of humanity, from sex to food, politics, loyalty, disloyalty. They're all there. So they're very real stories, we can understand them now. Purgatorio and Paradiso, it becomes for many very theological, very abstract, it's all about like the music and whispers, you know, so inferno has this and if you think about, you know, a lot of dance or a lot of Danters, translators into English, they were Victorian, even Protestant minister, your people have said, Oh, here we've got example, you if you don't behave, you don't leave. This is what happens to you. And fantastic rather than letting the Bible tell you that why not use a work of literature to do that? I was astonished to see how many priests and pastors and ministers try to translate Divine Comedy. I remember this guy in Nottingham, it was Reverend Plumtree who translated the first five cantos of inferno sends him on to Cardinal Newman sort of regionally says, oh, yeah, thank you. Yeah, they're not too bad, you know. And then he says, I was reading someone else's translation, and it made me fall asleep. But it's clearly as I say everyone would recognize in Inferno, and maybe that's the purpose of oh, I've done that. Oh, yeah. Oh, I see what he talks. So they're very real stories, and stories that we can relate to. And also, the idea of going through dark times. Whether it's a forest or your room, because you're depressed, or your office, because you're being bullied, or the trenches of war in Ukraine, will we are all going through some form of hell in one way or another, I can, I cannot think of one person I know that hasn't been through hell and back ones. So that that is a very relatable story. Now if you're telling people about the earthly paradise, loads of birds and lovely fruits and vegetables, and it's warm, and you don't need any clothes, then I say, okay, I can go to summer. And that's exactly it earthly paradise exist. But as George Steiner said, earthly paradise must have been very boring. You know, you don't need language. You have direct communication with God, you're completely pure. Everything is perfect, actually, barring a thrower, but in fact, I don't know that you've got the jewels that you see the good and bad of humans more bad than good. But as always, open data gives you that, you know, it tells you Canto III go through this door, there's no hope but he he's a firm believer  you know, he's even in Inferno and with the stars, you know, you've come up we come up to see the stars again. Also, I often thought I haven't done a lot of research into this, but I've I've spent a lot of time with Buddhist and Hinduist friends, and we advise with spiritual, scholars and sages and Nirvana, you know,  nirvana. I'm simplifying things about Nirvana, which is display of realisation. In Sanskrit it means out of the forest. In, you know, in. If you think of, again, I'm bringing things a little bit, pushing the envelope a little bit here. If you think of people like Yali Khrishna, for example,  now, the founder who came to America, he was a husband and he was a father. But what does he do? Because that's what his spiritual path is. He leaves the family, he leaves the wife being taken care of by his children. And he goes to the forest. That's what the sage does. He goes to the forest, you enter the forest, you become enlightened, and you leave it. Now, what's the name that the lot? What's the Latin name for Forrest? The Latin people had this great idea to call things by their opposite. So they called "war" ("bellum"). So ugliest thing, the ugliest thing you can think of they call it bellum. And they call the forest where things are dark they call it lucus, which is where there were word light comes. So again, it's that experience that we can all relate to, we need to go through darkness to find the light. And Dante does that I often think that some of these depiction of monsters punishment specially towards the end, when you get Lucifer that has got three mouths, you know, chewing sinners at the same time. Now, when I was in, in Myapu in India, and in a monastery learning a bit of Sanskrit, I saw all this depiction of, you know, the gods and goddesses, they're now  that it's eating Hiranyakashipu and he's chewing it with all his mouth. So this multiple multiple headed multiple mouth, you start thinking where did Dante get this is not necessarily or entirely Christian, then I started fantasizes, there may be some books have come through the merchants to Florence God only knows but the story is very simple. We are human, we are fallible, we make mistakes, we go through hell. And if we're lucky, we come back from it. 

In November 2007. The most popular clip on YouTube in Italy featured the actor Roberto Benigni reciting canto five of the inferno to a group of theater audience. This makes me wonder how difficult it is to translate a poem into English that is hard to echo the rhyme of the original. And what is Dante even in translation wholly without rhyme?

