The Press. — London, England, 1854-03-04 00:00:00

MARCH 4, 1854. sittraturt. The Divine Comedy ; or, the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Aliyhieri. Rendered into English by Frederick Pollock, Esq. With 50 Illustrations, drawn by George Scharf, jun., engraved by Dalziel. London : Chapman and Hall. Dante. Translated into English Verse by J. C. Wright, M.A., late Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Third Edition. Illustrated with Engravings on Steel after Designs by Flaxman. London : H. G. Bohn. PERHAPS 110 poet of any time has excited so much enthusiastic and enktrossingly devoted study as Dante. The classic authors have en tailed mountains of print; but for these pe dantry has been frequently as responsible as a spirit of admiration. An equal quantity, again, allowing for the difference of date, may have been written about Shakspeare ; but it has been more in the way either of verbal comment, of antiquarian dilettantism, or of regular literary exercitation, in which, starting from Shakspeare, the writer's self proves the chief ingredient. With Dante, it is rather a downright endeavour to understand, to theorise, and to illustrate. The primary explanation of such a hold upon the student's earnestness may be found in the abstruse nature of the subject, and that inany-sidedness of meaning in which the Divine Comedy concurs with and transcends all other great poems. Much remains beyond this. Profundity, intellectual and moral, is the grand characteristic of Dante. He is great personally in an overwhelming degree — not his creative faculty, or his mental sub tlety and range alone, but himself. The man Dante awes you. The divine grave purity of that youthful face which Giotto painted, " Whose open eyes desire the truth," the unsearchable anguish and scorn in that of the older exile and poet, are ever present to the reader of the Commedia. His are a passion that shakes the frame without impair ing his austerity, hatred inextinguishable of the base, a heart-piercing tenderness " pass " ing the love of women,"—not " second only " to Shakspeare's," as Shelley said, but without parallel ;—here the gloom of utter condem nation—there the incandescence of auroral brightness. It is the identity of the man which gives a supremacy to all he utters. If he has had but two rivals in poetic intellect since the world began —Homer and Shaks peare—he has had none in that grandeur and excellence which belong to a work as being the stamp of the individual himself. Through Homer's soul the demigod and the hero ex pressed themselves in song; Shakspeare has the comprehensive glance of a cherub. In Dante speaks the deepest heart of man that ever found utterance. An idle word could not pass those lips. To the mind all lie says is, through earnestness and condensation, pitched in a superlative key ; to the ear all arc the sim plest positives. Always the fewest, gravest, directest words, the most unconstrained adaptation to the requirements of the form, — so that instances are constant in which a thought has evidently, and unspoiled, •obeyed a rhyme—always the absoluteness of profound est meaning. We believe that no other book evokes such concentrated intensity of feeling in the reader as the Divine Comedy. He walks with Dante as through his own " selva " oscura," and clings to the hem of his gar ment with an awful love—more awful, were but his heart capable of the same depth of feel ing, than that of Dante himself for his " good " master" Virgil. In translating the Commedia into Eng lish Mr. Pollock enrols himself among a com pany already tolerably numerous. Who that has looked through Flaxman's outlines has not groaned or grinned, as indignation or the feel ing of the absurd got the better, over the shameful platitudes which poor old hebetated into English called a rendering of the p oet English heroic verse ? We have a recollection, almost as feeble as the lines themselves, of having looked into a specimen translation by THE PRESS. Lord John Russell. Another and a far more passable specimen was published years ago under the pseudonym of Odoardo Volpe, in a volume of literary imposture, the chief com position in which was pretended to be Byron's. Wright's version is a compromise, wearing a delusive show of the original terza rima, which is indolently scamped into a metre that is no metre, and, like most compro mises, to be condemned. Dismissing other, and some laudable, members of the minor fry, three translations remain, each of which deserves, in a degree, to rank as stand ard of its kind—Cary's, Carlyle's, and Cayley's —the two latter as yet uncompleted. The first is creditable orthodox English blank verse, of the Miltonic order, and consequently, pace Mr. Ruskin, neither in form nor in spirit Dan tesque ; the second has an inalienable value, that of literality and competent editorship, though, being in prose, we could wish that the literality were carried yet further ; the third, taking the bull by the horns, Is an honest, ho nourable, uncompromising rendering of the original in the supremely difficult metre, in the naked energy of diction, in spirit, as far as seems possible to be combined with equal fidelity to form—line fur line, and often word for word. There was still room for a translation con ceived on Mr. Pollock's principle, and, spite of what he has done, there still is room. " It has " been my endeavour," he says, "in the present " version of Dante's great poem, to be strictly " literal in the rendering of the original Ito.