Clearer Dante

Writing in The New Yorker, Joan Acocella discusses the extraordinary translation by Jean and Robert Hollander of Dante's Divine Comedy:

Dante’s poem is fiendishly difficult to translate into verse, partly because of its lovely, garlanded rhyme scheme, terza rima—or aba, bcb, cdc. To reproduce the Comedy in English terza rima, it has been calculated, approximately forty-five hundred triple rhymes are needed. In Italian, where almost every word ends in a vowel, you can come up with such a number. In English, it is next to impossible, as can be seen in the frequency of ridiculous forced rhymes in terza-rima translations. Some translators have compromised on aba, cdc—in other words, rhyming in twos, not threes—but that’s not easy, either, if you’re trying to be faithful to Dante’s text.

Jean Hollander made a bigger compromise. She has used blank verse, primarily: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Relieved of the task of rhyming, she is able to stay closer to Dante’s wording. Nevertheless, her translation is a poem, and it sounds like one. Robert Hollander says that it is heavily indebted to John D. Sinclair’s prose translation of 1939-46. (This was the pony of choice when I was in school.) He is being modest.