Patrick Worsnip - Divine Comedy -Interview

An Excellent Unpublished Translation of the Divine Comedy in Terza Rima

Patrick first hit my radar when I read his translation of Canto 2 from the Inferno, published in an anthology called To Hell and Back.¹ At the time I was doing research for my book Danteggiare (co-authored with Barrie Tullett) and wanted to ask him if he ever translated Canto 1 so I could include the first tercet in my book. With a quick search I discovered he translated two books of poetry, Sextus Propertius: Poems (from Latin) and Umberto Saba: 100 Poems (from Italian). They were published by Carcanet Publishing, so I sent him an email via Carcanet in March of 2021.

He quickly responded and I was pleasantly surprised through our emails that not only did he translate Canto 1, he had, at that time, translated 90 of the 100 cantos (he finished his translation in 2022). Patrick sent me his translation (THANK YOU!) and would then send me updates as he finished the remaining ten. I am looking forward to seeing his translation in print someday!

At the end of this interview Patrick generously let me post his translation of Canto 33 from the Inferno, the Ugolino episode! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

If you wish to purchase either (or both) of Patrick’s books - Sextus Propertius: Poems and Umberto Saba: 100 Poems - Click HERE. I just recieved mine and started with Umberto Saba. I love poetry books because you just open to any page and read whatever poem the universe threw at you that day. I began reading poetry this way as a guide to sometimes get me through the day. It started around 40 years ago with Be Here Now by Ram Dass. LOL.

A brief Bio

I was born in Gloucester, England, in 1948 and read Classics and Modern Languages (Italian and Russian) at Merton College, Oxford. From 1971-2012 I worked as a correspondent for Reuters news agency, including postings in Italy, Russia, Poland, Iran, Lebanon and the United States (Washington DC and New York), as well as spells in the UK. Since retiring from journalism, I have devoted myself to verse translation.

With so many existing translations of Dante, why did you decide to add yours? Was the reason personal, professional, or something else?

This is a question all translators of the Divine Comedy need to ask themselves before they start. In the early 1920s, the British mountaineer George Mallory, asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, replied: “Because it’s there.” I think the same holds true of the Comedy. It’s the Mount Everest of world poetry, the supreme challenge for a translator, and hence almost irresistible if you know Italian. In my case, the edition of the poem I had used at university followed me round the globe on my travels as a journalist. Every time I opened it, its neatly printed tercets taunted me: could I produce an equivalent in English? Of course, most translators persuade themselves that no previous translation of the work they are embarking on has entirely done the job. My decision that, if I was going to translate the Comedy, it had to be in Dante’s original terza rima form reduced the enormous field of competing existing versions to a small fraction, particularly if we consider those published after about 1900.

You have translated and published two books of translated poetry for Carcanet Press: Poems of Propertius (2018) and 100 Poems by Umberto Saba (2022). Did these translations influence your decision to translate Dante or was it the other way around?

Neither really, although I felt that Propertius and Saba, as much less well-known poets, would be an easier sell to a publisher than Dante, and hence I would offer those first. I actually began on the Comedy soon after starting Propertius. I found Propertius really hard work, in that I felt I had to decide on a form and style for each poem individually to make it work in English. This may sound pretentious, but after struggling with a Propertius poem for a few hours, I would actually then relax with a bit of Dante, where I’d already settled on the form for the whole thing and everything else had been decided by him. I just needed to worry about those rhymes!

Unfortunately, your translation of the Divine Comedy remains unpublished, but you have had cantos in two anthologies: Inferno, Canto 2 was published in To Hell and Back, edited by Marco Sonzogni and Tim Smith (2017), and Purgatorio, Canto 33 was in After Dante: Poets in Purgatory, edited by Nick Havely (2021). How did the inclusion of your cantos come about?

