Translations – Page 9

Caroline Bergvall, Dante Variations

June 7, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“As of May, 2000 the British Library housed 48 different translations of Dante’s Inferno into English.

“Poet and sound artist Caroline Bergvall gathers the opening lines of each translation in her sound piece VIA (48 Dante Variations).

“Bergvall reads the opening of each translation then names the translator and the date of the publication. The result is powerful. The overarching monotony sprinkled with the subtlety of each translation and the hypnotic drone of Bergvall’s voice leaves the listener transfixed as they await the next rendering of Dante’s lines. The piece conveys the inherent complexity of the art of translation and illuminates the uniqueness of each translator’s work.” –Michael Lieberman, Book Patrol, December 15, 2009

Read Bergvall’s piece at poetryfoundation.org.

Listen to the performance here.

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Electronic Arts Re-Releasing Longfellow’s Translation

January 30, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“There’s a new edition of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ that’s recently begun appearing in bookstores. Same words. Different cover. It’s got a big picture of a muscular fellow in a spiky crown and an overline that says, ‘The literary classic that inspired the epic video game.'” [. . .] –Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times, January 29, 2010

Elisabeth Tonnard, “In This Dark Wood” (2008)

November 16, 2009 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“This book is a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations I collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the same archive as used for Two of Us (the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers working in San Francisco from the 40’s to the 70’s).
The book is set up in a repetitious way, to stress a sense of similarity, endlessness and interchangeability. The images are re-expressions of each other, and so are the texts.” —Elisabeth Tonnard

Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas – Austin)

Remembering Michael Mazur’s Illustrations of the Inferno

August 30, 2009 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“Michael Mazur, a relentlessly inventive printmaker, painter and sculptor whose work encompassed social documentation, narrative and landscape while moving back and forth between figuration and abstraction, died on Aug. 18 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73 and lived in Cambridge and Provincetown, Mass. [. . .]

“While attending Amherst College he studied with the printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, who was teaching at Smith College. After taking a year off to study in Italy, where his lifelong fascination with Dante began, he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. [. . .]

“After seeing an exhibition of Degas monotypes at the Fogg Museum in 1968, he began exploring that medium, most notably in the monumental Wakeby landscapes of 1983, depicting Wakeby Lake on Cape Cod, and in a series of illustrations for Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, published in 1994.” [. . .] –William Grimes, The New York Times, August 29, 2009

Contributed by Richard Lindemann (2006)

See also the 2020 exhibit of Mazur’s work at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Mass.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Mezzo Cammin” (1842) and “Divina Commedia” (1867)

July 7, 2009 By

The title, “Mezzo Cammin,” takes its name from the first line of the Inferno. Longfellow, the first American to translate Dante’s Commedia into English, “was 35 when he wrote this poem, halfway through the scriptural lifespan of 70 years.”
Additionally, Longfellow wrote six sonnets, entitled “Divina Commedia,” which were composed during the grief-filled aftermath of his second wife’s death.
“The six sonnets. . .were written during the progress of Mr. Longfellow’s work in translating the Commedia, and were published as poetical fly-leaves to the three parts. The first was written just after he had put the first two cantos of the Inferno into the hands of the printer. This, with the second, prefaced the Inferno. The third and fourth introduced the Purgatorio, and the fifth and sixth the Paradiso.” —Representative Poetry Online (retrieved on July 7, 2009)

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