Book Review: The Divine Comedy: Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Translated by Mark Musa

Pros: excellent translation and notes, poem is easy to read and pay attention to, fascinating descriptions

Cons: daunting, miss a lot, lots of politics

Dante the pilgrim wakes in a fearsome wood and is guided by the pagan poet Virgil through Hell.

This is a poem I’ve wanted to read for years and have always delayed because it’s so intimidating.  Having read a lot of medieval works in university, I can attest that translation matters.  A lot.  A good translation can pull you into a book and fire your imagination.  A poor translation can make the most interesting material into a slog, boring and tedious.

In looking for a translation of the Divine Comedy I took my own bookseller advice.  I grabbed a bunch of different translations and read the first few lines to see which one was the clearest in terms of language while being able to maintain my interest.  The copy I ended up with is translated by Mark Musa (Penguin Classics edition).  I was even happier with my decision after I read his introduction to the poem and translation notes.  This is a verse translation, but one that retains the cadence of the original Italian without imposing the limitations of rhyming.  It’s very clear, and that clarity helps maintain attention (something I often have trouble with when dealing with poetry).

The poem surprised me in many ways with regards to its complexity.  I didn’t realize how organized and structured it was through the three main parts of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.  I also didn’t realize how political the poem was, constantly mentioning figures from Dante’s own time and the Ghibbline/Guelph conflict of the different city states in Italy of his day.  Thankfully, Musa gives a tremendous number of end notes for the poem, explaining not only who all the characters are, but also mentioning areas when his interpretation and translation differs from that of earlier Dante scholars and translators.  I loved that the end notes come immediately after each canto, so you don’t have to constantly flip to the back of the book.  

I also liked that there were illustrations showing the different levels of hell and the path Dante and the pilgrim take through it.  The glossary at the end of the book going over all of the characters mentioned in the text, is invaluable for further study. 

This isn’t a book to read once and put away though.  The text is complex in that canto IV of Inferno parallels canto IV in Purgatory and Paradise as well.  I suspect it would take years of study to fully understand the genius of this poem.  

Shout-Out: Life on Mars by Tracy Smith

I'm not a huge poetry fan, so it was with some surprise that I found myself flipping through a copy of Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith while shelving it a few weeks back.  The title intrigued me, and as I suspected, there was some SF content inside.  The book won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2012.

With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.

Since poetry needs to be experienced, here are two stanzas from part one of "My God, It's Full of Stars".

We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,
Only bigger.  One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies.  One man 

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America.  Man on the run.

You can read some more of her work using Amazon's look inside feature.

Book Review: Fleas, Flies and Friars: Children's Poetry from the Middle Ages by Nicholas Orme

Pros: designed to be read by anyone (not just scholars), wide variety of examples, good introduction

Cons: little commentary on the different poems/examples, no conclusion, no easy way to see the original poems he translates

Nicholas Orme has put together a short book of poetry that would have been told to or written/spoken by children in the Middle Ages.  He's done so using full English translations so the book is accessible to those without a background in the field or a knowledge of Latin or middle English.  The downside to this is that if you do know the languages there's no checking his translations to see what (if any) liberties he's taken to get the meaning across or to force the rhythm and rhymes of the poems.  He did keep some old words, to help with the rhymes and maintain flavour, and here he helpfully added translations/modernisations at the bottom of the page.

The book covers a wide variety of poems, from games to manners, stories, and grammar school exercises.  This allows for a nice window into the lives of children, at work and at play, increasing our knowledge of how people lived.  It shows that children were not thought of as 'little adults', that they were allowed to play and were catered to in many ways, according to their age and abilities.

I would have liked more commentary on the individual pieces and a conclusion showing some of the things these poems show us about how children were treated in the middle ages.  But again, Orme wanted this book to be less scholarly and more easily accessible and so kept commentary to a minimum.

An interesting glimpse of an aspect of the middle ages that is not well understood.