Funny as Hell (Inferno, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Dante's Inferno, translator Michael Palma discusses his own history with the poem and how he came to translate it, the terza rima rhyme scheme Dante employs, and in what ways the Divine Comedy is really a comedy. 

Michael Palma is the award-winning translator of Diego Valeri and Guido Gozzano, among others. He has published four collections of his own verse: The Egg Shape, Antibodies, A Fortune in Gold, and Beginning Gladness, and he has also published the title Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Inferno, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/InfernoNL.

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Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/Inferno/part2/transcript.

Transcript

[Music] 

[Mark:] you are listening to the Norton library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Chirino with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Dante's Inferno, as we interview its translator Michael Palma. In Part 1, we discussed Dante's Life and times, his masterpiece the Divine Comedy, and the particular significance of the Inferno. In this second episode, we learn about Michael's own history with Dante, the terza rima technique, and the unexpected moments of humor Dante includes. Michael Palma is the award-winning translator of Diego Valeri and Guido Gozzano among others, and he has published 4 collections of his own verse: The Egg Shape, Antibodies, A Fortune in Gold, and Begin in Gladness, and he has also published the title Faithful in my Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry. We are so happy to have him with us today. Michael Palma, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast!

[Michale:] Thank you very much! it's a delight to be back.

[Mark:] I'm looking forward to learning more about Dante's Inferno and your relationship to it. The first thing I want to observe about it—I'm looking at the gorgeous Norton Library Edition—how would you describe it, Michael? We have a crimson cover with gold lettering for the title and black lettering for the author. Do you think that's appropriate? 

[Michael:] Yes, very much so. Certainly, the crimson is quite appropriate. It's very difficult to imagine any edition of the Inferno in which the cover would not prominently feature some variation of red, and the author's name in black has a kind of an authority to it. And the gold of the title Inferno, I suppose, could be considered certainly an indication of the quality of the work, and although it's not appropriate to the Inferno per se, [it brings out] a sense of the ultimate hopefulness that Divine Comedy seeks to communicate, which is why, after all, it's comedy in classical terms. Comedy did not necessarily connote what it does today in terms of mirth, hilarity, and amusement, but basically as distinct from tragedy, in which the protagonist begins in a good position and comes to ruin, usually through some personal defect—the famous tragic flaw. In tragedy, the thrust seems to be the suggestion that, in the end, our own weakness and infirmity and the forces arrayed against us will prove too much, and we will be destroyed partly—self-destroyed, whereas comedy suggests that, with understanding and resolve, our problems are such that we have the means within us to overcome them and to achieve a happy ending, so the Divine Comedy is a comedy in the sense that the promise of salvation is real and available to anyone who will come to the realization of the stakes that are being played for in this life [,and our life] will straighten up and fly right in the end.

 [Mark:] it's wonderful to think that way, and that that cover renders all of this and evokes all of that is a is a beautiful concept. Anyway, the Norton Library always produces attractive, meaningful covers, so it's great to hear you talk about it. Michael, when did you first encounter Dante and the Inferno? 

[Michael:] Originally in college. I took a course called “Masterpieces of World Literature,” and in the first half of the two-semester course, of course, Dante's inferno was concluded. I forget now who the translator was in the edition that the instructor had assigned. I do remember it was really a very literal, plain translation. It was divided on the page with line by line equivalency to the original text to give the illusion of a poem. But other than the fact that the lines didn't go all the way to the right-hand margin, there was nothing in the least poetic about that particular translation. And while it's impossible to read, I think, any translation of the Inferno without getting something of value from it, this translation was certainly not designed to give me any appreciation of the true magnificence of the work. I didn't begin to read it in Italian, interestingly enough, until much later. I began writing poetry in my teems, began publishing it in my early 20s. And as I was approaching the age of 30, I began to translate, even though at the time I begin to translate had no familiarity with the Italian language. I was raised in the Bronx by parents whose own parents had come from Italy, and Italian around the house was the language my parents used when they didn't know well enough to know what they were saying, so from the beginning Italian to me was something other—something that wasn't for me, something that was to exclude me. In college, I prefer the French, German, and Russian authors—all in translation, of course, along with the ones in English—and did not pay much attention to Italian literature. I suppose in some ways I was in flight from my heritage.  Being Italian in the neighborhood made me just like everybody else, but being Italian and college was a very different matter at that time. Around the time I turned 30, I began to feel deracinated, began to feel that I wanted to get into closer touch with my own heritage and decided to teach myself as best I could and, of course, it would always be a very imperfect Italian education. I thought the best way to do this—since I was a poet since my entire life in one way or another, revolved around words and expression—was to find some nice little Italian poet who hadn't been translated yet and teach myself what I could have attained by translating that poet. The poet I hit upon was Guido Gozzano, an early 20th century poet. The upshot is that six years after I began this enterprise my translation of Gozzano was published by Princeton University Press’ The Lockert Library Series. For the next 20 years or so, I continue translating modern and contemporary Italian poetry with no sort of Dante. And then in 1994, there began an event that has been extremely important to me in the intervening 30 years: the annual reading at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City of the Inferno in English translation in various traditions. At the beginning the entire text was read, and every reader got to read a complete canto. By the time we were done and came outside, we could no longer see the stars; over the years it has evolved into selected cantos, usually being split between two different readers. The first year that I was asked to participate in the inaugural reading—like everyone else, I'm sure—I just grabbed the translation—in my case, Mandelbaum’s—off the shelf and read that. Afterwards, I thought if they do this again next year and ask me again, I think I'll take a whack at doing my own translation, so I translated Canto 6 through that iteration of the reading. And then the year after that, I was asked again and I translated Canto 13. At this point I began to think “I don't want to spend 34 years doing this,” so I decided to just plunge in and do the entire Inferno.