I was lunching with Michael Schmidt, the head of Carcanet, to discuss Propertius. I let out that I was working on Dante and he mentioned the To Hell and Back project and gave me the email of Sonzogni, who’s a friend of his. I sent Sonzogni my entire Inferno translation, fully expecting to get no reply or a thanks-but-no-thanks. To my surprise, he replied in 48 hours, saying the book had gone to press but he had phoned the publisher (in Amsterdam) to halt production so he could include my Canto 2. When the book came out, it was reviewed in a journal called Translation and Literature by Nick Havely, who commented favorably on my canto. I heard that Havely was himself putting together an anthology of translations from Purgatorio, but he told me all cantos had been assigned. However, a couple of months later he emailed me to ask if I could, after all, provide Canto 33. This was to replace the original choice, the version by the late W.S. Merwin. I can hardly believe Havely and his co-editor thought I was better than Merwin, and think the replacement may have had something to do with the fact that his translation was already published, whereas new versions were preferred for the forthcoming book.

You also had Inferno, Canto 5 in the International Writer’s Journal (2021). Have any other cantos been published? Are you still seeking publication for your translation of the Divine Comedy in part or whole?

A bit of Inferno, Canto 34 was published in the parish magazine of a church attended by a friend of mine on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. I am still seeking publication of my entire Comedy but have currently ground to a halt in my efforts, partly due to family health problems but also because, frankly, it’s a hard sell unless your name happens to be William Shakespeare. I have toyed with the idea of self-publication, but that would be a last resort.

Your translation is in terza rima. Why did you choose that for your translation?

This choice is at the heart of my translation. Free verse is the default form for most verse translation these days, but even the most modernist translators have recognised that it just doesn’t work for the Comedy. It’s simply too slow and ponderous to carry a narrative poem of 14,000 lines. So, most people have gone for form of some kind. A lot have asked themselves what is the closest equivalent to the Comedy in English literature, and have come up with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). That, then, has been the dominant form, I would say. But blank verse also seems to me somewhat plodding for Dante. In my view, Dante pioneered terza rima to promote his goal of getting the poem read, and read in its entirety, by as many people as possible. Let’s just recall that the rhyming is ABA BCB CDC and so on. The effect of this is that the rhyme scheme acts like the cogwheels of a mechanism to drive the story forward. The reader wants to know how the middle line of each tercet will be rhymed in the next tercet, and hence, more importantly, what will happen next in the plot, because the Comedy is, among other things, a gripping yarn. Lose the rhymes and you lose that all-important effect. Unfortunately, poetry editors don’t really agree with me. Though none have openly said so, they seem to find strict terza rima (full rhyme and exact iambic pentameter) clunky and old-fashioned, more like something out of a hymn book than what they consider modern poetry. Of the translations done in recent decades, the only ones I can immediately think of that are both in full terza rima and contemporary diction are those by Peter Dale and Michael Palma – and Palma has loosened up the pentameters. Some translators, such as John Ciardi, have even argued strongly against full terza rima. Others have said it is impossible in English, or else involves departing too far from the original text (not that that seems to have bothered certain translators who don’t use rhyme at all).

Did any earlier translations inspire you?

Not really, though I have learnt much from many translations. I probably came to the Comedy first through Dorothy Sayers’ Penguin Classic, but was repelled by her archaic diction. Perhaps you could say that inspired me to think: surely I can do better than that!

Did you consult any commentaries or earlier translations?

I kept H.W. Longfellow’s and Allen Mandelbaum’s translations in front of me most of the time, though primarily for interpretation. I steered very clear of any rhyming translation, because those rhymes get into your brain!

Which Italian version did you use for translation?

For sentimental reasons, the one published in the 1950s by Natalino Sapegno, which I had used at university and, as I mentioned earlier, followed me around thereafter. I use his readings and, in most cases, his interpretation. Of course, others have been published more recently, which may, for all I know, be better.

Did you have a particular routine or method for translating?

As I said, it started as a late-afternoon amusement after a hard day with Propertius. I began by thinking I would just do a few lines, and then a canto or two, just to see if I could do English terza rima. But then it became addictive.

From start to finish, how long did the translation take?

