Objectives: (By the End of This Assignment, You Will Have )

"Poetry Pages - Pinsky on Poetry, Computers, and Dante." Interview by Wen Stephenson. The Atlantic Monthly Online: News and Analysis on Politics, Business, Culture, Technology, National, International, and Life %u2013 TheAtlantic.com. 19 Apr. 1995. Web. 14 Sept. 2011. . Objectives: (By the end of this assignment, you will have …)  Summarize a primary source  Interpret the perspective of Dante’s translator . Explain why Pinksy chose to use “Art Translation” over “Pure Translation” . Evaluate whether Dante should be taught in high school or whether it dampens the love of poetry in young people The Article: In a review of Pinsky's translation of the "Inferno" in The New Yorker, the poet Edward Hirsch points out that "The journey into the underworld is one of the most obsessively recurring stories of the Western imagination," and cites the classical examples of Orpheus, Heracles, Odysseus, and Aeneas, as predecessors to Dante's pilgrim. All of these descend into the nether regions of death and survive to tell about it -- tales that hold a distinct fascination in the way they open up vast, mysterious, complex worlds. … the "Inferno" -- which is the first part of Dante's "Divina Commedia" -- remains a popular and compelling poem for modern readers; there have been at least fifty English versions of the "Inferno" in this century alone. Of course, any translator must rely on previous translations and commentators in undertaking such an ambitious task, and Pinsky has said that he depended largely on Charles Singleton's scholarly, painstakingly literal prose translation (1970), and on the best-known nineteenth-century American verse translation, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867).

1. Question: In an essay on Dante, T. S. Eliot wrote that the love of poetry should precede the scholarship of it. He said that he was "passionately fond of certain French poetry" before he could translate any of it correctly, and that with Dante, "the discrepancy between enjoyment and understanding was still wider." What drew you to Dante's poetry? RPinsky136 : I agree that poetry does not begin with understanding, but with attraction--like love or hunger for food. The Inferno had an interesting reputation, and looked delicious, but I had never been able to get to know it in the translations I knew. 2. Question : Edward Hirsch, in a review of your "Inferno" in The New Yorker, describes terza rima and says the effect is like "moving through a series of interpenetrating rooms...or going down a set of winding stairs." Is there any connection between the spiraling form of Dante's poem and the way computers appeal to our imaginations? RPinsky136 : I think so: there is the elegance and compression of something systematic or technical; and then there is the wildness or variation of our feelings--a grid, and a flow--that is the essence of terza rima, and in a way the essence of the many swirls and dips and abundance that flow from the binary guts of computing. 3. Question : Mr Pinsky, where are you originally from? RPinsky136 : I am from --let's say "from," given the last question--a lower-middle class family in a small town in New Jersey. My grandpa had a bar there. My family was nominally Orthodox Jewish. My work, I think, tries to pull together as many of the different kinds and levels of American speech and experience as I can. I think the class and place I am "from" are good for the imagination--but what "here" is not? 4. Question : Regarding Canto IV of the Inferno, why do you think Dante chose this particular canto (the canto of the gluttons) to concentrate also on political factionalism in Florence? What's the connection? RPinsky136 : Suddenly I wish I were still answering a question about Tibetan thought.... I don't know, in other words. I suppose that materialism's bottomless quality, the incapacity of gluttony to fill itself--might've been linked in his mind to the ultimately self-defeating avidity for power of factions? (My own bull**** meter is gonging a bit.) 5. Question : Does that mean that you don't think Dante should be taught in high school? RPinsky136 : My best answer is probably, "yes." I think, however, that pleasure in the sounds of poetry should be taught in school first. The truth about teaching seems to be that a skillful, loving teacher can teach just about anything, and no text or system can survive brutal, inept teaching.... I always wish for a way to help students follow their desires--to require enough to entice a lot. Utopian, I know. 6. Question : Don't you think terza rima in English could be called a misnomer? RPinsky136 : No, not at all: the term refers to an abstract pattern; as I say in my preface to the book, by loosening the definition of "rhyme" only slightly, one can fulfill that pattern. It may be possible to think I have not done it well, but I don't think you could read this version aloud and deny that I have done it somehow. I HAVE sometimes called my own way of doing it--rhyming, say, quiver, flavor, never... 7. Question : I believe Claude Levi-Strauss said “poetry is what is lost in translation.” Here's a tough one: Isn't the translation of poetry written in other languages inherently suspect? Isn't poetry essentially untranslatable? RPinsky136 : Yes. Poetry is basically a technology of the sounds of language and one set of sounds is not another; in this sense "pane" does not "translate" as the different sound "bread." "Translating" the Latin for "carry across" is an impossibility, strictly speaking. But as a WORK OF IMAGINATION one can--to use a very old term--"English" a work of art into another, derived work of art, meant to give pleasure and an idea of the original in the new language. In this sense, because the art-translation conveys the uncrossable space between, it is perhaps a more valid pursuit than so-called "literal" or scholarly translation. 8. Question : I know you've commented on this before. Haila is interested in how your religious background fits into your translation of Dante: You’re Jewish? How do you respond to Dante's Catholicism? RPinsky136 : I turned my back entirely on Judaism as a religion when I was around fourteen: I chose baseball, rock and roll, bacon, free Saturday mornings, and ultimately English poetry, European culture, etc. But (to use an analogy) when the descendants of slaves started blowing that European instrument, the saxophone, they changed it. They brought something to it that it hadn't expected. That is a lofty ambition. I would like to emulate at least a little. The Catholic idea of sin--a hole, a space, an absence, that is its own pain--that idea appeals to me considerably.