Students Translating Dante

Fourth- and fifth-grade students at Sobrante Park Elementary School in East Oakland have begun the 2010-11 school year by translating The Divine Comedy.

The kids at Sobrante Park met Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) under the auspices of Poetry Inside Out, the Center’s in-school literary arts program, that fosters imagination and builds students’ problem solving, critical thinking, and literacy skills through the translation and composition of poetry. Poetry Inside Out has worked with over 5,000 Bay Area students since 2000.

A generous grant from the Stocker Foundation has enabled Poetry Inside Out to get a running start at the beginning of the school year, even while school districts were awaiting the passage of a budget in Sacramento that might enable them to contribute to the costs of the program.

We gave our students at Sobrante Park — Spanish, English, Fante and Samoan speakers, 81% of whom get free lunch — the first three lines, in Italian, of Dante’s epic poem:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

The students sympathized with the poet’s life story: how Dante fell in love with his next-door neighbor, Beatrice Portinari, when they were both nine years old; how political differences led to his being kicked out of his home town, Florence, and how he wrote this 14,000-line poem which explores the entire known universe of his time.

At the beginning of the poem Dante finds himself lost in a dark forest. Guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil, he makes his way down through the nine circles of Hell and then climbs the mountain of Purgatory, finally ascending into Heaven. Of course, we told them, Dante placed all the folks he was mad at in Hell and all those he admired in Heaven. “Was he God, then?” one kid asked. No, we replied, that was just his opinion.

We started by reading the poem aloud over and over in imperfect Italian to get the music of the words, then dove into a trilingual Translator’s Glossary parsing every word of the text. The students quickly grasped that Italian and Spanish are closer to each other than either is to English (we intend to run with that kind of insight all year). It wasn’t hard to puzzle out the meaning. Here’s fifth-grader Jeremiah W.’s translation:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a gloomy jungle
because the proper pathway was lost.

Some kids slyly added their own licks and flourishes to their translations. Another fifth-grader, Diego P., grinned like a cat with a tummy full of canary as he read his translation into Spanish:

En el medio del viaje de nuestra vida
me encontré en una selva oscura
porque el camino derecho estaba perdido en el mundo cruel.

Ah cruel world indeed . . .

Finally, we gave the kids the assignment to write their own original poems in three-line stanzas, beginning with the first line of the Dante and then taking it wherever they wanted. Fourth-grader Celeste C. chose ice-cream with a cherry on top and a surprise twist:

In the middle of the journey of my life
I am going to be an ice cream cone with sprinkles
and a cherry on the top and I will get eaten by my dog.

Fifth-grader Gerardo G. drew on the Greek myths they are studying in class:

In the middle of the journey of my life
I was at war with the gods
I defeated the slayer with Medusa’s head.

Estefanía T., also in fifth grade, writing in Spanish, turned the dark forest into a place of light:

En el medio del viaje de mi vida
yo me encontré en una selva de luz
en el camino izquierdo había un castillo encantado.

In the middle of the journey of my life
I found myself in a forest of light
on the left-hand path there was an enchanted castle.

Fifth-grader Sandra Z. created an entirely fantastic scene with its own rules of engagement:

In the middle of the journey of my life I stared
at the lion made of lightning bolts while the rain-
drop soldiers tried to destroy me with their useless water weapons.

Fifth-grader Deontae P. found a deeper meaning that resonates wit,h Dante’s epic journey of self-discovery:

In the middle of the journey
of my life I was lost in the dark night
of wisdom, but now I am smart.

One more fifth-grader, Janiah O., turned her exploration into a hymn of grateful acceptance:

In the middle of the journey of my life
I went to explore the world. I went to see
what is the world and how the world is made.

I smelled roses and I saw roses, but it
doesn’t matter. I love the world and I like
how it’s made. Thank you for this world.

We’ll keep you posted as these kids continue their Poetry Inside Out journey.