About ten years. Bear in mind that I was simultaneously working on Propertius and then Saba.

Did you prioritize literal accuracy, poetic flow, or something else? What was your reasoning behind that?

Similarly, what was your approach to balancing faithfulness to the original with readability in English?

I’m going to answer these two questions together. I think readability and poetic flow have to come a narrow first, although I have tried to stick as close to the original as those other priorities, and the demands of the rhyme scheme, would allow. I am comforted by the conviction that Dante himself, for all the complexity of the Comedy, prioritized readability. His finest lines are in very simple Italian. To digress slightly, I adhere to the concept of translation, as opposed to imitation. In other words, I seek to promote the illusion (and I concede it’s an illusion) that what is confronting the reader of my work is a poem by Dante, not a poem by Patrick Worsnip. And I want that reader’s experience to be as close as is possible in this day and age to the experience of a reader of the original in the 14^th Century, including through the use of terza rima. Again, I seem to be out of fashion at the moment. When editors start praising the notion of “re-fashioning”, “re-creating” or “re-imagining” the original – sometimes involving transposing the action to a new setting, or writing it in an obscure dialect of English – I know I’ve come to the wrong shop. I don’t think I can do better than Dante.

Can you give an example of a translation choice that involved a tough compromise?

I could say that every line involved a tough compromise. But that would be to evade the question. Let me give an example that might seem relatively trivial. Commentators have made much of the fact that all three cantiche of the Comedy end with the word “stelle” (stars). I haven’t been able to reproduce this in my version. So here’s my conclusion to Paradiso:

Power failed my fantasy, soaring above;
but my desire and will had now been spun,
like a wheel evenly moved, at the touch of love,
the love that moves the stars and drives the sun.

The original Italian of the last line is “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle”. I’ve switched the order of the sun and the stars, partly for the rhyme, but partly also to make it, at least in my view, slightly punchier than what comes across in English as the slightly lame “and the other stars” for the climax of Dante’s masterpiece.

What was the most difficult canto, passage, or line to translate, and why?

The section which almost made me want to abandon the whole enterprise was Canto 2 of Paradiso, in which Beatrice seeks to explain to Dante the reason for the dark patches on the face of the moon. This apparently straightforward scientific topic becomes the subject of a lengthy and exceedingly abstruse piece of medieval theology tied in with the concept of the universe portrayed in the Comedy. It would be difficult enough to translate into prose, but arcane and detailed reasoning, replete with technical terms that can’t be changed or paraphrased, becomes infinitely more difficult when you are battling with terza rima.

Do you have a favorite canto, passage, or line? Why does it speak to you?

I’m going to again digress a little, and also invite the wrath of those I characterize below as the “true believers”, by saying I consider the Inferno to be the finest of the three cantiche. Why? There are those who will say that to state this is tantamount to saying that sin is more interesting than virtue, or even that Hell is more fun than Paradise. It would be flying in the face of Dante’s own vision (they will say). No. I am simply going with the view of centuries of readers who find in Inferno a tragic depth that the other two cantiche, for all their passages of sublime poetry, do not quite match. Many of the people in Hell are just plain evil. But quite a few are not. They are basically good people who, through a combination of circumstances and character flaws, made the wrong choices. I am not saying that these people ended up in the wrong place or got a raw deal from God. The rules governing what happens to you in the after-life are quite simple, but they are inflexible and there are no mitigating circumstances. That is the tragedy of these people, and I am thinking of course of characters like Francesca, Brunetto Latini and others. Dante had not read Greek tragedy, but in a sense these characters resemble the heroes and heroines of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who (to turn Eliot’s quote from Murder in the Cathedral on its head) did “the wrong deed for the right reason”. In the accounts related to Dante and Vergil by Francesca, Ulysses and Count Ugolino, Dante reveals a dramatic power that none of his earlier works would have led us to suspect. By contrast, the already-saved people in Purgatorio and Paradiso seem ever-so-slightly two-dimensional. The real stunners of lines come from Inferno: Francesca’s “Quel giorno più non leggevamo avante” – “On that day, from then on, we read no more” (to my mind the most erotic line in Italian poetry); or Count Ugolino’s “Se tu non piangi, di che pianger suoli?” – “If you don’t weep, at what, then, would you weep?”

