Andrew Frisardi |
10-16-2012 12:46 PM |
As a postscript to this thread, I want to post this comment (from an Italian Studies listserv, where the review has been discussed) on Vendler's review by one of the leading Dante scholars in America, Steven Botterill, who teaches at Berkeley and has (as you will see) done some Dante translating himself. Basically, he flattens Vendler's argument like a pancake, so if you like pancakes, read on . . . (I quote it with Steven Botterill's permission.)
Quote:
I have followed this correspondence so far with an unusually developed sense of personal involvement: first, because some time ago I wrote an admiring reader's report on Andrew Frisardi's "Vita nova" translation for a university press that, incomprehensibly to me, decided not to pursue the project (so that I am delighted to see that Northwestern UP has now shown better sense!); and second, because when reading Helen Vendler's TNR review of the translation I was surprised to find that she apparently thought herself entitled to quote, on two occasions, my own translation of "De vulgari eloquentia" both as though it were anonymous (which it is not) and as though it were in the public domain (which it is not either). This much, then, as preface to what follows, "since it is required of any theoretical treatment that it not leave its basis implicit, but declare it openly, so that it may be clear with what its argument is concerned;" (DVE, I. i. 2, my translation [!]).
Vendler's review strikes me, by and large, as intelligent and finely observed, like all of her other writings that I have read; but it is very clearly the work of someone so deeply immersed in the assumptions and cultural context on which are based, and out of which emerge, the post-Romantic and Modernist poetries that she knows and loves best, that she is barely capable of even recognizing the danger she courts throughout: namely, that negative consequences might follow from anyone's attempt to read Dante without trying to compensate in advance, as far as possible, for their attachment to that particular parti pris.
A case in point: the notion that the "Vita nova" is somehow "absolutely untranslatable" — or rather that its poems are, since, like all too many readers of Dante's *libello*, Vendler shows no more than a vestigial interest in its prose (she does at least toss Frisardi's translation thereof a couple of well-deserved but still generic compliments, "graceful" and "readable"). This is a stale post-Romantic conceit, as her claim that it is the *heart* that "in the case of certain kinds of poetry … rebels against translation" reveals; and her invocation of the "Convivio" to support her claim ("everyone should know that nothing harmonized according to the rules of poetry can be translated from its native tongue into another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony" — quoted, by the way, from Richard Lansing's translation, with no acknowledgment of the translator this time either) simply will not wash. Sweetness and harmony refer here, as in the "DVE", to the sound-effects created by a poem composed with the (at least implicit) idea of oral performance in mind; and Dante, as book I of the "DVE" clearly shows, was well aware (like any competent linguist today) that the phonological system of a given linguistic variety can never be reproduced exactly, or even approximately, within another variety. But to accept the claim that therefore poetry **in that sense but in that sense only** cannot be translated (a proposition which does seem to me consonant with the sense of the phrase Vendler quotes from the "Convivio") is not necessarily to accept the much more ambitious claim that the poems of the "Vita nova" are "*absolutely* untranslatable" (emphasis added). And a reader using her reason rather than, or even as well as, her heart (as the Dante even of the "Vita nova," let alone of the "Convivio" or the "Commedia," would surely have had her do) might have been expected to grasp, and think about, the difference — and perhaps thus rescue us from anodyne anachronism and tell us something really new.
Similar difficulties surround, I think, Vendler's assertion that Frisardi's translation of the "Vita nova"'s poems into contemporary American English "sits ill with the archaism and medieval manners and sentiment in Dante's fiction" — a remark which Rainer J. Hanshe's generosity of spirit leads him to call "certainly a valid and sensible point." To me, alas, the point seems almost laughably ahistorical and reductive (and Vendler's later jeers at what she sees as Frisardi's failure to live up to standards of contemporariness that she herself ascribes to him seem scarcely worthy of a critic of her reputation). It should surely be unnecessary, after the last few decades of theoretical controversy in literary scholarship, to point out that any "archaism" and "medieval" qualities that the "Vita nova" may be deemed to possess are not "in" its text; they are "in" our (in this case, Vendler's) reading, and they stem from (although they are not imposed upon us by) the pre-existing, and in Gadamerian terms prejudicial, knowledge that the "Vita nova" is seven centuries old and thus can be associated with a period and a culture both now, but of course not then, thought of as "medieval," with such connotations (archaism, sentimentality, whatever) as that term may be thought by the critic to entail.
Dante, alas, had not our advantages, and therefore did not know himself to be medieval or his language to be archaic; thus deprived of the valid and sensible insights of today's scholarship, the poor chap blundered along, doing the best he could with what he had to hand: which, fortunately, happened to be a language not only understanded of the people but being spoken by them at the time he was at work — polished and stylized to a degree by him, of course, especially when "harmonized according to the rules of poetry," but derived from the linguistic practice of, addressed to some (albeit possibly tiny) subset of, and theoretically available to the entirety of, a community of living speakers of that language who were extending the depth of its vocabulary and the parameters of its usage all around him (though less effectively, no doubt, than he!) as he wrote. The language of the "Vita nova" is, in short, an undeniably and necessarily contemporary language, one employed by a chronologically-bounded author communicating his utterance to contemporaries likewise defined, in part at least, by their own location, which they share with the author, in the inexorable flux of time.
But since translators of the "Vita nova" into English in 2012 are located elsewhere in that flux, and can thus no longer communicate directly with an audience from the Florence of the 1290s, it is surely logical, and not perverse, that they should strive to replicate their text's (and I would also say its author's) demonstrable intent, by addressing their own contemporaries in a language that will strike such recipients of their utterance as contemporary. If "perversity" is really what is at issue here, the worst form it could possibly take, in my view, would be either to have translator, text, and implied readership all swathe themselves in pseudo-authentic medieval fancy dress and go around saying "thee" and "thou" and "by my halidom, ladye, I wot not but that thou art a portent glorious, yclept Beatrice" — in which case we would not be *respecting* the text's medieval qualities but *importing* them, ut in praecedente capitulo huius licterae iam dixi (and how's that for archaic, may I ask?) — or to have us scholars and critics declare the enterprise of poetic translation between languages and cultures impossible, give up it on altogether, and thereafter, I trust, have enough decent intellectual consistency to give up our comfortably endowed chairs and our nationwide magazine-reading audiences as well. And if we do that, of course, the "Vita nova," along with everything else written before roughly the week before last, will vanish from view in the twinkling of a couple of student generations' eyes; and the culture of our century, and of all centuries yet to come, will have suffered an irreparable loss of richness and beauty at the hands of its self-appointed guardians and their pinched, ignorant, and anti-humanist standards of poetic decorum.
If Andrew Frisardi and other translator/interpreters of Dante's work in a contemporary vein (Robert Pinsky, Ciaran Carson, Sandow Birk, Roberto Benigni (yes!), "and many others whom an affectionate interest invites us to consult" (DVE II. vi. 8) can help at least push back the hour of our departure down that particular road, it seems to me that they ought to be earning a bit more unqualified gratitude, and a bit less captious carping, from the likes of Helen Vendler.
Best wishes to all, Steven Botterill
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