Dante Alighieri, Magic Realist

“Is and is not” is a riff familiar from the magic realism of Marquez, Rushdie, and their inheritors – a stylistic signature akin to Hemingway’s monosyllables and Faulkner’s latinate meanders.

So it was striking to find is right there in Canto 7 of Clive James’s recent translation of the Purgatorio.  Virgil is speaking of his plight as a holy man who had the bad luck to precede Christ by just a few years:

                                                   “Before

Souls worthy of the climb to God came here

To this hill, my dead bones were buried by

Augustus. I am Virgil. For that mere

Defect – lack of the faith that I could not

Have had, because a child was not yet born –

I lost Heaven.” So spoke Virgil of his lot.

Hearing him is Sordello, like Virgil a poet of Mantua – but one born 1200 years later:

As one who marvels at the sudden dawn

Before him of a thing he both believes

And disbelieves, and says `It is … and yet

It isn’t …’ and then finally retrieves

His power to move, Sordello with bent head

Again went humbly to my lord, embraced

Him low down as the lowly do, and said

“O Glory of the Latins, you that graced

Our tongue and proved its power to Earth,

What did of mine or blessing shows me you?”

James made this translation of Dante out of his deep familiarity with postwar writing, and he may be making use of intentional anachronism. But the effect is to suggest that Dante was a magic realist – the first?

• 5 April 2014
• #literature and belief#dante
• 1