I penned this bit of whimsy, and included it in my collection "Born to Blush Unseen: Collected & Rejected Poems." Fair-minded readers will recognize the difference between plagiarism and homage.
THE SONNETEER
by Eric Chevlen
The sonneteer is writing sonnets still,
Though well he knows the sonnet is passé,
A scholar's musty relic. Yet the thrill
Of fourteen lines of rhyming interplay
He can't resist. He may alone beweep
His outcast state, to have been born too late
To write this style, but nonetheless he'll keep
His antique tongue, content to promulgate
More sonnets still. He has no use for verse
Of modern lilt, and less for unrhymed lines
That smack of prose. This modern age -- it's worse
Oh, I completely forgot about some poems about poems three of us perpetrated at our satire journal. Hester Fester-Münsterfenster and Pumptilian Perniquity are two of my noms pour vers, and the other two versifiers are part of our British contingent. https://specgram.com/CLXXIX.2/03.linguimericks42.html
Currently reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, a perfect summer read about a grandmother and her six year old granddaughter spending the summer in the islands of Finland.
And Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. I just finished the second book, The Wife, and am heading into The Cross. It's even better on this my second read.
And my current audiobook is Virgil Wander by Leif Enger. So I guess I detect a distinct Nordic theme to my reading this week.
I've been reading Malcolm Guite's meditations on the Psalms, David's Crown. Especially good book to bring with me to adoration.
Our family read aloud of the Iliad is coming to an end. I had forgotten how powerful Andromache's speech is after Hector's death. This time through I'm so struck by how deeply human Homer's characters are and how much sympathy there is for both sides, especially the Trojans.
Have you read Olav Audunsson/Master of Hestviken? I finally read it last year and liked it even better than Kristin. I've been reading Aidan Nichols's study, Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, which is good --- we visited her house outside Lillehammer last year, saw her rosary and the oratory she had made in her bedroom . . . that house is really one of the numinous places in the earth.
No, I haven't read it yet. Though it's definitely on my list. Last year I read The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush, a two-part novel set in the early 20th century. Also a powerful story of conversion. I'm not sure I liked it better than Kristin, but it was interesting reading the same strong Undset point of view but in a modern setting. I've also read some of her shorter non-fiction in Stages on the Road and her biography of Catherine of Siena. Visiting her house would be such a treat! I would love to be able to go.
I Could Have Been More Wrong, by Kevin McCaffrey has been a frequent companion in the last few months. McCaffrey is a master of light verse. He is, as a critic of renown remarked, the master of how to end a poem. Poem by poem brings a smile and then ends with a twist of the knife as McCaffrey with sardonic wit makes you realize he slipped past your defenses. If you like snarky humor, you will love this volume.
I hesitate to post this since I am certainly not as well read as many who choose to comment here, but I thought you might like to know that at least one of your readers is very much inexperienced with poetry. I found your substack on a recommendation from another I subscribe to and have been delighted to get the daily bits of poetry in my inbox. I enjoy the detail and backstory that you provide before the reveal of the poem for the day. My last bit of exposure to poetry was when my children were younger and we would have occasional 'poetry nights' where we would dig into the house library and everyone would choose something to share - lots of Shel Silverstein and James Whitcomb Riley. :-) I am very much enjoying the broadening of my horizons.
In terms of my own reading (which seems to be a bit lighter than that described in these comments), I am working on the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, a contemporary science fiction series that reads more like classic sci-fi.
I like the Murderbot stories, though I haven't read the more recent ones. Autonomous robots is a great sci-fi theme. Two wonderful old short stories in the genre that do light philosophy: Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin" (robot as Thomas Aquinas) and Isaac Asimov's "Reason" (robot as Descartes) in I, Robot.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the natural state of the universe is entropy but also continual birth, and how that can possibly be. Fiddling around with the beginning of a thought of a poem on that.
May 30·edited May 30Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum
Coincidentally, speaking about poetry about poetry and writing about poetry, a month ago I reread The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons and then the Wen Fu. My classical Chinese teacher was of course thoroughly familiar with both and made sure I learned them well in English; unfortunately, while I read a lot of poetry with her, I never did read those two in Chinese with her (or her favorite work, New Account of Tales of the World). More recently, besides the usual mysteries, SF (got all six volumes of Zelazny's complete stories; he's my favorite and I'm enjoying them immensely), and history, I started a collection of Korean short stories (in English) and Jessie Redmon Fauset's Comedy, American Style, and reread several of Edith Wharton's ghost stories. Not as much poetry this time, so here's a good poem read by the author that the Literature Translation Institute of Korea has up (they have a great YouTube channel).
