A Poet's Dante

IN the year 1867, six centuries after Dante’s birth, there were published in Boston, some thousands of miles to the westward of Dante’s Florence, three translations of famous works of his, in a tongue he had rarely heard, and among a people whose whole political and ethical systems were alien to his. This little group of books, winch, appearing after so great a lapse of years, amid the troublous times that marked the completion of a great civil war, proved the extraordinary virility of Dante’s literary fame and influence, were, Mr. Norton’s beautiful and faithful rendering of the Vita Nuova; Longfellow’s translation of the Divina Commedia, — a work which has shared with Cary’s the honor of being more widely read than all others among English-speaking peoples ; and Dr. Parsons’s long - expected and much - revised version of the Inferno. It was, of course, something more than a mere coincidence that three such volumes, not even now surpassed in their respective fields by the work of equally ardent and more highly specialized scholars, should have appeared at the same moment. The completion of all three was probably hastened by the great Dante festival in Florence in 1865, to which Dr. Parsons and Mr. Longfellow had done honor by sending partial results of their labors of love and scholarship. What we may well marvel at, however, is the depth and intensity of the interest shown in America, not only then and for a score of years before, but now, for a foreign and mediæval poet. For seventy-five years, certainly, since Professor Ticknor first, after much effort, secured a copy of the Divina Commedia, and by the luxurious beguilement of fine cigars bribed, while in Göttingen, the tutor of some German prince to initiate him into its mystic language, the tradition has been unbroken. During three quarters of a century Dante has had no rival in poets of other days than our own ; not even Homer, Shakespeare, or Goethe has aroused such an enthusiastic following, or has been made the object of such devoted study. Of no other poet’s works can it be said that a knowledge of them has become regarded as a special mark of culture. Those who follow close on Dante’s footsteps are few, but men persist in reckoning them blessed among their fellows, and as the possessors of a peculiar knowledge and insight into life and letters.

In America, much of this ardent admiration for Dante has been due — although we have scarcely realized it— to the great contemporary English and Continental movements in thought and art. The Classicism of the eighteenth century denied Dante all honor. The Romanticism of our own century, in which American art and letters have had perforce their share, has, on the other hand, made him the object of peculiar worship. Dr. Knapp’s interesting account, in the Encyclopædia Americana, of the study of Dante in the United States shows clearly that Lowell, Longfellow, Norton, and Parsons were not alone in their admiration. The little band was increased by many lovers of the romantic and the mediæval, who loved to pore over what Longfellow called, in his earlier days, “ the gloomy page of Dante ; ” and by those who had traveled in Italy itself, — that marvelously picturesque Italy of which we hear from earlier pilgrims thither, or read of in the now antiquated guidebook of Valery. Later modes of thought — Ruskinianism with its insistence on the ethical message of the Middle Ages, pre-Raphaelitism with its mystic adoration and mimicry—bridge the way to more recent days, when Valery yields to Baedeker, Burckhardt, and Gsell-Fels, and Cultur - geschichte is dominant; but we do not find American interest in Dante decreasing. To read the Divine Comedy with Professor Norton at Harvard, as before with Lowell, Longfellow, or Ticknor, still makes an undergraduate a marked man among his intellectual fellows; and the Dante Society that has its headquarters in Cambridge is the oldest organization of its kind in existence.

The greatness of Dante’s poetry, however, and his permanent position on the watershed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, had not, we suspect, so much influence in making him a name to conjure by in American verse as the romantic character of his life and fortunes. His child love for Beatrice ; his youth’s saintlike passion for her: her marriage, heedless of his worship; her foreseen death ; the loss, under tragic circumstances, of his friend Guido Cavalcanti ; his own distinguished political career, broken off by sudden and lasting exile ; the legend of his checkered wanderings and deadly enmities ; the poet’s toil that made him lean ; the bitter salt of others’ bread; the pain of climbing others’ stairs, — all this, in strong contrast with our own prosaic times and country, endeared him to the heart of the lover and the poet, and made him the idol and darling figure of the mediæval world. Later study has softened somewhat these earlier conceptions. Dante’s Beatrice has grown less human, and more allegorical; nor are there good grounds for identifying her with Beatrice Portinari, whose marriage with another was gratuitously assumed to have broken Dante’s heart. On careful examination, Dante’s political importance grows less, and his supposed personal vindictiveness tends to disappear. To us he is less like a bravo, and more like a wise poet, scholar, and ardent idealist of any time, who, in a country torn asunder by conflicting parties, passed from a boy’s love for a maiden to a man’s passion for an ideally just apportionment and righteous administration of all powers, temporal and spiritual; and who, though more Ghibelline than Guelph, was acceptable to neither party. That he formed a party by himself, and did not flinch from his own political isolation, is not less remarkable than that his judgment of the men and affairs of his time is just both to the world as he saw it and to the truth as he conceived it.

