Eratosphere - Helen Vendler on Andrew Frisardi's Translation of Dante's Vita Nuova

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Helen Vendler on Andrew Frisardi's Translation of Dante's Vita Nuova

This review in The New Republic claims that Dante's Vita Nuova is untranslatable. I guess we are all supposed to learn medieval Italian if we want to read it. Sympathy to Andrew for having attracted the formidable attention and erudition of Vendler only to be told that all that labor of his is for nothing.

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and...adise?page=0,0

Susan

There are a number of factual errors in the review. I sent a letter to the editor at The New Republic about a couple of them (working within the 200-word limit), and for the record I’ll also print that letter here:

Quote:

Dear Editor:

I write to correct two of the errors in Helen Vendler’s review of Dante’s Vita Nova, a book I translated, introduced, and annotated.

One error involves why I spelled the title Vita Nova rather than the better-known Vita Nuova.In Italy, where I’ve been living for thirteen years, recent editions of the Vita Nova are spelled as mine is. The reason for this is not, as Vendler claims, only to reproduce the Latin vita nova (new life) that opens Dante’s story. As my preface explains, in Dante’s time orthography wasn’t standardized, so “new” could be written novo or nuovo. Dante uses both, more often novo. My title’s spelling, then, reflects the archaic, nonacademic flavor of Dante’s Italian, not merely the Latin phrase.

Vendler writes that Dante in the Vita Nova values “the binding of one sound-syllable to another” in his poems far more than the “semantic articulation” in them—i.e., that meanings are overwhelmed by sound patterns. However, many poems in the Vita Nova are well known (to Dante aficionados) for their urgent, dense theological, philosophical, and mystical themes, later developed in the Divine Comedy. My notes section explains this in some detail.

Andrew Frisardi
Orvieto, Italy

Andrew, that sound you hear is applause. I do hope they print your letter.

Andrew,
I am on your side in this battle. I think Ms. Vendler is out of her depth and has raised a real issue about translation that should have been discussed in a different context entirely. To claim that your work is anything less than admirable because poetry-in-translation is no poetry at all is facile and disingenuous.
I am an admirer of HV and her work, generally. But here she has gone too far out ion a very weak limb. I hope, as Janice says, that your rejoinder is published --as I hope my critique of her critical methodology is, as well. You and your work deserve better than this.
Regards, and congratulations, just the same ---on the publication and on garnering Ms V's attention. No small feat, either.
Regards

Thanks, guys. By the say, the Poetry Foundation has put up an announcement of Vendler's review, including a comment that it is "flippant." Maybe that's where Susan first saw mention of the piece: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...o-translation/.

Vendler’s “review” is really her take on La Vita Nuova (not, mind you, La Vita Nova to which she gave scant attention), saying rather oddly that Dante’s earlier work is really so much less satisfying when compared to the Commedia.

Her thesis that this earlier work by Dante doesn’t quite succeed, and consequently remains “untranslatable,” is itself unconvincing. Above all, she wrongfully compares this early work to his most read masterpiece on the account that Dante noted in his Convivio that La Vita Nova is a less mature work. Allowing Dante his own extreme demands of himself as an artist and that one shouldn't always accept how a writer judges his/her own work, maturity doesn’t mean the same thing among all artists. It would be like saying Dubliners is an inferior work because it is earlier (i.e. less mature) than Ulysses. It simply doesn’t follow. The works are only different in kind, not in terms of genius in a thoroughly realized work.

Vendler might as well have called La Vita Nova a literary Frankenstein. Near the outset she claims:

The narrative as a whole tells of the poet’s attachment to the lady Beatrice, and the poems, as printed, appear to be responses to, or illustrations of, the narrative. But this appearance of the book is deceiving: the poems were in fact written first, beginning when Dante was eighteen. Only a few years later—after Beatrice had died and Dante had undertaken the study of philosophy—was the frame-story written to surround those earlier lyrics. The “fit” between the narrative and the poems is consequently uneasy: Beatrice is already dead when the prose narrative begins, but as Dante recollects his youth the “inserted” poems themselves record the ongoing life-chronology of love followed by mourning.