Haven't reread Zelazny in years, but I've always told young friends to put the short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" and the novel "Lord of Light" early in their sci-fi reading.
May 30·edited May 30Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum
"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" was the first story of his I read, and it made me track down what I could find of him. It's also one I've read too many critical lit-critter essays trashing for Orientalism and assorted other sins while failing to distinguish author and narrator (in fact, Zelazny hated the narrator, because the narrator was a distillation of everything he hated about himself after ruining his engagement with his behavior). And while his novels included some very good ones and he had some excellent short stories, it was his novellas like "Rose" that are generally his best. Not as well known as "Rose" but also a favorite is "The Graveyard Heart," where the poet in the story is probably another image of himself, not quite as self-hating (he had started as a poet, but I gather he decided he wasn't that good at it) but still pitiful, or at least pitiable. But in any case, I find all his novellas from the 60s to be memorable. The other ones I'd recommend someone to start with might be the three novellas in My Name is Legion, which combine SF and hard-boiled-ish detective fiction. What I like most about them, besides their quality as stories, is the way he takes two or three big ideas from SF at that time well on their way to becoming tropes and manages to find ways to fit them together naturally and memorably with a detective tale. (The stories also manage to exemplify perfectly how little SF writers suspected the incredible advances in computers after the late 1960s--and in that respect Zelazny was part of the legion.)
A lot of Dryden. I'm writing something about the rise and fall and rise again of English literary criticism in the 16th and 17th centuries and of course Dryden is pivotal. His prose is the focus but I can't resist rereading some of his poetry, including The Secular Masque:
When the Cambridge History of Eng. Lit. was published a century ago, the book on his era was called "The Age of Dryden." Now he is only grudgingly allowed in anthologies. Great to revisit him.
I know! There's no one whose reputation has fallen further. I think the combination of couplets and highly topical satire ultimately doomed him, alas...
I just finished rereading Inferno, and I can't wait to starting reading Purgatorio (and then eventually Paradiso later this year). I enjoyed the Ciardi translation more than the Wordsworth translation I'd read the first time around, if anyone agrees or differs on that (or prefers another translation altogether).
There's far, far too much I've been thinking about Inferno, so I can only say honestly that it's astounding as a vision that's simultaneously poetic, theological, cosmological, and thrilling. Even that statement is fairly lame as to all that Dante was up to. Also, I can say honestly that I'm furious that the Comedy wasn't required reading when I studied literature in college.
I have only read two translations, Ciardi and Pinsky (and Pinsky only for the Inferno of course, though I wish he would do the others). I really liked what Ciardi achieved, and his notes are very good. Of the three, I like Purgatorio best. Pinsky's use of off-rhyme works as a representation of the Terza Rima in English.
Noted — Pinsky is one I hadn't heard of. And I'm excited to finish the Comedy, starting with Purgatorio next.
Ciardi, in his notes and in his introduction, admits up front the approximation of his translation, rather than the exact match (he calls it the best failure he can manage). His emphasis is on transmitting Dante's selective vocabulary and his three-line muscularity for the Inferno, rather than keeping the strict three-line rhymes and so remaking the poem's feel to achieve a rhyme scheme that English doesn't quite have. I'm partial to this: the experience of the language beyond rhyme, which Ciardi manages in his "dummy terza rima" of three-line stanzas. Of course it'd be controversial, but it's a translator's choice I better understand by learning about other translators' choices from you (and others).
I like Ciardi a lot, too, even though Sayers accomplishes the terza rima. And no, the Divine Comedy wasn't required reading for me, either, as either an undergraduate or a graduate student (though nobody was *stopping* me from reading it, so I guess I shortchanged myself, as part of the whole misspent-youth package), which is why I made my kids read it in high school.
Curious it wasn't required for y'all either, though I suppose specializations have existed a long, long time. My curriculum opinions usually turn out to be whims, but requiring at least a decent portion of the Divine Comedy for students studying all kinds of literature makes sense, given how the poem makes classical, medieval, and biblical histories into literature.
And I am glad you required it of high schoolers. How do they take to it?
Yeah . . . I'm trying to think if I remember ANYBODY reading Dante when I was an undergrad (Vanderbilt, 1980s) or graduate student (U of Memphis, U of Utah, 1990s). My not remembering doesn't mean nobody did, but I know I did not, until a lot later.
As for my own kids, we read it on a very basic, "look, it's not actually that hard" level. Three of my four went on to read it as part of their university's core curriculum, but I wanted to be sure everybody at least had run their eyes over it before they left my house. Varying levels of enthusiasm, but in truth, it wasn't actually that hard to track what was going on, which was all I was asking.
