Dante Alighieri.
The fame of the Fiero Ghibellino, as the Italians are wont to call Dante Alighieri, is great, not in extensiveness, but in weight. Wherever and to whomsoever he is known, his name and his works carry a charm and an authority vouchsafed to only a few in the department of authors. Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are the poets, whose names are enshrined on an elevation above the rest; they breathe, so to speak, in an atmosphere of their own. They are, indeed, masters and guides,
"Maestri di color che sanno."
In truth, to understand their works, the study thereof must needs be made a specialty. Yet even those who have lisped their names in their mothers' tongue find that "ars longa, vita brevis." The student will drink at those pure fountains with ever-increasing pleasure. "How often have you been in St. Peter's?" asked of us a venerable monk, the first time we entered the Vatican. "Never before, sir." "Well," replied he, "I have been coming here almost every day for the last thirteen years, and every day I find some new thing to admire and study!" The same has been averred by those who have been familiar with Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare.
We well remember how, in our youth, and in our native schools, we were so trained in the study of Alighieri that it was an easy matter to discover whether an author, be he poet or prose-writer, had been formed on Dante, whether he had drunk at the head fountain or at side streams. Only few poets we remember whose verses we read with an enchanted devotion—Gasparo Leonarducci, of Venice; Vincenzo Monti, of Milan; and Alfonso Varano, of Ferrara. Of the prose-writers, Paolo Segneri, Sforza Pallavicino, of the seventeenth, and Pietro Giordani, of the nineteenth century, are the only Danteschi in whom we delighted, as we were delighted in reading Homer transformed into the succum et saporem of the AEneid. Those above mentioned were poets, historians, and orators, than whom more ardent and persevering students of Dante are not recorded in the annals of Italian literature. Theirs was not, however, a pedantic servility: Dante was the father that engendered their style, the eagle who provoked them to fly; and they did fly, and soared above the rest, and fixed their pupils on the brightness of the sun. Which remarks afford us also the measure by which to value the success of those who have attempted to translate Dante into foreign languages, an attempt which to the Italian scholar sounds almost presumptuous. For, if the style and the meaning of Dante have proven a matter of so much difficulty and labor to the countryman of Dante, how much more laborious and difficult must they prove to the foreign-born student?
Whoever attempts to translate a poet must join "the fidelity of rendition to the spirit of a poet." The former presupposes a thorough knowledge of the two languages, even to the commonest idioms. Then, unless one is born a poet, the attempt will be the very madness of folly, which truth receives additional evidence when the work to be translated is one of transcendent merit in its originality; ay, more, when it is incomparable: incomparable, we mean, as a human work can be.
Such is the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri. Pindaric in flights, supernatural in conception, inventive in expression and language, (for Dante is "the father of the Italian tongue,") Dante stands before the scholar as a most difficult author. Nor are the numberless commentators and voluminous comments, agreeing or conflicting, ingenious or absurd, a mean proof of our assertion!
Commentators have, in fact, pushed their folly and their presumption to an excess equalled only by the absurd twisting of Holy Writ in favor of the thousand and one senses which defenders of opposite doctrines have fancied they read in one and the same text. A witty Italian imagines he sees Dante crouching low, and vainly endeavoring, with wild gesticulations and lusty cries for help, to parry the blows by which clergymen and laymen, laico o cherco, endeavor to force him to admit such meanings into his words as he never dreamt of; at the same time they, falling out among themselves, exchange blows, and throw at each other's head their heavy comments, bound in wood, and rudely embossed with brazen studs. It is related that once the stern poet, while passing by a smithy, heard snatches of his poem sung, but so interlarded with strange words, and the ends of verses so bitten off, that the grating upon his ears was unendurable: whereupon he entered the shop, and fell around wantonly throwing into vast confusion the tools of the churl, who, thinking him mad, rushed upon him and yelled: "What the —— art thou about?" "And what art thou doing?" retorted Dante, sobering down at once. "I am at my work, and thou art spoiling my tools!" replied the smith. "If thou wishest me to leave thy things alone, leave mine alone also." "And, pray, what am I spoiling of thine?" "You are singing my verses, but not as I made them; it is the only art I possess, and you spoil it." [Footnote 92]
[Footnote 92: Had Shakespeare this anecdote in mind when he made Orlando cry out, "I pray you, mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favoredly"? (As You Like It, act iii. sc. 2.)]