How has translating Dante changed you intellectually, spiritually, emotionally?

The “true believers” among Dante’s interpreters and translators to whom I referred earlier (and I don’t want to downplay their contribution to Dante studies) sometimes imply, without saying so openly, that you can’t truly appreciate, or even understand, the poet unless you share his religious beliefs, or something resembling them. Needless to say, I can’t agree with that, and I’d better state frankly here that I am not a religious believer. So, what I can say is that, after living with Dante’s text for ten years, I have come to appreciate the heights of artistic mastery that a person can rise to. And if you want to say that is because of his religious beliefs, you are welcome to. I would add, though, that, crucial as theology and philosophy are to the Comedy, it is not primarily a theological or philosophical tract, it is a poem. There’s a difference. And that fact seems to have been overlooked, alas, by too many of Dante’s commentators.

Could you give us a canto that would be a prime representation of your translation?

Okay, so here’s Canto 33 of Inferno (Count Ugolino, although it should be noted that his story begins towards the end of Canto 32 and ends in the middle of Canto 33):

Raising his mouth from his repulsive dinner,
he wiped it on the hair left on the brain
whose back part had been ravaged by that sinner. 3
He said: “You want me to revive again
the desperate grief that wraps my heart about;
even before I talk, the thought brings pain. 6
But if my words can be the seeds that sprout
infamy for this traitor that I gnaw,
for all my weeping I shall still speak out. 9
I don’t know who you are or how come you’re
in hell, but when I hear you talking so,
it sounds like you are Florentine for sure. 12
I was Count Ugolino, you should know;
Archbishop Ruggieri’s the one I bite:
here’s why I’ve scant neighbourliness to show. 15
The fact that I, because of this man’s spite,
though he enjoyed my trust, was apprehended
and killed – on that I need shed no more light; 18
the cruel means by which my life was ended,
however, may be something new to you:
hear then, and tell me if he has offended. 21
A narrow slit cut in that falcon’s mew,
now named the hunger tower to mark my state –
and other people will be jailed there too – 24
had let the moon several times penetrate
in through its opening, when a nightmare brought
a scene that tore the shroud around my fate. 27
This man was master of the chase, I thought,
driving the wolf and wolf-cubs to the hill
that cuts the Pisans’ view of Lucca short. 30
The hounds were thin, keen, well-trained in their skill;
Gualandi and Sismondi took the lead,
Lanfranchi too, to home in on the kill. 33
Father and sons looked tired out by the speed
after a while; I saw sharp jaws outspread,
then grabbing hold to make their bodies bleed. 36
When I awoke, before the night had fled,
I heard my children sobbing in their sleep –
they were with me – and asking me for bread. 39
You are a cruel man if you can keep
from tears, to think what was becoming clear;
if you don’t weep, at what, then, would you weep? 42
They’d woken up, and it was drawing near
to that time when guards usually would bring
our meal, but dreams had filled us all with fear; 45
I heard the dreadful sound of hammering
to seal the tower’s door below, and eyed
my sons’ faces, not saying anything. 48
I did not weep, but turned to stone inside:
they wept. ‘Father, why do you look that way?
What’s wrong?’ my little Anselmuccio cried. 51
I shed no tears and had nothing to say
through all that day and through the night that came,
until another sun brought the next day. 54
A ray of sunlight cast its meagre flame
into our wretched cell, and I could see
my face and their four faces looked the same; 57
I bit at both my hands in misery;
they, thinking that I did it from a lack
of food, got up at once and said to me: 60
‘Father, the plight we’re in would be less black
if you ate us: for this poor flesh we had
you clothed us in – now you should take it back.’ 63
I calmed down then, not to make them more sad;
for two days we remained there, all struck dumb;
earth swallowing us would not have been so bad. 66
