The Inferno of Dante Alighieri
translated by Ciaran Carson
296pp, Granta, £14.99
There were at least 50 English translations of The Inferno in the 20th century alone, and now we have another, by the Belfast poet and novelist Ciaran Carson. It is a brave undertaking, given the scores of august literary figures who have attempted the task in previous centuries, often obscuring Dante's brilliance in the process. Part of the blame must lie with the Victorians, who reduced the poet to galumphing fustian, full of cod moral sobriety.
The original was nothing like this, and nor were the circumstances of its production. Dante began his trilogy in about 1307, five years after he was exiled from Florence for corruption and embezzlement. The charges against him were false but he never set foot in his native city again. The Inferno, the first section of Dante's three-part poem The Divine Comedy, famously opens in a supernatural forest. Dante, a figure in his own work, has lost his way and is alone in the woods. The Latin poet Virgil, sent by the mysterious Beatrice, is about to show him Hell.
Little is known of Beatrice Portinari, who died in Florence in 1290; in the poem she is an allegory of divine grace, and appears before the speechless Dante in robes the colour of "living flame". The love of Dante's life, Beatrice was worshipped by the Pre-Raphaelites as a dewy-eyed damsel, tender as a marshmallow. Rossetti's Beata Beatrix, now in Tate Britain, illustrates the lachrymose ideal.
Recast as Victorian hymnology, The Divine Comedy became the most serious of poems. Even Longfellow's translation of 1865-67, much admired, is like drinking flat champagne for its timid expurgations and literalisms. That Dante was celebrated in Bible classes throughout the British empire is hardly surprising. There was a message for contemporary society in The Divine Comedy which Christians such as John Ruskin saw it as their duty to convey. Ghastly retribution is meted out to the sinners in the nine circles of Hell.
Yet, awkwardly for the Victorians, parts of The Inferno are pretty ribald. Translators must have agonised over Canto XXI, where Captain Stinkytail (Malacorda) makes a "trumpet" of his arse by breaking wind musically. The Reverend Henry Boyd comically rendered the devil's farts as "loud Aeolian fifes", after the Greek god of wind.
Who put the fizz back into the Florentine? None other than the detective novelist Dorothy L Sayers. Many who know Dante from the Penguin Classic (published between 1949 and 1962) are surprised that it was translated by the same Sayers who gave us Lord Peter Wimsey. Revealingly, her dandified sleuth owns a private Dante collection which (we read in Whose Body?) includes the "famous Aldine octavo of 1502". For the last 13 years of her life Sayers worked industriously on Dante; her translation, trimmed of Victorian distortions, was energetic if at times stilted. Its colloquialisms at least were in keeping with Dante's Italian.
In Italy, The Divine Comedy has always been a national institution. In order to reach a wider audience, Dante chose to write in the vernacular Italian instead of Latin (his overthrow of Latin preceded Chaucer by 80 years). As a teenager in Turin during the 1930s, Primo Levi took part in "Dante tournaments" where boys showed off their knowledge of The Divine Comedy, one contestant reciting a canto and his opponent scoring a point if he knew its continuation. Later, in If This is a Man, Levi related how he struggled at Auschwitz to remember lines from the poem.
In the mid-60s, the Italian poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini rewrote The Divine Comedy to form a critique of Italy's consumer society. Published in the year of his murder - 1975 - the Divine Mimesis bristles with Pasolini's abhorrence of American-style materialism, religious cynicism and political opportunism. Like Dante before him, Pasolini fulminated against politicians and other humbugs who had ruined Italy (so he believed).
By that time, The Divine Comedy had already reached the silver screen in the US. The 1935 Hollywood melodrama, Dante's Inferno, starring Spencer Tracy, contains a 10-minute reconstruction of Hell inspired by Gustav Doré's God-fearing illustrations. In their hellpit the damned are wedged against each other "arsy-versy", in Samuel Beckett's words, "watering their bottoms with their tears". There is nothing like it in cinema history. In Britain perhaps only Peter Greenaway has interpreted Dante so adventurously. Computerised leopards slouch across the screen in his TV Dante, as John Gielgud solemnly intones: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter".
New translators might have the same feeling. So how has Carson done? Like Sayers, he has tried to restore a vocal music to Dante - by inserting archaisms from 18th-century Irish ballads. These move wonderfully with the rough grain of Dante's speech, sustaining the stabbing beat of the original. William Morris had done something similar with Homer, converting The Odyssey into a weird ballad-speak, as if the poem had descended from the smoky throne-rooms of northern Europe.
Bravely, Carson has chosen to work within Dante's terza rima, a fiendish triple rhyme. Dante's tercets are especially hard to translate because (as Borges said) "not a single word in them is unjustified". Yet Carson manages to preserve their cadenced tautness. Others have also attempted terza rima in English, among them TS Eliot in "Little Gidding". However, Carson's Dante is far removed from Eliot's vision of the poet.
In an influential 1929 pamphlet on Dante, Eliot studiously ignored the less elevated aspects of the Florentine. Instead, Dante was the highest expression of Christian civilisation, and his austere trilogy encouraged Eliot in his conviction that modern man is spiritually shipwrecked. "I had not thought death had undone so many", we read of those rush-hour commuters in The Waste Land (words that Eliot cribbed directly from Canto III of The Inferno).
Carson's Dante, on the other hand, pulses with vulgar burlesque and slang ("palooka", "squit"). Indeed, an exaggerated scatology ("Let him have it up the bum!") is a mark of this translation. Carson incorporates an extraordinary range of literary influences in his version, ranging from James Thomson's verse epic City of Dreadful Night to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Dante has no equal as the singer of otherworldly horror, and Carson memorably renders the hints of cannibalism in Canto XXXIII and the noisy "boil and hiss" of the medieval underworld. Like Steve Ellis's acclaimed translation of 1994 (bleakly titled Hell), Carson's Inferno is a creative transformation that deserves our highest admiration and respect.
One hopes that Carson's Irish-English version will lead new readers to this greatest of works. Although the medieval belief in infernal retribution may have lost its power to terrify, we still respond to Dante's epic journey of salvation and self-knowledge. Only when he has seen all there is to see of sin does Dante reach the mystical revelation of God in paradise. If any work has a claim to the universal, it is The Divine Comedy: all life is written in its burning pages. Another Irishman, Samuel Beckett, knew this well; he kept a copy of the trilogy by his bedside in 1989, as he lay dying in a Paris hospice.
· Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi is published by Hutchinson