It is a wonderful question. Now, if you remember the cover of my book, I put a very grumpy face. I get up grumpy looking down for a reason. I think when you translate. So when you separate meaning from the language that he was enveloped in, you break the legame musaico you break a bond and that bond is lost. And every effort to rebuild it in another language is somewhat short. So yes, but you know, tough we told him you didn't want to be translated. Look at this book, and we're giving you two translations. Each are clearly a different experience. Now Roberto Benigni being so popular, you often wonder, you know, he'd been in you went on television and read Sudoku, you probably would have as wide an audience. So clearly, there's a there's a conversation there about popularizing an author like Dante, that for a modern audience, it's difficult. I have no shame in saying that if I read Dante, as an academic, I still have issues with the language. In other words, there are bits of it that I need to stop and get help or look at the notes or see what is this word? So I have no shame in saying that. And I would challenge every damn scholar on the planet if they can tell me as native speakers I understand every word but I don't believe it, not because it's not possible because that's also part of the beauty. So there's two different conversations so the Benigni popularizing bringing down tech on the scene reading it out loud. It's it's absolutely fine. I mean, Benny, reading him is like an audiobook. You have this wonderful, popular actor, very famous. And I think it's a nice way of bringing this author in this book that you study in school, you find difficult, you have the illusion that if you hear him, it's like when you read a book and when you're listening to it on audiobook, you read Ulysses on the page, it defeats you after five minutes, you may find the audiobook, a different experience. So that's one story when it comes to translation. I think that I'm not I'm not like I don't I disagree with Frost. You know, I don't think that poetry is what get lost in the translation actually, the poetry is what survived translation. Now then we can discuss there are good translators and translators that are successful and other aren't successful. It's a different experience. And I'll finish the answer with one example. Clearly down to us, you talked about rhyme. Dante uses the term terza rima. Why does he uses it? He uses the term terza rima for two reasons. One, the term terza rima, is still logical Father, Son and Holy Spirit is three in italian. Okay? But more importantly, I think from a writerly point of view it is a forward, it's like an engine that propels the narrative forward. It's very clever. It's like a chain. Now. Why do I like Clive James's translation so much? Because he said, Alright, I forfeit the third terza rima. And then I can hear all the all the scholars of Danta saying, well, you're surrendering a big part, the very important theological component of Dante's language. Now, Clive James, his ex wife was one of the most influential and learned Dante scholars have come across. So he's not doing that, you know, easily, but what he does, instead he chooses the quatrain, which is as the same effect for English as that propelling forward motion, then we can discuss bits of Clive's translation that we like others that we like more, like less, but I find in Clive James is that sort of very nice forward moving a narrative that makes the poem accessible. Now, if somebody wants to be a purist and say whatever they want to say, well then dissolve one solution, study Italian study, medieval Italian study Dante the medieval Italian, read the original, and we're going to be here in 300 years discussing this again, I think it's our duty as humans is to share the gifts that we have in our own cultures and languages. And so I always favored translation. In fact, we have a lot to learn, even from translations that are not successful. We learn more from translation that are not successful, that from those who are.

We need that attitude in today's academia, about your 2017 book to hell and back an anthology of Dante's Inferno in English translation, a project you collaborated with your student, Timothy Smith, could you talk about why this particular editorial choice by collecting different versions to form a whole and continuous narrative?

Yes. Now I give, I'm gonna give Tim a bit of extra time. I just wanted to congratulate him he got his PhD from Oxford last week and in ancient history, so Congratulations to Dr. Smith now. When When Tim was a student, an undergraduate student, and then he did his thesis in with me and literary translation, he titled The dethroning Dante. And we often talked about that passage in Commedia, where he does say you break the music, you know, that bond. And, and Tim has a wonderful disposition towards bibliography. So we started looking, you know, at all these translations that were there, and I said to him one day wouldn't be nice to have to do an anthology. And Tim parts, many years ago, reviewed some new translations and the title of his new I think it was from The New Yorker, they know, the New York Review of Books, they thought was To Hell and Back, that is a phrase. So that's the to hell and back, literally, we did that we went to hell. So 1 to 33. And then we came back in there we compare and we tried to match is subjective. We chose our pairings for a reason, sometimes, two ministers, two poets, two women, or, you know, a teacher and a student that kind of that was the thinking, and we knew we knew from day one that some old fashioned, pedantic, boring, whatever, in some, whatever university would have come and say, That doesn't work because you cannot read the inferno backwards. Well, that isn't the point. But we even I even asked the publisher at some point, can we do it in a way that you can flip the book. That's the way we originally thought of it. So that there was no distinction of going to hell, and coming back was just one continuous reading, but even even as it is, and when I have an electronic copy, you can click the chapters you can move, you can say, Okay, let me see what happened in this place at this time. Or let me see this academic. What job you need. Oh, let me see what ...needed with this. And, you know, it's just it's a choice like any I believe, it's like when you do when you translate all this, i tell my students. I'm interested in the explanation. If you tell me why you're doing what you're doing, then we may disagree. I may say Well, I disagree with the way you did it, but you need to legitimize it. And our mission was very simple was to sort of document the variety of styles, prose, poetry, rhyming no rhyming . And I was very, very happy to be able to do it while Clive James was still alive. Because I have a lot of time. I have a lot of time for him. And yeah, it's much missed. And I think, yeah, when when I was asked not long ago, you know which translation of Dante that I would recommend students who said, well, read Clive's, this is a wonderful reading. And then from then on, you can find one that you prefer.

