The poet exists for us. That is an excellent idea. It is our privilege to take what we enjoy and reject what we do not like or understand. I cannot be interested in Dante's ethics, which interested him so profoundly and is the bone of his thought. His "stern indignant moral," as Carlyle called it, is for me no part of the beauty of the "mystic song." I cannot regard without suspicion, even in a New Englander, Norton's statement to Dr. Dinsmore that the quality of the Commedia, other than its beauty, which attracted him to Dante was "his powerful exposition of moral penalties and rewards." Other than its beauty? What does that mean? If the qualities of the Commedia can be separated (Dante happened to believe that they can not be), let us throw the ethics, the penalties, and rewards to the four winds. Let us keep as much as we can grasp of the beauty of the episodes, the images, the phrases, the structure, whatever gives delight.
The beauty of the fifth canto of Inferno does not depend on the ethical fact that the carnal sinners are punished, but on the poetic fact that their pathetic loves on earth are recalled and that their punishment is vividly, physically dramatized. The tragic pity and terror of it break through the baldest translation stripped of the enchantment of the original verse. Many English poets have been tempted to try to render that famous fifth canto. Mr. Arensberg has made the best version that I have seen. His version is in the terza rima, a difficult thing to manage in English, and he succeeds in making a good English poem, a shade finer than a mere tour de force. I doubt whether he or any other poet can so well translate the entire Commedia in the same form, though the attempt has been made. The terza rima has never been quite naturalized in our language. Even such a master as Shelley can not turn it perfectly. We imported the sonnet as easily as the apple and we made some French forms grow thriftily in our hardy garden. The terza rima remains artificial and foreign, peculiarly Italian and more peculiarly Dante; he made it his own and moved at ease in its exacting rigidities. He was in thought and form a diabolical magician.
In order to show the terza rima in English and to suggest (not to solve!) the problem of translation, let us look at three versions of the last ten lines of the fifth canto of Inferno, the story of Paolo and Francesca. Francesca is speaking and tells how she and her lover read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere—romance within romance! First, Norton's clear, deliberately uninspired prose:
"When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by such a lover, this one, who never shall be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. Gallehaut was the book, and he wrote it. That day we read no farther in it!"
While the one spirit said this, the other was so weeping that through pity I swooned as if I had been dying, and fell as a dead body falls.
Then Longfellow in traditional blank verse (and it is good verse; he knew his business):
"When as we read of the much longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.