Longenbach on new Dante translation

The University of Rochester’s own James Longenbach has a review of a new translation of Dante’s Paradiso in this Sunday’s New York Times book review:

When Dante wrote the poem we call “The Divine Comedy,” he called it simply the “Commedia”: a story, beginning in sorrow and ending in joy, of one man’s journey from hell, through purgatory, to paradise. It’s a good story. But while many of us are eager to harrow the halls of hell, with its gossipy tales of human suffering, few of us make it to heaven, where we are instructed in the theological intricacies of free will, gravity and the soul. No one said the journey was going to be easy.

But if the “Paradiso” is low on human interest (its inhabitants neither want nor regret anything), it contains some of the most exhilarating poetry even written. Recently, the poet Robert Pinsky offered us an English “Inferno”; W. S. Merwin translated the “Purgatorio.” Robert and Jean Hollander have made the whole journey: their “Paradiso” completes their verse translation of the entire “Commedia.”

Robert Hollander is one of the pre-eminent Dante scholars of our time. Each canto comes trailing notes of generous length elucidating the political, theological and cosmological aspects of Dante’s allegory. In addition, the translators refer to 73 commentaries compiled over the centuries and available at the Dartmouth Dante Project (dante.dartmouth.edu). But the “Commedia” is above all else a poem, and the Hollander translation obscures this fact — not because its scholarly apparatus is vast, but because the translation only fitfully succeeds as English poetry.