[Mark:] So how much has your translation of Conto 6 and Canto 13 changed over the last decades for this edition?

[Michael:] it's changed a bit—not as much as you might think. I don't know whether that's a good thing or bad. I'll leave that to others to determine, but I found ways to make the rhymes more regular; I found ways to make the colloquial passages sound more colloquial and less stiff ways; I found ways to heighten the rhetoric where it needed to be heightened, but there was not a substantial change in terms of the phrasing or my understanding of what was going on in those cantos.

[Mark”:] In the first episode, Michael, we were talking about some of the challenges to reading the Inferno, and I mentioned that all of the characters that Dante meets along the way through his journey to hell. Some of them—most of them—are unfamiliar. Is that the main challenge to reading this text? What do you hear from students from other readers that might be difficult to penetrate with Dante's Inferno?

[Michael:] I don't really interact with many people on the subject of the Inferno except the ones who read with me every year at the cathedral, and of course they are pre-sold audience. These are people obviously who love Dante, or they wouldn't be participating in the first place, so I don't really hear a good deal of this sort of thing describing. I've looked at comments, of course, on certain websites, whether it be the Amazon, readers comments on various translations, or whatever. Certainly, as you suggest, what would be the greatest bar to appreciating the poem is the multiplicity of people, some real, some mythical that most of us have never heard of and know nothing about; there’s a need to burn up some measure of steam in order to fully appreciate their function in the poem, not only what the meaning of what they say and do, but the larger thematic meaning of their presence in the poem. Another thing, though, is that I've seen voice—and heard—that said that for some people it's an impediment is, of course, the doctrinal element of the poem. For example, limbo. It’s clearly hard cheese, from our point of view, that the people who lived before Christ are condemned to an eternity of desolation and denial of the presence of God for now having done something that they had no possibility of doing. Also, even beyond the more universal elements of Catholic doctrine of the 13th century, Dante had some peculiarities of his own. The structure of hell, for example, as Dante presents it. Most of us find it hard to conceive of a divine justice that punishes murderers and tyrants less severely than people who said no in answer to the question like “do these jeans make me look fat?” But essentially this is what's happening in the Inferno, and the explanation, as Virgil gives it—I'm not sure exactly what this means psychologically for either Dante or for me—in canto 11, where Dante gives, through Virgil’s explanation, are key to how Dante's hell is structured. I found one of the most entertaining cantos to translate. I found putting into rhyme and meter what is essentially a somewhat dry disquisition about the depravity of some human nature a rather a pleasant challenge. But his hell is structured in that sins of appetite are punished less severely than others. That is, activities which in and of themselves are not evil, such as eating, drinking, having sex, but when they are indulged into an extreme or in an inappropriate context, obviously that is when they become sins, and that is why they are punished, but they're punished less severely than sins of violence, which is not in and of itself, but a healthy human activity. Sins of the violence are punished less severely than sins of fraud and betrayal because sins in this third category are the only ones that distinguish us from animals. Animals eat, drink, and copulate, and animals are violent with one another. But animals don't lie, animals don't counterfeit, animals don't say one thing and do another and betray the people to whom they owe loyalty, and so on. So it is the sins that involve a perversion of the faculty of reason, which God has presumably instilled to enable us to know and love and serve him to understand what we must do to achieve salvation and perverting that to one's own base and personal ends: this is the category of the most serious things; therefore on this it sounds like lying is worse than killing by that structure.