Can we look closely into one or two examples of these translated cantos, which you think are culturally significant and linguistically daring? In the process could you please talk about what is the underlying logic of pairing and comparing two translators the same canto at a time?

 So let me just share the screen. 

Cool. 

Okay. And so here it is. Now. So if we go to Allen Beck so we the I think there's
a moment ago, I saw that the, the cover, and you may say, Why do you want to cover I want to cover because the cover as that grumpy face, so here we go. So let's start from the grumpy face. Okay. So that's our chronological range. So we go from from quite a bit further back to in fact, 2017. So So here's to him, very grumpy. So here's how the book looks like. So here on the, on the left hand side of the screen of my screen, I have all the cantos, right? So for instance, let's start from counter one. Now, imagine that you have the most famous line or the most famous lines in literature, in the midway of these are mortal life. Not exactly my favorite intrepid in translation, and we look down and we see, this was done by Henry Francis Carrie 1805. It's one of I, one of my friends, in fact, Eduardo Crisafulli, who happens to be of all of all, in all places, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Kyiv. So he left he left Kyiv, when, when, when the war broke up, he wrote his PhD on this translation during doing exactly what we couldn't do in detail here. We're just doing it at face value, showing what it felt like to do this translation in the  1800s. Okay, now, who did we pair in with so we continue, are we going fine 10 to one, which will be at the very end of the book. And let's go down and see what what we have here as a translator. So we've got Ned Danny. Now, this is a genius in 1975. We publish this before his own book came out, which is titled B. And I think he has chosen different words for Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, all beginning with B now, in the midst of the struggle of this life that Sam called Good, I, that's fantastic. I mean, even just the choice of the word stroll Is life a stroll, but there's a, there's a sort of a fresh air, modern, almost cheeky, colloquial upbeat things. And I can assure you that behind this translation, which is done in stanzas of 12 lines, if I remember correctly, 123456789101112 each stands in stance of 12 lines, and it's all astrological. Ned explain to me why he picked 12. And I jokingly said, you know, it's one line for every apostle. But you can see, similarly, I'm going to try and find so you can search it in different ways, like your traditional way. So I'm gonna go to my, because I'm working on him at the moment, I'm gonna go to Muchini and try to find these translations. So Canto three. So we're going to go to Canto three. And Seamus, this translation is right here. So here's the entry to a real inferno here, you've got the door that says there's no hope, you know, abandoned hope, or you go through me now. Muchini. And that's the reason why, for example, I'm talking about him with you. Has an experience that many readers have, he reads, Dante as an undergraduate in translation, he can't finish it, because there's not ready for it. And he was very well equipped because it's he had studied Latin, he had studied Virgil and MA in school at university. This doesn't, doesn't quite happen, but then something does happen. He is conscious of what happens in the north and the tribal, where you have sectarian struggles between Catholics and Protestants. Where religion apparently is the reason for discrimination and violence. And if you ever happen to be in Dublin and you go to the National Library of Ireland where Muchini, his papers are now kept. You will see his translation of Guglielmo  that dramatic not discounted by Another one that dramatic Canto where someone is punished for being a traitor, politically and is putting them in a tower and starve to death with his children. Now, some political prisoners in Northern Ireland, starve themselves to death. So clearly, there you have a poet who wants to preserve his integrity as a poet and his independence as a human as a citizen and wants to talk about the North. He wants to talk about political struggles and strife and violence. He wants to