Why Is It Challenging to Translate Dante in Terza Rima?

To begin with, it’s not easy to write your own poem in terza rima, much less to translate someone else’s. It’s a devilishly tricky rhyme scheme, especially for a long poem, because you always have to think two steps forward and one step back. The pattern of rhymes goes like this: ABA BCB CDC … YZY Z. As an example, here are the first three stanzas of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (an English poem in terza rima):

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Notice how every stanza rhymes with the preceding and following stanzas, so that you have to keep three stanzas in mind simultaneously as you write. Change the wording to suit the rhyme on one line, and it may spoil the rhyme on the next (or the previous). It’s quite difficult. Of course, this has to follow the meter as well (iambic pentameter, roughly the English equivalent of the hendecasyllabic meter of Italian terza rima).

Now compound this difficulty with the challenge of translating an existing text from another language: not only are we bound to the form of terza rima, but also to the meaning of the words in the original language. As you might expect, many words rhyme in Italian that do not rhyme in English. Often, you will hear translators say that Italian is “rhyme rich” while English is “rhyme poor”; that’s true, if you only count exact rhymes. If we relax that requirement and allow slant rhymes (e.g. assonance), which sounds a bit more natural in English anyways, English is not really rhyme poor at all; but even so, there’s little correlation between what rhymes in English and what rhymes in Italian. Occasionally there are linguistically related English words that happen to rhyme in the exact same way, but this is the exception rather than the rule (and you can’t always use those words in rhyming positions, because the syntax is different).

And don’t even get me started on proper nouns. Dante uses a lot of proper nouns in the Divine Comedy (names of people and places), and many names which rhyme in Italian just don’t rhyme in English (especially classical or biblical names, which have traditional pronunciations in English). Here’s an example (Inferno, Canto 4, lines 136–144):

Democrito, che ’l mondo a caso pone,
Dïogenès, Anassagora e Tale,
Empedoclès, Eraclito e Zenone;

e vidi il buono accoglitor del quale,
Dïascoride dico; e vidi Orfeo,
Tulïo e Lino e Seneca morale;

Euclide geomètra e Tolomeo,
Ipocràte, Avicenna e Galïeno,
Averoìs, che ’l gran comento feo.

It’s basically just a list of names. And the names that rhyme in Italian (Orfeo/Tolomeo) don’t rhyme in English (Orpheus/Ptolemy). What’s a poet supposed to do with that? Here’s my translation in terza rima:

Democritus, who leaves the world to chance,
Diogenes, Thales and Anaxagoras,
Empedocles, Heraclitus, Zeno; and

I saw the good collector of which and what,
Dioscorides, I mean; Orpheus I could see,
Tully and Linus and moral Seneca;

Euclid the geometer and Ptolemy,
Galen, Avicenna and Hippocrates,
the great Commentator, Averroës.

You’ll notice I use slant rhymes. And sometimes, in these lines packed with proper nouns, the meter ain’t exactly perfect in English.

I can’t tell you how many times the following situation happens: you can get two of the rhymes to work, but not the third; and then you figure out a way to get the third to rhyme with the second, but not the first; or maybe you figure out a way to rearrange the words across two lines, and you finally get all three rhymes to work… but it breaks the rhyme on the next trio. And occasionally, damn it, you just have to settle on something that works, even if it means sacrificing an otherwise perfect line.

Finally, on top of that, we aren’t just translating any old Italian poet, we’re translating Dante. Dante is unbelievably attuned to linguistic and poetic devices, on a par with the likes of Shakespeare. Most of what he writes, he writes with careful purpose (even where it doesn’t seem so). So if you want to be true to the poetry, you also have to capture (as much as possible) things like wordplay, repetition, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and so on. Oh, and did I mention, Dante’s writing is very compact. Many of his lines could easily expand into two or three lines of English verse. So if you want to keep pace with Dante line for line, you also have to boil your English down to the essence. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. And often that means you have to have a deep understanding of what Dante is saying. I’ve read pages and pages of commentary, in some cases, just to render a single line correctly.

There are too many examples of translation difficulties to enumerate, but I’ll highlight one of my favorites. In the Inferno, Dante uses the exact same trio of rhyming words (rabbia, abbia, labbia) in Canto 7 lines 5–9, Canto 14 lines 65–69, and Canto 25 lines 17–21. You’ll have to take my word for it, but even though the lines are in completely different cantos, Dante definitely does this on purpose. As I said earlier, you already have to keep three stanzas in mind while writing or translating terza rima; so to mimic this repetition of the rhyme across cantos, you really have to juggle nine stanzas simultaneously. I should note that I ended up cheating a little here in my translation: I rhymed “wrath” (rabbia) and “has” (abbia) in all three places, but I used different words for the third rhyme in each canto (the translation of labbia is a bit contextual; and just in case you were wondering, yes it is etymologically related to English “labia”).

Finally, since we’re on the topic, how about I close with one of my own poems in terza rima on the subject of translating Dante:

The Mask of Dante

How vain, to want to see the poet’s face
so long after his death. As if I’d find
some vestige of his wisdom, or some trace

of all his words, some aspect of his mind
within his face. What, even, would I ask
of these sad eyes, this craggy nose, these lines

set in by his life’s grief, if these lips cast
in stone began to speak? The face, perhaps
like every face, is nothing but a mask;

and I try not to see, but wear, the mask.

And there you have it.

(Note: This post was originally an answer to a question on Quora.)

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-challenging-aspects-of-translating-Dantes-terza-rima-into-English/answer/J-Simon-Harris