Clive James on his new Dante

My translation of the Divine Comedy is here today because my wife, when we were together in Florence in the mid-1960s, a few years before we were married, taught me that the great secret of Dante’s masterpiece lay in the handling of the verse, which always moved forward even in the most intensely compressed of episodes. She proved this by answering my appeal to have the famous Paolo and Francesca episode in Inferno 5 explained to me from the original text. From various translators including Byron we can see what that passage says. But how did Dante say it? My wife said that the terza rima was only the outward sign of how the thing carried itself along, and that if you dug down into Dante’s expressiveness at the level of phonetic construction you would find an infinitely variable rhythmic pulse adaptable to anything he wanted to convey.

-- James, writing for Slate

Don Share on Montale, and "squirming through poetry"

In his Oxford lecture on Eugenio Montale's poem, "L'anguilla" ("The Eel"), Paul Muldoon explores this - and Montale's poem - wryly and thoroughly, perhaps definitively. Like everything else he does, it's a tour de force. As you'd expect, Muldoon starts off by quoting Robert Lowell's infamous introduction to Imitations and, having presented his own version, wiggles his way through a number of competing English translations of the poem (there must be at least fifty, but Muldoon takes on a selection of the most formidable of them). My guess is that most American readers read Montale's poems in either Jonathan Galassi's versions or William Arrowsmith's, though Charles Wright's have been a perennial favorite as well. Galassi's are increasingly becoming the go-to versions in this country, revised versions of which have just been reissued in paperback by his company, F.S.G.

-- Over at his Squandermania blog, Don Share reflects on his experience with Montale, on the occasion of the simultaneous reissue of the Galassi and Arrowsmith translations in comprehensive volumes. It is a rich post, highly recommended for persons interested in Montale and in tales of how translations and texts pass from author to translator, from scholar to scholar, from teacher to student.

Sixty-Six: The Journal of Sonnet Studies is now available

I am very excited to announce that the inaugural issue of Sixty-Six: the Journal of Sonnet Studies is now available for purchase.

Of particular interest to Pusteblume readers are the sonnets in translation and accompanying essays on translating. Stephen Tapscott, a fine scholar, poet, and teacher at MIT, has submitted original translations of Frederico Garcia Lorca's sonetos del amor oscuro and a short, intriguing essay on these darkly delicious Spanish sonnets. There are also several sonnets by Francesco Petrarca, translated skilfully from the Italian, with an accompanying essay, by Christina Mengert. The Spring 2008 issue of Sixty-Six also features translations of poems by the German poet, Herbert Eulenburg, and--delightfully--a translation in English of a Polish translation of a poem originally in Hungarian. I would recommend you get your hands on a copy!