talk about what happens the story of Guglielmo is perfect and it's Muchini explain himself in an a flaming  beautifully in an interview, he does say, Alzigmandenstan, who, if you haven't read it, Alzigmandenstan's essay on Dante is probably the best essay ever written and in their mind wisdom says you know when you read Dante, Dante always as the feeling of a prism visit there is the urgency of a prism visit and most of them are prism be so imagine, Muchini reads that talks he thinks about the prisons in Northern Ireland, the mace prison Catholic IRA, activists who are for better for worse upholding their own beliefs are denied the rights of political prisoners, they decide to starve to death. So Dante becomes a metaphor. So is he is writing is writing is translating medieval Florence and Dante's Inferno, but he's actually writing about Belfast in the early 1970s. By the same token he also says but a works of literature is also independent you do it for the joy of it, and that's when he also says the reading Dante gave him such a charge that he decided he was going to do the Inferno the whole Inferno and here we have Canto three but that's where it ends it couldn't go past Canto three because he didn't have as he said, Enough purchase of the Italian and of the terza rima to be to be producing something that would be rewarding for 34 candles. But the first three is there so here we've got canto three, we got the back and we see another canto three so let's see the opening line here "through me it leads to the city sorrowful" . So there are ........ sort of that's the line that's Dante's line, and in canto here "through me the way enter the suffering city through me the way to the eternal pay through me the way that runs among the lost. And whose voice is this we see I don't even remember all the translator. This is Oh yeah, my again, I have a lot of time for him and I beloved Alan Mandelbaum. He was his translation when he was published. Got a bit of criticism from other other Dante scholars then other Dante translators, Alan Mandelbaum's was wonderful, fine poem, poet translator of Italian poetry, including Quasimodo, I got to know him very late in life. I still have his pictures here in my office and of all people. The meals we were talking about their creature the meals of another Italian poet Burma Brandeis, who was teaching at Bathe College at the time, a Dante scholar answered the critics by defending this translation. So I guess you know, if you even just look at the book this way the to hell and then the way back for us it was a way of showing different engagement with the text different registers of English from different continents. I think we've got English I don't think we've got India, but we've got English you know, from we've got from Scotland, Ireland, UK, America, Canada, Australia, other parts of the a variety of of internations. And this of course, goes to the universality talks about the universality of Dante and then one of the things I always say to my students, the best way to remember that is to pick up a passage or a line that really matters to you and learn Italian and then the joy is not to criticize the translation in our clothes are good or bad or fluid or not fluid  is but it is to say, you know, this adventurous journey know how close are we getting to the message that Dante's saying. And I'll finish off with just one remark if you go back to canto one.
But I'm gonna go back to canto one here and now. How many ways can you have to translate ......? You know, at some point you're gonna run out of option. But a good point. And a good translator is someone who does create and regenerate options all the time. And I think this ontology, we could have gone on, we could have gone on and on, because I think what happens is when we get to the book, I think there's more after this. We're starting again, I think that's what happened. That's what we decided to do with Tim. Yeah, we started again, we start to get from canto one. And I think it's Clive James's that I, yeah. See, we're starting again to go through hell, we come back, and then we start again. And this can continue. So hopefully, I don't know maybe in 20 or 30 years, someone can extend this to not do a third round and go, go back to hell. Go all the way back to out and then come back.