There are many traces in Dr. Parsons’s poems¹ of this earlier and more romantic conception of his great poetic master, not the least of which are to be found in one of his earliest, and certainly one of his best productions, On a Bust of Dante. It is not unsignificant that these verses, too familiar to be quoted here, were, in the edition of 1843, printed opposite a most sinister engraving from the Neapolitan bust. To the poet Dante was a “ cold Ghibelline, “ a “ poor old exile, sad and lone,” whose “ wan image ” revealed stern and grim lineaments, and whose only prayer, according to the old legend, was for peace : —

In Francesca da Rimini, lines written on Scheffer’s very un-Dantesque picture, the same touch of romance appears again:

Nor are other instances wanting to show how ingrained this idea of Dante was in Dr. Parsons’s mind. To cite but one, it is curious to notice that almost the only case in which we catch, in his work, an almost unconscious reminiscence of Dante’s words is a verse that parallels one of Dante’s most famous and most scornful lines : —

In Dr. Parsons’s poems, moreover, with their fine thoughtfulness, with their tendency to mark great events or to mourn great human losses, one can never read far without stumbling on Dante’s name, on ideas most familiar through him, or without catching faint echoes of the music of his verse; much as one cannot wander far in a mountain valley out of sight or hearing of the stream whose impulse and direction have given it its form and its depth. Whose voice but that of Dante speaks, for example, in these verses, in which he attacks the seemingly worthless and Philistine ideals of our own age and country ?

In Dr. Parsons’s boyhood, Italy had exercised on him, as on many another, an influence such as Greece had for centuries exercised over Italy herself. His love for Dante was one of youth as well as of manhood. Even as early as 1843 he speaks of having formerly attempted to render a good portion of the Divina Commedia into English. But, “ still charmed by the touch of the mighty master,” he has “endeavored to follow him for a little, in a metre which permits a closer transcript of his meaning, — the stately and solemn quatrain, the stanza of Gray and of Dryden.” This “ little ” of 1843, ten cantos, had not grown to the full Inferno till 1867. At his death he had scarcely completed Purgatory, and only here and there essayed Paradise. The slow growth, however, was good growth. The volume which contains his collected translations from the Divine Comedy ² is a precious one, and sure to be more precious as the years go by.

All attempts at translating poetry fall into one of two great classes. One faithfully repeats the words and thoughts of the original, despairing of success in reproducing its charm, its music, its poetical essence. To this class, among translations of Dante, belong all those which have been most widely read: that of Cary, in blank verse faintly recalling Milton’s; that of Carlyle, in rugged prose ; that of Longfellow, in the blankest of blank verse ; and that of Mr. Norton, in prose which not American readers alone have long since learned to admire. All of these may help the student; certain of them will be of great value to him ; but none of them is anything like a poem in itself. The second class, on the other hand, follows Pope’s Homer in being a poem at all hazards. Versions of this sort endeavor adequately to reproduce Dante’s music, his form, and, with these, as much of the specific thought content of his poem as possible. To this group belongs Dr. Parsons’s uncompleted translation of the Divine Comedy into English quatrains.

The form chosen is indeed a natural one. The metrical system of the quatrain has very much the same effect as that of the terza rima, though in a series of quatrains the rhymes are, of course, slightly more numerous than in a series of terzets. Nor has Dr. Parsons misused the license to which his choice of even such a simple form of verse as a medium for translation gives him a claim. Instances are, to be sure, not wanting in which the strong bent of his native genius or a puzzling search for a rhyme has prompted him to alter Dante’s form of expression, or even his very thought. Where, for example, the Inferno reads simply, “ I began, ‘ Poet, I would gladly speak to those two who go together,’ ” the translator renders, —

It would probably, indeed, be impossible to find a canto in which, somewhere or somehow, the rhyme or the rhythm had not made Dr. Parsons do what Dante is said to have been proud of never doing, — for rhyme’s sake altering his thought. Such incongruities must, however, inevitably occur in any poetical translation. He is wisest who accepts them as a foregone conclusion, and does not allow the faults inseparable from any genre to deter him from appreciating its virtues. The poem is English, not Italian, in the form in which Dr. Parsons gives it to us ; but it is a poem, and a poem superior, in our opinion, to any other that has been based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The thrill which we feel, on reading in this version the opening, or indeed the whole, of the last canto of the Inferno is one that a prose translation could never give us, — no, nor perhaps the original, either, unless we have been reborn into the Italian tongue.

Dr. Parsons’s version may, then, depart from strict literalness, but it has music and a charm of its own. It is, finally, simple. Even to an Italian Dante is hard reading ; to an English-speaking person, his great poem is one which, if read in the original at all, must be mastered as a special language. There will certainly, then, be few who will long object to a translation which has really been translated, and is not, like parts of Longfellow’s, still almost as hard to read as if it were in a foreign tongue. These two qualities of English versemusic and of English simplicity will make Dr. Parsons’s volume yearly more widely known. As Professor Norton, than whom there is no more competent judge, says in his excellent preface, “ So far as his work has gone, I believe that it is safe to assert that, as a rhymed version in English of the Divine Comedy, it has no superior.”