Nevertheless, several scholars of Dante have poured scorn on the idea and for reasons I don't entirely want to guess at, Dorothy Sayers comes in for a great deal of condescending tut-tutting. What was she thinking? Silly woman! The result is so hackneyed and Victorian. Oh, my, my, my.
Before I continue, I must mention the Robert Pinsky used terza rima in his celebrated translation of The Inferno.
I think the criticisms of Sayer are entirely bogus.
Sayers's Divine Comedy translation (the final book, Paradise, was finished by Barbara Reynolds after Sayers's death), the first time I encountered Dante, in part because I was already familiar with Sayers from her murder mysteries. I also chose Sayers because I liked her commentary.
I recently reread Sayers's translation alongside a prose public domain translation.
1. It MOVES.
It doesn't lag or get bogged down in "oh, my, aren't we being special with our free verse" posturing (as quite a number of current translations do). It gallops along. The first time I read it, I READ IT. I didn't pause to recover from reading Great Literature.
I will grant that the terza rima takes getting used to--but no more than nineteenth century prose or manga layouts.
2. Sayers captures the story.
The first time through, I probably understood about 1/2 of the allusions--okay, I'll be honest: maybe 1/4-1/3rd. I didn't, at the time, know anything about Ghibellines and Guelphs. As other fans have pointed out, it doesn't much matter. Dante's narrator (Dante himself presumably) is on a wild ride of an adventure through the cosmos of good and evil.
3. Sayers captures Dante's own flexibility with language.
One translator I read sniffily criticized Sayers's "cliches." What I read of Dante by that translator was profoundly dull. As Sayers correctly points out, Dante used whatever came to hand. Like Tolkien with his writing, he used "high" courtly language when it suited his purpose; joking language; platitudes and cliches; intellectual language; everyday language...
Sayers ruefully comments that unless one reads Dante in Italian, one struggles to fully appreciate his versatile use of anything that came to hand, from expletives to poetry. Thinking "he's Art; his depth must be honored" is to miss that The Divine Comedy was continuously popular through the Middle Ages for its own sake. It vividly communicates.
Two scenes stand out:
The lowest point of hell in The Inferno is those who have betrayed God and fellow citizens: Judas, Brutus,and Cassius are endlessly devoured by Satan. The next lowest point of hell is frauds. In one of the most vividly disgusting images in The Inferno, thieves (who comes across here as types of grifters) constantly change turn into each other:
There darted up a great
Six-legged worm and leapt with all its claws
On one [of the thieves] from in front and seized him straight,
Clasping his middle with its middle paws.
Along his arms, it made its fore-paws reach
And clenched its teeth tightly in his jaw;
Hind-legs to thighs it fastened, each to each,
And after, thrust its tail between the two,
Up-bent upon his loins behind the breech.
Ivy to oak so rooted never grew
As limb by limb that monstrous beast obscene
Cling him about, and closer and closer drew,
Till like hot wax they stuck. And melting in
Their tints began to mingle and to run,
And neither seemed to be what it had been.
Two heads already had become one head,
We saw two faces fuse themselves and weld...
Yuck! Don't tell me horror began with the twentieth century!
In contrast, Sayers's Purgatory supplies one of the sweetest images of rest from trial I've ever encountered in a book. Dante and Virgil are laboring up Purgatory's mountain. They stop in a valley protected by an angel.
We'd not gone far when I perceived a place
Scooped, so to call it, from the sloping lawn,
As valleys here scoop out a mountain's face.
A winding path, not level but not steep,
Led us to where the rising hill-spurs lose
Half of their height along the valley's lip.
Here nature had not only plied her paints,
But had distilled, unnameable, unknown,
The mingled sweetness of a thousand scents.
Now - in the hours that melts with homesick hearing
The hearts of seafarers who've had to say
Farewell to those they love, that very morning--
Hour when the new-made pilgrim on his way
Feels a sweet pang go through him, if he hears
Far chimes that seem to knell the dying day -
The quiet of the image, the--frankly--campground feel to it: familiar and comfy yet transcendent at the same time--all of it brings home to me that for Dante, as for Sayers, the cosmos was steeped in physical reality.
Sayers is a unique translator because her desire to convey the essence and feel and excitement of Dante appears to be larger, by far, than her ego as a translator.
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