A couple of mine read the Longfellow translation for the simple reason that it was available online, and I could link readings in an assignment blog I kept for them. They were migrating back and forth between home and the college campus where they were taking dual-enrollment classes, and as much as I'd have liked to get a little precious about holding the physical book in the hands and all that, not to mention what translation we used, the bottom line was that books were easy to lose, but they weren't going to misplace their laptops. Longfellow is not my favorite translation, but they read him just fine.
I too just finished Ciardi’s Inferno and am starting Purgatorio. I settled on this translation because I could get an ebook version and make the type easy on my tired eyes. 🤷♀️
My kids read the Sayers translation and much preferred it. Her notes are 🔥
Good to know (I'll just set a date to read the Sayers translation 1-2 years from now, for fun).
Does Sayers keep some approximation of the terza rima? What Ciardi does with the three-line structure definitely helped me along and settled me into the verses' rhythm.
She maintains the whole form really impressively , including the quatrain that resolves each canto. Ciardi does tercets (middle lines don't rhyme with anything) and a closing couplet, if memory serves me? So he gestures toward terza rima, but doesn't try to replicate the form exactly. I do really like his translation and his notes, but I should probably give Sayers another go.
Now I'm taking down various translations from the shelf. I don't have anything like an exhaustive library, but I do have some choices here. For example, I have but really haven't read John Hollander's, which is in blank-verse tercets that don't have to resolve themselves in any way because there's no end-rhyme.
I think I have Mark Musa's, too. I've read some of that but don't remember what he does about the form.
It occurs to me that the challenge in writing terza rima (which my autocorrect keeps wanting to call "Tereza Rima") is how to end it --- you go on braiding up your rhymes, and each middle line gives you the next stanza's first and third lines, but you have to end somehow.
Obviously the traditional thing is to make the final stanza a quatrain, making the previous stanza's middle rhyme the second and fourth lines of that quatrain.
But you could opt to end on a couplet using that rhyme. OR you could use the a-rhyme from the first stanza as the middle end-rhyme in the last stanza, so you complete a circle.
Just . . . in case anybody was going to go write some terza rima, or Tereza Rima, as my autocorrect has again styled it. It is fun, and the problem of how to end it is part of what makes it fun to write.
And finally, a few years back in Plough Quarterly my friend Andrew Frisardi, a translator and Dante scholar, reviewed Mary Jo Bang's translation of the Divine Comedy, panning it --- but in a way that taught me lot that I didn't know, and with a concluding discussion of other popular translations. It's behind a paywall, but you get one or two free articles if you're not a subscriber. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/which-dante-translation-is-best
Also, I can't read, as in print on book covers. My Hollander translation is Jean and Robert, not John. And as Andrew points out, their translation is not really blank verse, because the number of stresses per line varies, for reasons he details in his essay (if you can't access it, those reasons boil down to the translators' desire not to pad out the lines with non-original filler to make the meter)
I am amazed that nobody has yet praised the Hollander's translation. I had read Dante before, but I only truly fell in love with Dante when the Hollander's translation arrived. Highly, and I mean Highly, recommended. I wouldn't think of using anything else for teaching purposes. Every time I have used it in a class, it gets universal raves.
I finally finished Dana Gioia's Pity the Beautiful, and began reading Theodore Roethke's Collected Verse. Pity the Beautiful ends on a personal poem which I found deeply moving in its description of loss borne through seeing the person's life refracted through the life of someone else. Of the Roethke's, I really liked The Adamant in the way it suggests the content of "thought" and I wish I had written No Bird.
I only know a few, and that just the commonly anthologized, of Roethke's poems. Of that generation, in which I read a lot, for some reason I didn't dig into his verse. Maybe it's time.
I am also much more familiar with the other members of that generation, especially Louise Bogan. I am enjoying discovering him now. Another poem of his I really liked was On the road to Woodlawn, and its very clever presentation of the first person narrator. I actually don't like My Papa's Waltz quite so much: it tackles a difficult and important topic to be sure, but the conceit is a little belaboured.
I do like the line about the mother's countenance that could not unfrown itself. More than the pots and pans jouncing off the shelf, that detail seems perfect and true.
Thank you for your post along with the beautiful image of Erato, Muse of Poetry. As a dream analyst/author/teacher, I offer a several-week online series following the nine muses, daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus. This past Tuesday I spoke of Urania in my weekly presentation, a synchronicity with your presentation today. The Muses rise through the mysterious voice of dream (visionary lucid waking dream or dream of sleep), taking us beyond what our eyes perceive, awakening us to deeper meanings, helping us understand better ourselves and our place in the Cosmic Design. Abundant blessings to all who find themselves traveling the magical realm of poems, ancient and modern. Erato
I'm reading Sextus Propertius & the French poems of Rilke.