[Mark:] And what about the punishments that Dante chooses to associate with each particular crime?

[Michael:] The so-called contrapasso, or the fitting of the punishment for the crime, the place at which the term itself is invoked the contrapasso is in the 28th canto in the appearance of Bertran de Born, the Troubadour, who carries his head—shades of Washington Irving, perhaps—outstretched like a Lantern before him. The sinners in this canto, heretics and others who sowed discord, are punished by those who caused separation of father from son, of believer from the truth, and so on and so forth. They're punished, by being separated themselves, by having their bodies horribly mutilated and even severed into pieces. The gluttons are punished by being plunged into, as Dante says—they're in the mess stewing, in the mess that looks as if it came from latrine. It’ll surprise people to discover by the way that Dante can be quite vigorously specific, explicit, and vulgar when he’s discussing digestive processes and their waste products, and yet, at the same time—perhaps probably perhaps not—he's rather prudish in matters of the human body otherwise, especially the sexual element. His descriptions of sexual activity range from the prudish to the euphemistic, not nearly as explicit as he is in coprological matters 

[Mark:] Speaking of the challenges that we've been describing and approaching this text. I imagine as a translator the obvious one is taking Dante's terza rima and conveying it into English. Can you talk a little bit about what terza rima is, and how its translator might approach it?

[Michael:] Certainly. Terza rima, or shared rhyme, describes the rhyme scheme of the poem which Dante himself devised—created—for the purposes of this poem. The poem is written famously in tercets, or three-line units, and the terza rima comes into it in the first and third line of each of tercets and rhyme with one another, whereas the middle line—or so-called linking rhyme—then becomes the basis of the rhyme for the first and third lines of the next tercets and so on throughout. So when translating, if you're trying to keep the rhymes, you can't really think only in terms of three-line units before going on to the next. You always have to be thinking ahead; you’ll realize that the end sound of the middle line of this tercets is going to be rhyming with the first and third lines of the next one, so simultaneously you have a situation where the three stanzas, or tercets, are independent, and yet interlocking. 

[Mark:] Is it easier to rhyme in Italian or in English? 

[Michael:] It’s immensely easier in Italian than in English. In fact, translators constantly invoke that fact as an excuse for not attempting to keep the rhyme, especially when they translate the Inferno or the rest of the comedy. In fact, the difference is so stark that back in the early days when I was first becoming acquainted with Italian, I took a couple of early free verse poems—very short free verse poems of my own—and try to put some into Italian just to see if I to do it. To me the greatest challenge was keeping the unrhymes, preventing them from being any rhymes in the poem. Now, the fact of this is a challenge to me at least doesn't mean that, therefore, one should just walk away from it. I can understand why a translator would not want to attempt the task of keeping the rhymes, but at the same time to justify it by saying that it was important that keeping the rhymes would interfere with presenting the meaning of what Dante actually says—first of all, I don't really see this is an either/or to the extent that the claim is made, and secondly, that demonstrates a concept of poetry that is not much more sophisticated than the undergraduates: if that's what he meant, why didn't he just say it that way? That a poem is not exactly coterminous with what it says; there's much more going on in the poem than just the content. My feeling was—with Dante and with any other poets that I've translated in rhyme and meter—my feeling is that the poem is a blend of these various components, and we don't read the poem just to find out what it says, and I think people don't read Wordsworth just to get his quote-unquote philosophy of life. Poets are not philosophers; however, many of them may think they are, but poetry is an art, and if you translate what's the poem says without conveying any sense of the art, then it’s useless to do that. I don't think you're being fair to the author or to the reading.

[Mark:] Is there something about terza rima that lends itself to this particular narrative? Why would Dante choose terza rima, such an intricate style, for this particular poem?

[Michael:] Again, as I say, since to me the key to everything that's going on in the commedia is the idea of unity and complexity combined. I think the rhyme pattern is certainly a reinforcement of that. Also the rhymes carrying forward gives the poem a kind of propulsive movement that in some places—or some of the discussion—might seem quite abstruse and static; frankly I would say there are not many 21st century readers who’ll find themselves enthralled by an extended discussion of the 13th century’s understanding of why the moon has dark spots, but if it does then give the poem, as I say, a momentum that it might not otherwise possess them. And quite frankly, having been there myself a number of times in my own poetry, I think part of it, too, is just flexing, just showing off, setting himself a challenge  and demonstrating that, unlike all the little men who are nipping at his ankles, he can do it.

