Renditions

(Today's post comes from David R. Slavitt, whose translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova will be forthcoming from Harvard University Press in August. Per Harvard's website, the book is a sequence of thirty-one poems, the author recounts his love of Beatrice from his first sight of her (when he was nine and she eight), through unrequited love and chance encounters, to his profound grief sixteen years later at her sudden and unexpected death.
Here, Slavitt talks about his approach to translating this work.)
There is a poem on the page. In English, which is your native language. You read the poem. No problem. But then suppose that there is someone else in the room and he or she reads the poem. Now there is a problem, because your understanding of it, the associations it triggers in your head, and the degree of your approval or disapproval are different from his. It is like the time that your watch shows. Yours says 2:45. But if there is someone else wearing a watch, and his says 2:47, neither one of you knows exactly what time it is.
Each reading of a poem is unique. Even readings by the same person, separated by months or years, will be slightly different. It stands to reason then that translations from another language--or renditions, with the violence that lies embedded in that word--will be inexact, some of them closer to the French or Italian or Latin text, others taking liberties and yet coming closer in the way they suggest the experience a reader might have had had he been adept in the source language.
I took liberties in my translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova (to be published in August by Harvard University Press) because I wanted to make it clear that the poems in it were poems, that they rhymed, and that they were virtuoso pieces of linguistic dexterity. What they say is . . . not so important, after all. They are love poems, mostly, and all love poems have a similar gist. But to make a statement that seems naturally to form a sonnet or a canzone is to defy the difficulties and constraints of the language and appear to be uttering inspired speech. (Indeed, because English rhyming is more difficult than Italian, the effect in English is all the greater.)
I have been criticized from time to time (or, more accurately, most of the time) for departing from my source with such insouciance. How do I have the temerity to fiddle with Dante? The answer is simple . . . For those who insist on fidelity, the poems are still available in Italian. Go, learn Italian. Or at least learn enough Italian so you can, with a trot and a dictionary beside you, read it a word at a time, a line at a time. That's a perfectly good way to approach a poem in an accessible language. (Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and others require more effort.) Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin pretends to be a translation but is, in fact, a course in Russian. It requires great effort on the part of the reader but is greatly rewarding.
I am aiming at a version that is not so strenuously demanding. I have in mind intelligent dilettantes. That has come somehow to be an insulting word (like amateur) but it is cognate with delight (as the other denotes a lover). And what else, after all, is the point of literature.