The Salty Tang of The Inferno

In February 2000, when Irish poet, writer, and musician Ciaran Carson was asked to translate Canto XXXI of Dante's The Inferno, Carson had yet to read the epic poem in its entirety. Now, a scant three years later, Carson's energetic translation (The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, Granta) is garnering strong praise from critics and readers.

Of his first experience with Dante, Carson said, "Until then, I knew little or nothing of The Inferno beyond the famous injunction to 'abandon all hope, ye who enter here.' For a while, I did indeed abandon hope of doing anything with it."

However, the positive reaction to his first translation encouraged him to take on the whole of The Inferno. His unique method of translating -- he translated while reading The Inferno for the first time -- ensured that his translation is fresh and full of vitality and verve. Readers will be delighted with Carson's accessible translation of Dante's famous poem. It was, he says, "a kind of journey full of highs and lows, or hope and despair, perhaps not unlike Dante's own journey into the poem."

Carson was born in Belfast in 1948 and still lives there. He has published over a dozen books, including a novel, Shamrock Tea, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Belfast Confetti, winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award for Irish Poetry, the Irish Book Award, and shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize; First Language, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry; and Last Night's Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music, a study of Irish traditional music.

Carson grew up speaking Irish at home, and his collection of Irish translations of sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud, The Alexandrine Plan, was published in 1998. This experience, combined with his love for Merwin's translations of Osip Mandelstam and Anthea Bell's translations of the W.G. Sebald's work, stood him in good stead when he took on the project of translating The Inferno.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for The Inferno's many English translators has been Dante's interlocking terza rima, a poetic rhyme scheme which involve interlocking rhymes, written in iambic tercets. There are many fewer rhymes in the English language than there are in Italian, so Carson was faced with "the added burden of rhyme (or half-rhyme, or assonance in many cases, which was all I could manage)." Carson found he was "forced into inspiration by the strictures" and had to "come up with a nice (and accurate) translation that would not have occurred ... if there were no barriers to circumvent, no puzzles to be solved."

Despite these challenges, the first thing to strike the reader about Carson's translation is the ease of reading. Carson was pleased that "some reviewers said that mine was the first version of The Inferno they had read all the way through." His translation is indeed a breath of fresh air, akin to Seamus Heaney's recent Beowulf and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid. This is poetry that carries the reader along with it in vivid and accessible language.

Not that there have not been critical reviews. The Daily Telegraph called the translation "uncouth" because it did not pay enough conventional respect to Dante.

Carson was undaunted. "Many translations of Dante are into a received, 'respectable' English, which loses all the salty tang of Dante's language." The Telegraph's reaction may also be indicative of some readers' expectations that The Inferno in English be replete with high-flown, ornate language. Carson explained that The Inferno does not deserve this reputation.

"One of the interesting things about The Inferno," he said, "is listening to Dante sometimes making the language up as he goes along, by turns slangy, formal, foul-mouthed, vituperative, lyrical, and so on." What Dante was doing, and what Carson in turn did with his translation, was to make "a space in which the language of the street can enter into formal discourse."

Carson also "admired Dante's concision," and hopes that his immersion in the translation will bring something of that quality to his own writing. His new book of poems, Breaking News (Wake Forest University Press), concerning war in Ireland in the recent and not-so recent past, will be published this month.

When asked, Carson said he did have contemporary candidates for The Inferno's circles of hell. "Without speaking of specific circles, there's quite a big list at the moment. A lot of politicians who advocate violence without considering its aftermath, or its human consequences. The same politicians who present their specious arguments in glib language. Or who are incompetent in language. Who put profit before morality. You know who I'm talking about."

However, when asked to pick a favorite canto in The Inferno, he was less sure. "Canto XIII," he said, "is very powerful, for its evocation of a speaking personality, the suicide Pier delle Vigne," and, returning to his previous idea, "given the current situation in world politics, Canto XXVIII is a devastating account of the effects of war."

Fans of Carson's accessible new translation of The Inferno may have to wait a while for the rest of his translation of Dante's epic work. While he doesn't discount the possibility of future translations, The Inferno took him a year to complete "and perhaps life is too short to spend a couple of years doing a translation when one could be working at one's own stuff." -- Gavin J. Grant