Vendler uses a fact outside the work to call into question the nature of the work itself. That the poetry was written first and the prose second is of no more relevance than to know that a writer wrote chapter 16 before Chapter 9. If she would only point to the areas where the work becomes “uneasy” I would like to know. To this reader and to many others, Dante’s La Vita Nova is a convincing and highly unusual meld of prose and poetry. Not at all devoid of drama.

As for not enough imagery in this work compared to the Commedia, she herself in her book The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets noted that the poet used less imagery than in his plays, at times being quite abstract. Why can't such allowance be made for Dante's work?

Even more odd, Vendler barely disguises her curious disdain for the period in which Dante wrote and lived:

As Frisardi warns us, Dante draws on a vocabulary that is Aristotelian in origin but modified by Christian philosophy from Augustine through Aquinas, a vocabulary as foreign to the modern reader as are the special meanings of the topics it discusses...

Did Andrew “warn” us? Why a warning? I know Vendler is winking at the audience and not being literal. But the wink is telling. As another example, she seems bemused by Dante’s obsession with the number 9 as it relates to Beatrice. But metrical poets and arithmetic are never far apart and why not make allowance for Dante's time and place to take his thought seriously rather than belittle as quaint?

Then this oddest thing of all coming from an academic:

Dante’s fantastic reasoning requires pages of annotation, which Frisardi, drawing on a number of commentators, furnishes to the bewildered reader....

That doesn’t keep me from enjoying the read. She is being patronizing. “Bewildered reader” indeed. The type of person who would likely read La Vita Nova is the kind of person who would likely read La Vita Nova.

One more example:

Poems with defined arguments, plain narratives, or clear images are more readily rendered into another language, because a lyric putting forth an argument or a story, clarified by a montage of realistic images (as in Miłosz), can be substantially carried over into another set of words—or at least its arguments, narratives, and images can. But what of poems with a ghostly narrative, few images, an abstract line of argument, and an aspiration toward transcendent language?

The “ghostly” part? How? And if so, what of it? For someone so, and rightfully, enamored of the Modernists, among whom linearity of thought and argument be damned, Vendler should be more than able to handle whatever obstacles there are in reading Dante’s early work. She isn’t being truthful here. In fact, if you didn’t notice, she goes on about her favorite poets to “show up” the work under discussion. All Andrew’s efforts and success are for Vendler a springboard to discuss her favorite poets and their relationship to Dante. It is that agenda above all that should give Andrew umbrage.

As for archaisms, I believe Andrew was after a contemporary English, not a casual one ill suited to Dante’s layers of thought. Contrary to Vendler's claim, “woman” wouldn’t work as it is a generic term for any adult female human being. I want to hear Dante say “Lady” because it rings true of his time, its ethos, its mores, and its historical situation. “Run away” rather than “flee”? “Flee” is hardly archaic. She claims, One cannot imagine a native American speaker referring to his heart’s demolished core. But then one can’t imagine anyone but a poet who would. "Demolished" is quite urban, even global these days. It conveys both physical and mental/emotional breakdown.

Take heart, Andrew. And it's truly true that no press is worse than bad. Those who know better will stand by your enormous and generous effort. And, as has been said, Vendler "don't pick on just nobody."

Don said

Quote:

Contrary to Vendler's claim, “woman” wouldn’t work as it is a generic term for any female human being. I want to hear Dante say “Lady” because it rings true of his time, its ethos, its mores, and its historical situation. “Run away” rather than “flee”? “Flee” is hardly archaic. She claims, One cannot imagine a native American speaker referring to his heart’s demolished core. But then one can’t imagine anyone but a poet who would. "Demolished" is quite urban, even global these days. It conveys both physical and mental/emotional breakdown.

Of all that riled me, that is exactly what riled me most.