I'm writing a talk/reading to keynote a University of St. Thomas poetry conference in a few weeks. No one has ever handed me 90 minutes before (except John Dingell in an oversight hearing) and it's taking me longer than I expected.
I penned this bit of whimsy, and included it in my collection "Born to Blush Unseen: Collected & Rejected Poems." Fair-minded readers will recognize the difference between plagiarism and homage.
THE SONNETEER
by Eric Chevlen
The sonneteer is writing sonnets still,
Though well he knows the sonnet is passé,
A scholar's musty relic. Yet the thrill
Of fourteen lines of rhyming interplay
He can't resist. He may alone beweep
His outcast state, to have been born too late
To write this style, but nonetheless he'll keep
His antique tongue, content to promulgate
More sonnets still. He has no use for verse
Of modern lilt, and less for unrhymed lines
That smack of prose. This modern age -- it's worse
Than ages past for poems, he opines.
When asked if he's convinced all else is sham
That's not a sonnet, "Yes," he says, "Iamb."
Oh, I completely forgot about some poems about poems three of us perpetrated at our satire journal. Hester Fester-Münsterfenster and Pumptilian Perniquity are two of my noms pour vers, and the other two versifiers are part of our British contingent. https://specgram.com/CLXXIX.2/03.linguimericks42.html
Currently reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, a perfect summer read about a grandmother and her six year old granddaughter spending the summer in the islands of Finland.
And Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. I just finished the second book, The Wife, and am heading into The Cross. It's even better on this my second read.
And my current audiobook is Virgil Wander by Leif Enger. So I guess I detect a distinct Nordic theme to my reading this week.
I've been reading Malcolm Guite's meditations on the Psalms, David's Crown. Especially good book to bring with me to adoration.
Our family read aloud of the Iliad is coming to an end. I had forgotten how powerful Andromache's speech is after Hector's death. This time through I'm so struck by how deeply human Homer's characters are and how much sympathy there is for both sides, especially the Trojans.
Have you read Olav Audunsson/Master of Hestviken? I finally read it last year and liked it even better than Kristin. I've been reading Aidan Nichols's study, Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, which is good --- we visited her house outside Lillehammer last year, saw her rosary and the oratory she had made in her bedroom . . . that house is really one of the numinous places in the earth.
No, I haven't read it yet. Though it's definitely on my list. Last year I read The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush, a two-part novel set in the early 20th century. Also a powerful story of conversion. I'm not sure I liked it better than Kristin, but it was interesting reading the same strong Undset point of view but in a modern setting. I've also read some of her shorter non-fiction in Stages on the Road and her biography of Catherine of Siena. Visiting her house would be such a treat! I would love to be able to go.
I Could Have Been More Wrong, by Kevin McCaffrey has been a frequent companion in the last few months. McCaffrey is a master of light verse. He is, as a critic of renown remarked, the master of how to end a poem. Poem by poem brings a smile and then ends with a twist of the knife as McCaffrey with sardonic wit makes you realize he slipped past your defenses. If you like snarky humor, you will love this volume.
Thanks. I don't know him, but will now keep an eye out.
But caution, caution, little fool.
Heed my instructive words.
Do not attempt the things I do
and pull from optic nerves
your globes, for this madcap trick
has blinded many bunglers
who've ignored the obvious risks
to would-be eyeball jugglers.
I hesitate to post this since I am certainly not as well read as many who choose to comment here, but I thought you might like to know that at least one of your readers is very much inexperienced with poetry. I found your substack on a recommendation from another I subscribe to and have been delighted to get the daily bits of poetry in my inbox. I enjoy the detail and backstory that you provide before the reveal of the poem for the day. My last bit of exposure to poetry was when my children were younger and we would have occasional 'poetry nights' where we would dig into the house library and everyone would choose something to share - lots of Shel Silverstein and James Whitcomb Riley. :-) I am very much enjoying the broadening of my horizons.
In terms of my own reading (which seems to be a bit lighter than that described in these comments), I am working on the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, a contemporary science fiction series that reads more like classic sci-fi.
I'm a big fan of Murderbot. I read them all last year and I just last week finished listening to all of the audiobooks, which are well done.
I like the Murderbot stories, though I haven't read the more recent ones. Autonomous robots is a great sci-fi theme. Two wonderful old short stories in the genre that do light philosophy: Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin" (robot as Thomas Aquinas) and Isaac Asimov's "Reason" (robot as Descartes) in I, Robot.