Then finally, when the fourth day had come,
Gaddo collapsed at my feet with this call:
‘I need help, father, can’t you give me some?’ 69
He died; and I saw the three others fall,
as you can see me here now, one by one,
between the fifth day and the sixth; and all 72
I did, now blind, after they’d died, was run
my hands across them, crying their names two days;
then hunger fought with grief and hunger won.” 75
With those words, lowering his twisted gaze,
he took the wretched skull back in his jaws,
strong as the teeth a chewing dog displays. 78
Ah Pisa, where Italian’s heard you’re cause
of shame throughout that fine land; since no town
that borders you has come to impose some laws, 81
Capraia and Gorgona should move down
to block the Arno estuary and prevent
its flow so all inside your walls will drown! 84
Though Ugolino – or so the story went –
betrayed your fortresses, there was no need
to put his sons to that kind of torment. 87
Latter-day Thebes, did youth not prove indeed
Brigata and Uguiccione were benign,
and the other two names known to those who read? 90
We passed to where the icy wastes confine
in harsh envelopment another crowd,
who don’t face down but lie there all supine. 93
Because of weeping, weeping’s disallowed:
the grief that their eye sockets block turns in
to swell the misery under which they’re bowed; 96
the first tears freeze together as a thin
glass visor covering the concave space
beneath their eyebrows like translucent skin. 99
And though, as happens in a calloused place,
due to the cold all feeling had somehow
drained away from its dwelling in my face, 102
I seemed to feel a wind upon my brow,
and said to Vergil: “Who is causing this?
I thought down here all vapours were spent now.” 105
He said: “You’ll soon be where your eyes can’t miss
the answer to that and you’ll realise
the cause that blows this gust down the abyss.” 108
From the cold crust I heard one sinner’s cries
towards us: “Vicious souls, who’ve been assigned
the deepest place in hell to agonise, 111
lift off my face’s hard veils – be so kind –
so, till my tears are frozen solid twice,
I can discharge the grief that fills my mind.” 114
I told him: “If you want me to be nice,
say who you are, and if I don’t untie
your bonds, may I go down beneath this ice.” 117
He said: “I’m Friar Alberigo and I
once plucked the fruit that grew on evil land:
for those figs I get dates now in reply.” 120
“Oh,” I said. “You’re dead, then, I understand?”
He gave this answer: “How my body is
on earth, I’ve no intelligence to hand. 123
For Ptolemaea has such properties
a man’s soul falls here before Atropos,
who spins life-threads, decides to sever his. 126
And so that you may scrape the frozen gloss
of tears from my face with more willingness,
know that when someone starts to double-cross, 129
as I did, then a demon will possess
his body and exert total control
until that time when it becomes lifeless. 132
But down into these depths plunges the soul;
perhaps still, on earth, the body may be seen
of that shade there, wintering in this sink-hole. 135
You must know him – if you’re new here, I mean:
his name is Branca d’Oria and he’s kept
in this way, and for many years has been.” 138
“That’s something,” I said, “that I can’t accept,
for Branca d’Oria has not died as yet,
and always has dressed, eaten, drunk and slept.” 141
He said: “Michele Zanche had still to get
to the Malebranche in that higher dale,
where the pitch boils, all glutinous and wet, 144
when this man left, inside his body’s veil,
a devil instead, and likewise a kinsman
who helped him carry out the same betrayal. 147
But now stretch your hand down here so you can
open my eyes.” I did not do so then;
meanness to him was the most generous plan. 150
You Genoese, all breeding’s alien
to you, filled with all vice you can contrive;
why aren’t you hounded from the world of men? 153
For with Romagna’s vilest spirit I’ve
found one of you who, for his conduct’s sake,
although his body’s in the world, alive, 156
now sees his soul bathe in Cocytus’ lake.

1. Smith, Tim and Marco Sonzogni, editors. To Hell and Back: An Anthology of Dante’s Inferno in English Transation (1782-2017). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2017.