Yes, and "lady" is actually very common in pop songs ("Lay lady lay" etc. etc.). And I had no idea what her objection to "flee" was all about. As for "heart's demolished core," Don, your comment about sums it up, thanks for it. And that's an intriguing parallel between Joyce's early work and Dante's; it's the second time this week I've heard those two authors compared. Joyce liked deflating the "Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper" literary racket, but as one critic said

It is true, as Mr. Joyce's admirers insist, that the greatest classics of literature are very difficult of comprehension; but the difficulty is in the thought content and not in the word construction. The three writers whom Mr. Joyce refers to in this book as "Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper" (Dante, Goethe and Shakespeare), all used the simplest means to express themselves.

I believe Dante was Joyce's favorite writer. He had great admiration for his work, which like Aquinas' encyclopedic prose, influenced Joyce. I don't agree that Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare always wrote in a simple way. Ingenuity of expression is very much part of what is being expressed in the hands of a great writer.

But this is off topic. I have to add that Vendler is being academic in the worst way, almost as if she's trying not to perish by publishing. As if she needs to!

I agree about those writers' complexity, Don. I took the critic's meaning in a broad sense, in that they all did often compose conceptually dense writing which was also sublimely simple and direct in expression. This is surely one of the miracles of Dante's poetry--whenever, that is, he's not writing like Arnaut Daniel!

You and others might be interested to see a parallel discussion on this topic that's been going on at an Italian Studies listserv, with me, some other people, and above all our own illustrious and articulate Adam Elgar:

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/w...ian-studies#16.

FWIW, I can't imagine any review that would make we wish to seek out and read this work more strongly than this Vendler bit did. Really.
Well played sir. You drew her in brilliantly.

I'm blushing to be mentioned in such terms by our virtuoso dantista. Andrew has stated the case against Vendler with all the necessary force and insight. I'm just cheering from the sidelines.
And as Don and Andrew M are saying, Vendler is giving great publicity to this wonderful English Vita Nova. There'll be plenty of truly knowledgeable academics and lay readers of Dante out there who'll know what her review is worth.

THIS -
How she would go into something “like” a “trance” (as she implies she did) over poetry in a language she has only a cursory knowledge of, is a mystery.

is just too too funny. Cool idea.
Ok folks. I'm getting into a trance to learn Sanskrit. If you don't hear fm me in 2 days, someone come over and wake me, please? Just dont be surprised if I talk funny....

'untranslatable'? sigh sigh sigh.
Ah well, Andrew, nice spotlighting all around.

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

Fantastic response! As you say, she (or at least her argument) gets flattened.

I was pleased to see the tribute to Roberto Benigni in there as well.

I'm glad you liked it, Gregory. I know I did. I forgot to add the disclaimer that I had never met or corresponded with Steven Botterill before this -- he was an anonymous reader of my project early on, is all. His rebuttal of the Vendler review was the first time I knew he was the reader I had been so thankful for three years ago. After his rebuttal, I sent him an email to thank him for that and, of course, for the pancakes.

this is precious, priceless, delicious:

Dante, alas, had not our advantages, and therefore did not know himself to be medieval or his language to be archaic;

a very juicy pancake to start the morning.
good backup there, Andrew

Outstanding response, Andrew. I've never read a word of Vendler, who admits that she is totally tone deaf when it comes to poetry, but I certainly enjoyed this piece. I became aware of your Dante as you were beginning it, and on a trip to Cummungton MA in June, I was delighted to see Dick Wilbur's well thumbed copy with book marks and yellow stickies jutting out all over. Given how good his Italian is, I'd be much more interested in his opinion than Vendler's.

That is a FANTASTIC post from Steven Botterill. We should all be so lucky to have one such defender of our work, and the Helen Vendlers of the world can carp till they're blue in the face. Anyway, this review of hers will most likely be good for sales and good for the book in the long run, because people will remember the kerfuffle; not to mention, you get to see who's on your side. Hopefully Botterill will write and publish an answering review in a similarly prominent venue.

Chris