The Immutable Clive James

In his translation of the complete Divine Comedy (Liveright), James made the crucial decision to rhyme, in quatrains (in his case, abab). But, as he tells us in the introduction, end rhymes were no more important to him than rhymes or chimes within the lines: alliteration, assonance, repetition. He says that his wife, Prue Shaw, now a celebrated Dante scholar (her book “Reading Dante” will be out next year), pushed him in this direction, by teaching him, years ago, that the Divine Comedy had to be read phonetically. The great thing about it was its richness of sound, as word after word, line after line, beckoned the next and thus kept the reader moving forward. James says this is what he was intent on, above all.

All is a lot. James gave himself permission to add lines to Dante’s text and to incorporate background material. He didn’t want footnotes—nothing should stop the reader. Many things do, though. Here are Dante’s famous opening lines:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!

And here is James’s rendering:

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found
Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—
Merely to think of it renews the fear.
“Keening sound”? If ever there was a forced rhyme, this is it. Also, Dante didn’t say anything about wailing, only about fear, and the two are different matters.

Soon the pilgrim (as the protagonist of the poem is usually called) and his guide, Virgil, arrive at the gates of Hell, with its dread inscription:

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
fecemi la divina podestate,
la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
James translates this as:

To enter the lost city, go through me.
Through me you go to meet a suffering
unceasing and eternal. You will be
with people who, through me, lost everything.

My maker, moved by justice, lives above.
Through him, the holy power, I was made—
made by the height of wisdom and first love,
whose laws all those in here once disobeyed.

From now on, every day feels like your last
Forever. Let that be your greatest fear.
Your future now is to regret the past.
Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.

This shows a considerable drop in energy, partly because of a loss of compression. James has lengthened the passage by a third. But, also, he has added some confusion about what the gate is telling us. At least in the first line, it seems to think that we have a choice about whether or not to enter. We don’t, and that is what makes going to Hell a serious business.