The Divine Comedy, translated by Michael Palma

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Translated by Michael Palma

Liveright 2024

More than twenty years after Michael Palma’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, the translator and poet has now produced an English-language translation of the entire Commedia, substantially changing and elaborating on his Inferno in the process.

Dante translations are a crowded field, but 2024 has seen only this one new Divine Comedy, in which Palma becomes the latest to tackle bringing Dante’s terza rima into English verse, wrestling hendecasyllables into something modern readers can come to like.

“Although Dante’s epic is a work of much greater depth and profundity, it is in some ways an ancestor of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and other such works in which so many young people immerse themselves today,” Palma writes, stretching the blanket just a bit as translators tend to do. “It is no wonder that the Internet abounds in reviews from readers who started the Divine Comedy expecting to be bored or confused but who instead have found themselves riveted.”

That terza rima presents notorious challenges, with the first and third line of each tercet rhyming with each other and the second line of each tercet rhyming with the first and third of the next tercet, a forward-tumbling landslide of a verse form that can be very tricky a language like English that’s so fond of its pregnant pauses. “I have always translated poetry as I have always written it, striving to achieve a harmonious blend of form and content,” Palma writes. “To abandon or severely compromise the poem’s form in the hope of honoring its content is, to my way of thinking, to destroy the balance necessary to achieve that blend.”

Does his own blend succeed? Turn to a famous passage in the Inferno, the story of poor Paolo and Francesca, illicit lovers in life now condemned to be whipped around in a tornado forever. A stricken Dante asks Francesca how she came to be here, and she tells him how she and her husband’s brother fell into adultery prompted by reading about the famous adultery of Lancelot and King Arthur’s Queen Guinevere. Reading that passage, as Francesca tells Dante, destroyed their self-control. Back in 1865, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rendered it this way:

There is no greater sorrow

Than to be mindlful of the happy time

In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.

But, if to recognize the earliest root

Of love in us thou hast so great desire,

I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.

One day we reading were for our delight

Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthrall.

Alone we were and without any fear.

Full many a time our eyes together drew

That reading, and drove the color from our faces;

But one point only was it that o’ercame us.

When 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.

Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.

That day no farther did we read therein.

The tercets are separated from each other, and that “Galeotto” isn’t explained (he’s the character who recommended the book to the poor Arthurian lovers), but there’s a stateliness here that is, it must be admitted, much better Longfellow than Dante. If we turn to a more recent translation, this is how Allen Mandelbaum did it in 1960:

There is no greater sorrow

Than thinking back upon a happy time

In misery – and this your teacher knows.

  Yet if you long so much to understand

The first root of our love, then I shall tell

My tale to you as one who weeps and speaks.

  One day, to pass the time away, we read

Of Lancelot – how love had overcome him.

We were alone, and we suspected nothing.

  And time and again that reading led

Our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,

And yet one point alone defeated us.

  When we read how the desired smile

Was kissed by one who was so true a lover,

This one, who never shall be parted from me,

  While all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.

A Gallehault indeed, that book and he

Who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.

He appends an actual note on the subject: “Since Gallehault is a character who encouraged the Queen and her lover, the book is ‘a Gallehault indeed,’ for it serves Paolo and Francesca as a go-between.” And he substitutes indentations for actual breaks between tercets. And is it fair to add that the sludgy rhetorical choices Mandelbaum makes don’t quite add up to the “harmonious blend of form and content” Palma mentioned? His own translation, reworked a bit for this completed work, goes like this:

There is no greater woe

  Than looking back on happiness in days

  Of misery. Your guide can tell you so.

But if you are so eager to retrace

  Our love’s first root, then I will make it known

  As one who speaks with tears upon her face.

Reading how Lancelot was overthrown

  By love, we chanced to pass the time one day.

  We sat, suspecting nothing, all alone.

Some of the things we read made our eyes stray

  To one another’s and the color flee

  Our faces, but one point swept us away.

We read how the smile desired so ardently

  Was kissed by such a lover, one so fine,

  And this one, who will never part from me,

Trembling all over, pressed his mouth on mine.

  The book was a Gallehault, the author as well.

  That day we did not read another line.

He includes a note of his own: “Because Gallehault, Lancelot’s friend and fellow knight, acted as go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere, his name had come to signify ‘panderer,’” and he likewise indents rather than separates his tercets. But he captures the wild stop-and-start momentum of Dante’s passage, so key to this famous episode, with a better ear than most of his predecessors. This is true throughout Palma’s Divine Comedy, this care for sound and flow, which he displays even 400 pages later when he’s assaying the bewildering transcendences of the Paradiso. This book was most certainly worth the wait.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News