Don Quixote

[Mary Krimmel]

At 08:41 PM 12/19/03 +0000, you [Ghetta Life] wrote:

>I'd go for either - because I've read neither.  Is there a particular 
>translation deemed best for the Divine Comedy?  It seems best if we were 
>using the sane one.


I quote from The Well-educated Mind / Susan Wise Bauer, p. 362. I've had to 
ignore the italicizing.

"Recommended edition: The Inferno of Dante, translated by Robert Pinsky 
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994); ISBN 0-374-52452-1; $9.00. 
This idiomatic, energetic translation by an American poet has the Italian 
on facing pages. You can also read the Allen Mandelbaum translation, The 
Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, which has been a standard for 
years; it is less idiomatic, more formal (New York: Bantam Books, 1980; 
ISBN 0-553-21339-3; $6.50). Compare the two translations in this excerpt 
from Canto III, in which Dante approaches the gates of hell:"

Then Bauer quotes:


...Pinsky...

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.

These words I saw inscribed in some dark color / Over a portal..../ The 
sighs, groans, and laments at first were so loud, / Resounding through the 
starless air, I began to weep; / Strange languages, horrible screams, words 
imbued / With rage or despair, cries as of troubled sleep / Or of a 
tortured shrillness --they rose in a coil / Of tumult, along with noises 
like the slap / Of beating hands, all fused in a ceaseless flail / That 
churns and frenzies that dark and timeless air / Like sand in whirlwind. . . .


...Mandelbaum...

ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

These words--their aspect was obscure--I read / inscribed above a 
gateway.... / Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries / were echoing 
across the starless air / so that, as soon as I set out, I wept./ Strange 
utterances, horrible pronouncements, / accents of anger, words of 
suffering, / and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands-- / all went to 
make a tumult that will whirl/forever through that turbid, timeless air, / 
like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls....