by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Love X 3

Dante, grandmaster of terza rima, thought in threes as thoroughly as anybody ever has.   So there’s a kind of sense in seeing the Paris Review’s recaps of three cantos side by side.  With full intent, Alexander Aciman takes Dante exegesis from the sublime to the silly – comparing translations of a famous passage in Canto V, summarizing Canto VI via Facebook-style fanpage reviews, and evaluating Canto VII quantitatively, from the “number of inner groups encountered” (3) to the “number of times Virgil comforts Dante” (4, and Aciman adds, “this number feels low”).

For the Canto V passage about the doomed lovers Francesca and Paolo, who had an affair, he assembles an all-star team of translators: Lord Byron, John Hollander, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Pinsky, and even his undergraduate self, working in the purgatory that was freshman year at the University of Chicago.  But he passes over the translation that has been my own favorite (for the whole Commedia, that is) ever since I spotted it on the desk of a poet I admire: the one by C.H. Sisson, a British scholar and government official, published in Oxford’s World’s Classics.

Sisson renders the passage from Canto V – Francesca’s monologue – this way:

      `The country I was born in lies along

The coast, just at the point the Po descends

To have some peace among its followers.

Love, which quickly fastens on gentle hearts,

Seized that wretch, and it was for the personal beauty

Which was taken from me; how it happened still offends me.

Love, which allows no one who is loved to escape,

Seized me so strongly with my pleasure in him,

That, as you see, it does not leave me now.

Love led us two to find a single death;

Caina awaits him who brought us to this end.’

These were the words which came to us from them.

Note the use of the word love to begin three tercets in a row: that’s the power of love raised to the power of three.      

The painting is by Sean Scully.