- " Tian into the English of our own times, so far " as I found it possible, regard being had to " the idioms of the two languages, and to the " preservation of a metrical form. To a certain " extent, also, I have tried to represent to the " reader the actual arrangement as well as the " true English equivalent of the original ; and " I have made it a condition to retain the order " and identity of the lines, except where this " could not be done without violating more es " sential requirements. In working out this " design it will, I trust, be found that no " words of individual importance have been " added or omitted by me. Omission, indeed, " is almost out of the question in dealing with " Dante. The obvious danger lies the other " way ; and it is by the dilution of his wnrds, " and the insertion of epithets not to be justi " fled by the text, that he has most suffered in " translation." Selecting blank verse as his metre, like Cary, Mr. Pollock aims to be more faithful to the precise words and the structural disposi tion of the lines : he adds this advantage of metre to a literality equal, or almost equal, to that of the prose version of Carlyle ; and, shaking himself free of the trammels of rhyme and a most arduous rhythmical arrangement, he ought to come nearer than Cayley to his author, in every remaining respect. We are clearly of opinion that, although a most conscientious labourer in the Dantesque field, ho has not succeeded in doing this. Mr. Pollock points out one manifest require ment in a translator of Dante—condensation ; but condensation, in so far as it implies merely the abstinence from superfluous words, is only one side of the Dantesque quality. We musthave the utmost mastery of language—the simplest words, but the most energetic and clenching. Let the phrases be as positively English as Dante's are distinctively Italian, and of a certain scholarly choiceness, though stopping short of archaism, to represent the olden hue of the original ; neither euphuism on the one hand, nor a lax use of the first term that comes up on the other. These qualifications Cayley possesses in a remarkable degree ; Pollock in no wise beyond the common. So much for condensation ; but even this per fectly understood is scarce half the battle. It is the divine beauty of Dante's might which is the most unapproachable and impalpable. His height and depth are those of the zenith and of a great water,—the more gloriously blue for utter height, the more calm and star reflecting for unsounded depth. Condensa tion the translator can give—English is as pithy as ; enemy he can give—no Ita lian, save that of Dante alone, has a tithe of the English mass and life ; but the beauty none save a man of high poetic faculty 207 could render with real adequacy. Pangs of glorious tenderness, passions of longing love and hope, trances of beatific ecstasy abound, of which one of the most wonderful and ad mirable qualities is their inseparable inter weaving with the very words in which they received expression, nay, the metre and the sound. This was that inward melody of the man which could find no voice less perfect than itself. That dreadful inscription over hell-gate, the frightful transformations of the seventh pit, the loathsomeness of the pit of disease, the brutal hideousness of a tearing Cerberus, or obscene harpies, or filth-encrusted Thais, or the devils of the boiling pitch, may all be competently conveyed ; but we know no words that will signify the same as Frau cesca's La bocce mi baci4 tutto treniante. English that as you may, it is a perfume eva porated. Nothing conveys the same thing as the opening of the eighth canto of the Pur gatory : Era gia I'ora the volge it desio Ai navigaiiti, &c.; Dante alone mirrors the angel here : A not venia la creatura bells, Biancaveatita, e nella faccia quale I'er tremolando niattutina atella;* and there is no passage in the whole of that awful Ugolino canto so . untranslatable as this : Ben sei crudel se to giii non ti duoli, remand° el(*) che al niio cuor s'iunntuziava : E, se non piangi, di che piangcr suoli? Now, this quality of beauty, beyond any translator in degree, is only at all attain able in essence by a chaste and glowing poetic feeling, a most true idea of melody, and a power of versification which is vastly aided by the use of rhymed metre. Of this last aid Mr. Pollock is wholly deprived. He is much ham pered also in his versification by the structural fidelity to which, on other grounds, and grounds which we consider paramount, he adheres. The result of his giving line for lino is, that his chief pauses uniformly fall at the end of every third line, where, in the original, a triplet terminates ;—an accident fatal to gran deur of melody in English blank verse, one of whose most essential requirements is the variety of pause, loading to the constant close of a period in the middle of a line. Cary, less scrupulous, acts upon this rule of blank-verse prosody as systematically as Milton, and reads the better for it. Of poetic sentiment, apart from an evidently heartfelt love for his author, we do not find any salient traces in Mr. Pol lock ; and in the welding of a verse with a kind of conscious joy and power Mr.Cayley is much his superior. Were we bent upon making out a case for this gentleman to Mr. Pollock's disparagement, we might quote Vir gil's report of his interview with Beatrice, from the second canto of the Hell, in which the first retains much, the second loses all, of the supreme and celestial graciousness of Dante : but we take a pass' ge of another class where Mr. Pollock is at his own usual level. We think Cayley's greater nerve of phrase and of verse will be apparent ; and this is united to a fidelity little less literal than Mr. Pollock's, spite of the vastly-increased difficulty conse quent on the preservation of the terza Our extract is from the fifth canto of the Purgatory, where Dante meets the spirits of those who have repented in violent death : POLLOCK. A 10 Then spoke another: " As may that desire Which to the high mount dra ws thee be fulfilled, "Ail With holy piety encourage mine. rt I I am Buonconte, once of Montefeltm; Nor (liovanua heeds me, nor the rest ; .3119 Whence among these I go with face of shame." Then Ito him: " What violence or chance So far from Campaldino wrested thee That never yet thy burial•place was known?" " Alas !" he said, ' by Csaentino's plain There flows a river, Archiano called, Which over Ermo springs in the Apennine. To where that appellation disappears • I came : I was sore wounded in the throat, living on foot andibloodying the plain. I lost my power of sight here, and my voice Died with the name of Mary. On that spot I fell, and all alone my body lay. ~~ ~, • We must do Mr. Pollock the justice to say that he has ref• dered this very well, considering: " Towards us came the creature beautiful, Arrayed in white, and of such countenance As is the shining of the morning star." amt ME