That is the coolest project I have ever met. About also about that playful and creative book of yours titled Quantum of Dante, whose signature ant algorithm playfully invades the entire text. Could you tell us why the quantum of Dante per se, and why the word "ant" becomes this Borg-like simulating and devouring force that drives the texts? 

That's a very, you, you asked me very nice questions. Now. There's, there's two there's two coincidences here. Okay. So one is, I was teaching a class of, broadly speaking, Comparative Literature. And I used a passage, which is in quantum of Dante, at the end of the story of story from Vedic literature, Vedic wisdom. Again, I'm very drawn to those texts, and is the story of essentially a servant, a slave and a king. And the king is looking, you know, the king has been you, we can associate images and metaphors and symbols, the way we like, but it started very simple. Someone needs, it's needed to perform a task. And the king ask someone else to find this person to help carry the king around on a pilot king. And they identify this guy to say, oh, it's big, strong, perfect. So on they go, but then the pilot is starts to wobble. And the king gets really annoyed. So they thought you gave me this guy who's strong, but look, he can't even do his job. And the servant replies, the king, Your Majesty, I saw a file of ants. And I didn't want to crush them. So he wobbled because he's avoiding them. And, of course, in Vedic wisdom, you know, the most minut, of, of, of, of the animal. And of course, the king realizes that he's not a slave that he's talking to, but he's talking to a wise man to the incarnation of God, Himself. And so I was I was, I had this image of of and, and at the time, I also had not not only infestation but there was a little colony of ants traveling in my kitchen, they were coming and going, and I could see them and I of course didn't want to kill them. Fire me so and for were playing with my mind at the time and then one day I was I was literally staring at the image you're looking at, say, What can I do to you Dante that I haven't already done and that there I saw the there I said, there's the end, there's the Anton, the name and I'm gonna do something so quantum, you know, I thought of quantum of, you know, Quantum of Solace, you know, that is a double of seven feet. And also quantum is you know, of course the it's a word that thing Joyce's uses in Finnigan's Wake, and that's been taken by physicists. And it's also some sort of deal that you pay when you do something wrong, some sort of penalty, you gotta pay so so I'm gonna run through this. And then the story took an interesting turn. So I fabricated this idea that the first Italian who came to New Zealand carried a copy of of the Commedia with him. And because we know that his name is Antonio Antonio Ponto, so Antonio and was also there in the name of Antonio ponto, the first Italian who came over, he came by boat and often the soil used for ballast in the boats would have answered it. And the ant is not an indigenous animal in New Zealand, so someone must have brought in some app. So all the stories started to happen. And then of course, there's this wonderful, you'd love him. Chinese New Zealand or illustrator call An Tsang, it's short for Anthony, I think. And I said to him, Can you can you do if you look at if you look at his work on his website, it's amazing, you know, is you can clearly see he is mediating between us, you know, Chinese and New Zealand, culture or identities. And I said, Can you just do 10 ants for me in different positions, and I'm gonna pepper them around the book. And and I don't know if you noticed, but every time the three letters appear in the book, of course they are emboldened. But what happens at the very last, the very last occurrence of the last three letters, the ant is actually going into the text.
So the ant has moved from the margins has gone in instead of the letters. So when I launched this book alongside the other anthology, or people said, What is this? And often I'm in the bookshop. The book is still there. And people don't know I'm the editor, I can hear people saying, What is this? Why these what does it mean? That's right. Yeah. It's a it's a playful take on the Commedia. Well, one thing that I have the look of it, it's a very small book. I think I have it somewhere when it's a very small book, it feels like what a medieval book would have looked like the internal of it looks like a Bravia like one of those prayer books, and I've relinquished lines complete. It's like one it's like Finnigan's Wake, it's one large, one big long window of text, but it's all comedy. And then at the end, I wrote a little essay to explain what happened. And there's a gift, there's actually a little gift at the very end. The first sentence of Inferno is translated into Maori, the indigenous language of New Zealand for the very first time. And there's also the work. And in Maori, they're hidden in the text also. So it was a bit of a playful coffee, little coffee table book.

Quantum identity is a fun work. It's such a fun work that you did during the COVID pandemic, actually, which I think is very timely inspiring. Another book you also completed during this period is titled, “More favorable waters: Aotearoa poets respond to Dante's purgatory”. This is actually second book, you collaborated with your students Timothy Smith. So what gives you guys the inspiration to put contemporary New Zealand poets in conversation with Dante?

Well, it's, again, a way of testing the relevance of Dante, and our initial plan was to do a trilogy. So we've done to Alan Beck, is it fair? No, we said, we're gonna do something with Purgatorio. And then we'll do something with Paradiso. Now, the reason for More Favorable Waters is geographical. When Dante, you know, goes down, in fact, no, and comes out on the other side of the planet. He describes Southern Cross is not quite New Zealand geographically, precisely, but it's close enough for us to think that Purgatorio is right here. So, and the way that Dante describes the Southern Cross, very moving, when you see the Southern Cross, you know, and you think that in the early you know, in the 1300s, Dante was able to describe the southern cross so, so beautifully. And so we thought, okay, let's recreate the mountain, or the heel or whatever, of of Purgotary in New Zealand. And rather than going for translation, this time, we went for creative translation. So we gave a passage from the turkey, three counters for each poet that we chose 33 poets from New Zealand and the variety of styles, ethnicity, age, sexuality, whatever, it's actually a wonderful rainbow collection from every point of view. And some of the stories some of the cantos are beautiful. Some of the poems that were written are just beautiful. And as we speak, the Italian edition of of this has just come out in translation where 33 Italian poets have translated the 33 poets from New Zealand. So a motivation geographical ..., is here. Also, I think it's such key is pretty well, it's not too theological is not too brutal to Inferno. And New Zealand is a wonderful place. I think, even the landscape. The book cover was the result of a book cover competition were launched. So we asked New Zealand illustrators to create the cover. And if you saw the images at you know, we got some wonderful entries, as some of them have. Have all the cultural symbolism of New Zealand now the book that the cover has actually been chosen. And as the book cover, was the publishers choice was the publishers favorite. It was a mine I had another favorite and then the one that I had, I might show show it to you another time was so beautiful because it was so New Zealand was actually a it's a postcard from New Zealand. So here we are trending down there, purgatorio from the place that describes the well even if it wasn't able to come.

I would rather have you keep talking for three days or maybe more than that, but we do are running out of time. Just want to say thank you so much Marco for sharing your expertise, but you really manage make Dante's such a fun read. Well, thanks again for coming to the show.

You're very welcome, Claire, and thank you for inviting me My pleasure.