Inferno

Starred review from May 21, 2012
Bang has done for Dante’s most famous poem something akin to what Baz Luhrmann did for Shakespeare in his 1996 film of Romeo and Juliet: updated the presentation of a classic for a contemporary sensibility without sacrificing its timelessness. Bang (The Bride of E) has preserved the feel and tempo of the original—and the many English translations that readers will be familiar with: ”Stopped mid-motion in the middle/ Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—/ Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost,” she begins. She has, however, modernized the metaphors; where Dante looked to the politics and culture of his contemporary Italy for allusions to illustrate his sense of faith and morality, Bang mines American pop and high culture. Yes, traditionalists and scholars may shriek upon seeing Eric Cartman (of South Park fame), sculptures by Rodin, John Wayne Gacy, and many others make anachronistic cameos in Bang’s version of Hell, but this is still very much Dante’s underworld, updated so it pops on today’s page. The result is an epic both fresh and historical, scholarly and irreverent: “ ‘Pope Satan, Pope Satan, Alley Oop!’ ” begins Canto VII with a line in which Bang mines various previous translations of Dante and the roots of the phrase “Alley Oop” in French gymnastics and a newspaper comic about “a Stone Age traveling salesman from the kingdom of Moo who rode a dinosaur named Dinny,” according to Bang’s comprehensive notes. This will be the Dante for the next generation. Includes illustrations by artist Henrik Drescher.

November 19, 2001
In the high-stakes field of translating the great 14th-century Italian poet Dante, for years the stellar prose efforts of John Sinclair (Oxford) and Charles Singleton (Princeton) ruled because they focused on meaning rather than poetic effect. Those efforts were recently bolstered by the unrhymed, unmetered verse of husband-and-wife team Robert and Jean Hollander, who delivered a version rich in sense late last year. The Dorothy Sayers translation for Penguin, which mimicked Dante's original terza rima, was famous for its badness. Poets like Allen Mandelbaum (Bantam) and Robert Pinsky (Noonday) checked in with more poetic efforts in meter, but without trying the impossible task of writing superb poetry in terza rima that also matches Dante's meaning. That task was left for experienced translator and poet Michael Palma (My Name on the Wind: Selected Poems of Diego Valeri). His Inferno
has the advantage of a facing Italian text (as does Pinsky) and some explanatory notes. But although Palma has published three collections of his own verse, he simply cannot measure up to a task that defeated such highly gifted translators of Dante into rhyme as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Laurence Binyon. Norton is plugging his work as being in "contemporary American English," but the demands of the form make for some puzzling, clunky passages: "As I walked, one met my eyes with a moment's stare/ and I said at once when I saw him: 'I have not/ always been starved of the sight of that man there.' " The monotony of almost all masculine rhymes is a further sign that English-language poetry may not be possible here, regardless of who descends this time. (Jan.)Forecast:While the Norton imprimatur will guarantee a certain circulation for this version, the availability of superior editions and Palma's relative lack of renown outweigh any claims to contemporaneity. Readers can still be safely pointed to Mandelbaum, the Hollanders, the popular and accessible Pinsky, or the prose warhorses.