Dorothy Sayers on Dante

Extract

It is eight years since Miss Sayers brought out her ‘Penguin’ version of the Inferno, to the surprise of some readers of her other thrillers. Yet it need not have surprised anyone that she was interested in Dante and perfectly capable of writing competent footnotes to the Comedy. The long Introduction to her Hell was, however, a remarkable manifesto in praise of Dante and in justification of her own rendering of his verse—at once a declaration of love and a statement of method. But the most remarkable thing was the translation itself, a real tour deforce—five thousand lines rhyming in an intricate pattern, the terza rima, which I should have thought an extraordinarily difficult one to handle in English, though Miss Sayers herself speaks of the task with noticeable sans gêne. It had been attempted before, notably by Binyon for the whole Comedy and by Professor Bickcrsteth for the Paradiso; both commendable efforts, especially the latter. Then came Miss Sayers’s attempt; and then, a little later, the quiet voice of Mr Eliot was heard, off-stage, to observe that it would be better not to try to reproduce in English, with its less copious and ‘in a way more emphatic’ rhyming words, the ‘light effect’ of the more easily rhyming Italian. Mr Eliot did not refer, in the lecture from which I quote, tc Miss Sayers; he was talking, with characteristic modesty, about his own Dantean pastiche in Little Gidding; but his judgment is relevant, of course, to any rhyming English version of Dante. Meanwhile Miss Sayers, undeterred and unwearied, forged ahead with hers. Hes Purgatory appeared in 1955; and though for the moment, I believe, she has turned aside to deal with the trifling matter of the Chanson and Roland, no power on earth, we may be sure, will prevent her from crowning her labours, in due course, with a Paradise.