Escape From Hell (38 page)

We had finished the first work when we discovered the rhyming translation of Dorothy L. Sayers, better known as the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories. Sayers was a highly gifted scholar and has done what neither Ciardi nor Longfellow managed: she has preserved Dante’s rhyming scheme. Astonishingly she has sacrificed very little in meaning or imagery. Her notes and introductions are illuminating. We have drawn the epigraph from the Sayers translation.

It is useful to compare Sayers’s remarks on rhyme with Ciardi’s. As Ciardi (and Longfellow before him) remarks, rhymes and puns are much easier in Italian than in English. Dante made frequent use of both. Sayers has attempted to convey this in her translation, and to a great degree has succeeded, although sometimes through imaginative rather than literal translation. Anyone interested in the technical aspects of writing poetry will profit from reading her discourses on translating rhyme.

In the last analysis, of course, Dante only exists in Italian. Indeed, Dante could be said to have invented Italian, and it is Dante’s Italian that is universally understood in a land of a thousand dialects.

Neither of us reads Italian well enough to comprehend Dante in the original, although constant reference to the handsome Easton Press bilingual edition of the
Inferno
has given us some comprehension of the magnificence of Dante’s achievement. The accompanying translation by Allen Mandelbaum in the Easton edition is clear and in simple language, although his introduction is perhaps not as useful as the others mentioned above.