[Janice D. Soderling]

I am way behind on my obligations to Translation forum regulars, and perhaps should be devoting my time to one of the poems now up for consideration.

I would however like to share this text which brought to mind one of Andrew's Dante translations which seems to have been pruned away. It was from Vita Nuova, the poem about the traveller who met Love on the road. Part of the ensuing discussion concerned the use of it or he when referring to Love.

I am sure Andrew and several others are already cognizant of this, but for those who, like myself, are not expert in Dante I want to share the following.

This text is from an essay by Octavio Paz (Telling and Singing) in his collection The Other Voice. (Although the following is rendered one long passage, I am breaking it up here to make it easier to access as screen reading.)

In many passages of the Vita nuova, Dante employs expressions such as "Love said to me," "I saw Love approach." In other words, he sees Love and hears it; he speaks of it as though it were not a passion but a person. Nevertheless, in the same book, commenting on one of his poems, he writes: "There are those who may be surprised that Love speaks not only as though it were a thing in itself, or an intelligent substance, but as though it were a corporeal substance, which is not true. Love does not exist in itself as a substance. It is rather, an accident of a substance."

To understand the sense of this passage, the reader must know that, according to the medieval doctrine, there are intelligent and incorporeal substances, like the angels; substances without intelligence, like the material elements; substances animated by an animal or vegetable soul but not possessed of reason; and finally, substances that are corporeal and intelligent, human beings.

Although Love is not an angelic spirit or a demon or brute matter, neither is it a person. What is it, then`? It is an accident of a corporeal and intelligent substance; not a person but something that happens to a person--a passion, a feeling. Yet Dante describes this accident, which lacks form though it is born of the vision of a form, as though it were indeed a person. That is, he makes of love a personification.

Later, he explains that endowing love with human attributes is a privilege granted poets. Since antiquity, he says, poets have used "figures and rhetorical effects to speak of inanimate things as though they had sense and reason." Love is a figure of speech.

Andrew's translations also came to mind yesterday when I was reading an Introduction to Donne's poetry by Roy Booth.


(…) The poems have their own stage army of extras who appear in many guises. Alchemy is prominent; the cosmos as described by Ptolomy and the cosmos as described by Copernicus, and then on the same pattern as that clash in astronomy between old ideas and new, traditional Galenic medicine is brought into collision with the new "chemical" medicine of Paracelsus. The East and West Indies of "spice and mine" were the far removed but inter-related points on Donne's mental map, and the combination of three souls within the body (vegetable, sensible, and rational) never failed to pique him. (…).

I think these two passages, each in their own way, illustrate the difficulties of translating work esp. from past eras, but even modern work with clear influences. The translator needs a fuller understanding of the allusions and intentions than simply the words that make up the text. But so do we who judge the progression of a translation. I am always aware more of what I may not know, than what I think I know, so I am glad when I learn how the translator is thinking. Andrew (and others) is very good at that, at giving the reasoning behind his phrasing.

Translating, is always to see through a glass, darkly.

I enjoy the comments about the translations here, as much as the enjoyment derived from seeing translation develop to its finished form.

Edited in for typo: are not expert in Dante. "Not" went missing, and I sure don't want to sail under that false flag.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks, Janice, I especially like the Paz quote. Dante in the Vita Nuova is nothing if not ambiguous about Amor. In my reading about Polish poets this week I came across this statement from Wislawa Szymborska: “The translator is obliged to be faithful not only to the text, he must also reveal the full beauty of the poetry while retaining its form and preserving as completely as possible the epoch’s spirit and style.” And then there’s the epoch’s way of thinking, which in Dante’s case usually makes a lot of sense to me. That’s one of the things I like about translating him.

[Janice D. Soderling]

This text will be pruned away if I leave it here and I think it might be helpful to have a possibility to search for it (the Paz essay collection is astounding good), so I am moving it to Musing on Mastery.