Inferno. (Reviews).

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2000. xxxiii + 634 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-385-49697-4.

This new translation of the Inferno by Robert Hollander and his wife poet Jean Hollander seeks to offer readers what Dante himself "might authorize had he been looking over our shoulders." Dante would have found much to approve in this highly readable translation. Presented in a dual language edition, the volume includes extensive notes by Robert Hollander, a one page synopsis of each canto's contents, and charts of Dante's Hell.

If Alan Mandelbaum's highly esteemed translation (1980) is known for its fluidity and Robert Pinksy's (1996) for its supple consonantal rhymes, the Hollanders' translation is admirable for its overall clarity. The two collaborators reproduce faithfully the Italian text of the poem established by Giorgio Petrocchi in 1966-67, capture effectively Dante's different linguistic registers, and reproduce the arrangement of the cantos into tercets. Two features of Dante's Italian were not replicated: the translators have made no attempt to preserve either Dante's terza nina rhyme scheme or the poem's eleven syllable line lengths. While most lines of this verse translation conform to the English pentameter, the line lengths vary. The opening of Inferno 21, in which Dante compares the barrators boiling in tar to the hubbub of the Venetian arsenal, exemplifies the lucidity of the translation.

As in the arsenal of the Venetians
in wintertime they boil the viscous pitch
to caulk their unsound ships
because they cannot sail -- one rebuilds
his ship, while still another plugs
the seams of his, weathered by many a voyage:
one hammers at the stem, another at the stern,
this one makes the oars, that one twists the ropes
for rigging, another patches jib and mainsail --
so, not with fire, but by the art of God,
a thick pitch boiled there,
sticking to the banks on either side.

The translation reproduces Dante's lively description beautifully and deftly conveys the light tone of the passage.

Robert Hollander's notes constitute one of the most distinctive features of the volume. The critical apparatus far surpasses the brief historical and mythical notices found in Pinsky's translation and the Bantam edition of Mandelbaum. (The Everyman edition of Mandelbaum's translation contains excellent notes by Peter Armour not to mention Botticelli's beautiful engravings.) An eminent Dantista whose scholarly activities include numerous books and articles on the Commedia, a biography of Dante, the Dante Dartmouth Project, and the Princeton Dante Project website, Hollander has distilled and brought to bear the vast commentary and critical tradition on innumerable cruces, the meaning of particular words, notable motifs, and textual matters. Exceptionally well versed in the commentary tradition, Hollander often documents which commentator was the first to introduce new readings of particular passages. Indeed, Hollander has broadened the range of critical response by including observations made by his former stud ents at Princeton. The advantages of having overseen various databases are also obvious: Hollander provides considerable statistical information -- the number of similes in the poem, the number of times particular words are employed -- some of which is meaningfully interpreted.

While generally informative, the notes may prove tendentious for some readers. While Dante criticism over the centuries has viewed Virgil as a reliable sage and presence in the poem, Hollander, in his critical writing has argued for Virgil's more limited more role in the pilgrim's journey. For Hollander Virgil represents a classical tradition which Dante systematically revises according to a rigidly Christian epistemology The first sentence in the Introduction on Virgil makes this conviction emphatic: "We should be aware that Virgil was not always Dante's guide in poetry." The notes reinforce this view repeatedly. Virgil's reference to Empedocles' explanation of universal order in Inf. 12.40-45 shows his "ingrained pagan way" of accounting for one of Christianity's miracles; Hollander asserts that Virgil asks Dante to visit the usurers alone while he speaks with Geryon lest the beast "prove as difficult as the rebel angels and thus embarrass him" [Virgil]; in discussing Inf. 30.37-41 Hollander notes that the amount of Ovidian borrowings in the canto shows that Dante has "marginalized" Virgil noting in passing that there have been no references to the Roman poet for 169 lines. Such a reading of Virgil's role contrasts notably with an earlier strain of American Dante criticism dominated by the work of Charles Singleton and John Freccero. While Freccero's reading of the poem is broadly humanistic, allowing for sympathetic readings of memorable denizens such as Francesca and Ulysses, Hollander takes up a more moralistic, implacable perspective. Notwithstanding such different conceptions of the damned, this new translation provides ample opportunity for a lucid reading of Dante's voyage through Hell and lively debate over the meaning of its particulars.