Understandably, some of the rhymes are a little free. So it's amazing that Carson, who in 2000 "was almost completely unfamiliar with Dante's work", has produced this version - in terza rima. The Dante industry is unstoppable, and people can't get enough of Hell. It is perhaps telling - although also astonishing - that no English translation appeared until 1782. "One more tercet," Robert Pinsky would moan in bed, as his wife confiscated his pen. Dante's terza rima is frustratingly hard to get right in English, and many translators have nearly gone mad trying to get it right. ![]() Mandelbaum uses blank pentameters, with weak and strong line-endings as scaffolding, and it sounds great - but it's a way of making his life (relatively) easy. Mandelbaum's is miraculously good: not only does it read like real poetry (although not exactly in the same metre as Dante), it is accurate enough to use as a very reliable crib.īut it does not rhyme. The best crib available is still John D Sinclair's facing-page text from OUP the best translation of the entire work is Allen Mandelbaum's (published by Everyman). The chances of your moving on to Purgatory, let alone Heaven, are slim unless you are a student or preternaturally dogged. ![]() (It is, incidentally, quite possible to make yourself understood in Italy by using Dante's vocabulary, even though it's seven centuries old.) Eventually, of course, you will give up or grind to a halt. ![]() You can either try to get the sound right, and so lose out on the literal sense or you can concentrate on the meaning, and miss out on the poetry, hoping, perhaps, to use your holiday Italian as a basis for understanding the original Tuscan while using a crib for the more arcane vocabulary. Versions of Dante in English offer the reader almost unparalleled opportunity for learned snobbishness.
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