[Michael:] Michael, we ask our Norton Library editors for a hot take, something controversial or counterintuitive, about their text. Is there something about Dante—now you say that you don't talk to very many people about this—that there's like a prevailing thought about Dante's Inferno that you just feel exactly the opposite?

[Michael:] One thing, perhaps, as I said a little earlier, that comedy in this case doesn't mean what we understand by comedy that that nobody should come to Dante's Divine Comedy in the expectation that reading it is going to be a constant struggle to keep control over one's bodily functions, but  at the same time, ironically enough, even though certainly in hell most of what goes on is the furthest thing from what we would understand is comedy. One thing I think that's very much overlooked in many people's understandings of Dante is that there is comedy in our sense of the term in the Inferno. There are a number of places where there are some very sly and understated statements made, as when Dante sees souls being hastened along by demons who are whipping them and makes the point that at the first sting of the lash the sinners hastened on, and then there’s the line “none seems to care to linger for the second or the third”—little slide remarks like that. Another notable instance comes at the end of canto 23, where Dante is talking to a couple of friars who are at, as they describe, the College of Sad Hypocrites and are wearing heavy lead cloaks, just struggling to walk in them through all eternity. Virgil asks the friar the best way to move on to the next circle, and the friar gives him directions that are at variance with those that he got from a demon in the previous canto. When Virgil expresses his surprise that the demon misled him, the fryer says something to the effect that “once in Bologna, I heard a group of men talking about the devil and his vices, and one of them made the point that he is a liar, the father of lies.” At that point you can almost see the smoke coming out of Virgil’s ears at this review. Of course, the most obvious instance of comedy in the Inferno comes in those two preceding cantos, where Dante and Virgil are among these demons, the Malebranche—or as I translate into the term evil clause—where there are some roughhouse, knockabout farces, scatological references, which, except for the last part, would not be out of place in the three stooges, so I think, much certainly, many people would be surprised at that that Dante could joke. You’d think of him of course—with some justice—as being stern forbidding, uncompromising, ready to send everybody off to hell for the slightest infraction, and certainly in all the portrayals of him that we got portraits and his depiction on the covers of various translations you never see him smile, and yet there is wit, and there is irony, and there is even roughhouse and knockabout farce in the Inferno.

[Mark:] As I mentioned in the first episode, your Norton Library edition of Dante’s Inferno is generously annotated, and of all of the notes, though, one that I'm going ask you, Michael, to talk about briefly is a note to canto 4: the phrase that you are explicating is “sixth in their wisdom’s congregation, which apparently Dante is enlisting himself among the great poets of all time.” That got me wondering about Dante's self-awareness or the consciousness of what he's performing as a writer and his legacy.

[Michael:] Yes, it is a startling passage when you first come upon it. These writers among them are, of course, Homer and Virgil, but also there are three others that we might not necessarily consider quite at their level, but the these five are presented in Dante's as the greatest poets of antiquity. The five of them go into a haggle, take peeks at Dante as they're talking among themselves, and then they signaled to him that that they are making him a member of their brotherhood, so basically Dante is telling us “I was elected of the six greatest poets of all time,” which is eye-opening, to say the least. I think we can soften the hubris of all this a bit by putting it into some context. I was saying an instructive place to go for that context is the beginning of the 9th book of John Milton's Paradise Lost, where he has an extended aside, in which he pretty much trashes poets who as he sees it waste their time writing silly love poems and that sort of thing when the only business of life is to get out of it with your soul intact. Something of that attitude, I think, operates in this passage that you cite. Unlike many other poets—one might want to say Dante himself when younger——Dante, well, first, would see his gifts as divinely—his gifts as a poet or whatever they are as being just that gifts, not something that he bought and paid for himself, but that was given to him. He would no more boast of having this great poetic ability than he would boast of having 10 working fingers, or, say, two eyes that worked; therefore, the question is not “does he have this talent,” but why does he have it? And to what use does he put it? Essentially, he's making the claim that he's not wasting his gifts—and again remember that those who are in the deepest pit of hell are the ones who misused gift of reason, so he's been given this gift, and he is, by his lights, using it properly. But God has given him this gift so that he can lead others to an understanding of God's justice and God's mercy and the level of forgiveness that is available. 

[Mark:] Michael Palma, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Dante's Inferno.

[Michael:] Once again, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity! It's been a pleasure. 

[Mark:] The Norton library edition of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, translated by Michael Palma is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.