In our homeschool we’ve been reading “The Hospital” by Patrick Kavanaugh all month. It holds up to repeated readings!
Also working on memorizing “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and thinking about St. Columba as his feast approaches.
"…nothing whatever is by love debarred"
What a last line, too: "Snatch out of time the passionate transitory."
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the natural state of the universe is entropy but also continual birth, and how that can possibly be. Fiddling around with the beginning of a thought of a poem on that.
It's time as decline, creation as incline. Cf. Aristotle: Time in itself is more a cause of corruption than of generation. (Physics, 221a26–221b7).
writing: finished Petrarch's "Rime Sparse" (366 poems);
have embarked on an "Inferno," 1.5 cantos done
re-reading : Lord Weary's Castle;" less impressed than the first time.
Lord Weary's Castle has a killer ending.
It would seem there are many poems about poetry, but relatively few about the revision that goes into the making of a poem.
Revision
Not resonant, its rhythms sprung,
its halting strands
Should follow close on what may come
to one who stands
Alone in sunlight, while the stream
turns clear, and all
That gathers in that current seems
to rise and fall
And share a common pulse—what swims,
as though to test
That energy; what stays, and dims,
and comes to rest.
Coincidentally, speaking about poetry about poetry and writing about poetry, a month ago I reread The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons and then the Wen Fu. My classical Chinese teacher was of course thoroughly familiar with both and made sure I learned them well in English; unfortunately, while I read a lot of poetry with her, I never did read those two in Chinese with her (or her favorite work, New Account of Tales of the World). More recently, besides the usual mysteries, SF (got all six volumes of Zelazny's complete stories; he's my favorite and I'm enjoying them immensely), and history, I started a collection of Korean short stories (in English) and Jessie Redmon Fauset's Comedy, American Style, and reread several of Edith Wharton's ghost stories. Not as much poetry this time, so here's a good poem read by the author that the Literature Translation Institute of Korea has up (they have a great YouTube channel).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5emA8-Wuxrs
Second on Zelazny, started with his Lord of Light, when it first came out and went on from there.
Haven't reread Zelazny in years, but I've always told young friends to put the short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" and the novel "Lord of Light" early in their sci-fi reading.
"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" was the first story of his I read, and it made me track down what I could find of him. It's also one I've read too many critical lit-critter essays trashing for Orientalism and assorted other sins while failing to distinguish author and narrator (in fact, Zelazny hated the narrator, because the narrator was a distillation of everything he hated about himself after ruining his engagement with his behavior). And while his novels included some very good ones and he had some excellent short stories, it was his novellas like "Rose" that are generally his best. Not as well known as "Rose" but also a favorite is "The Graveyard Heart," where the poet in the story is probably another image of himself, not quite as self-hating (he had started as a poet, but I gather he decided he wasn't that good at it) but still pitiful, or at least pitiable. But in any case, I find all his novellas from the 60s to be memorable. The other ones I'd recommend someone to start with might be the three novellas in My Name is Legion, which combine SF and hard-boiled-ish detective fiction. What I like most about them, besides their quality as stories, is the way he takes two or three big ideas from SF at that time well on their way to becoming tropes and manages to find ways to fit them together naturally and memorably with a detective tale. (The stories also manage to exemplify perfectly how little SF writers suspected the incredible advances in computers after the late 1960s--and in that respect Zelazny was part of the legion.)
Well, he was monogamous in a time when that was considered weird, and he was funnier than most translators would let you believe.
A lot of Dryden. I'm writing something about the rise and fall and rise again of English literary criticism in the 16th and 17th centuries and of course Dryden is pivotal. His prose is the focus but I can't resist rereading some of his poetry, including The Secular Masque:
All, all of a piece throughout;
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.
When the Cambridge History of Eng. Lit. was published a century ago, the book on his era was called "The Age of Dryden." Now he is only grudgingly allowed in anthologies. Great to revisit him.
I know! There's no one whose reputation has fallen further. I think the combination of couplets and highly topical satire ultimately doomed him, alas...
A couple of Australian poets, James McAuley and AD Hope, were inspired by Dryden more recently (60s and 70s).
https://allpoetry.com/poem/8509645-Australia-by-A-D-Hope
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3084410951/view?sectionId=nla.obj-3087918849&partId=nla.obj-3084415737#page/n26/mode/1up (McAuley's True Discovery of Australia)
I'll have to check them out!
Manly directness, professional efficiency, a minor official of the Protectorate making his way in the Restoration without groveling.
I love this. And I agree! Although some of his contemporaries seem to have felt that his conversion was at least groveling-adjacent...
I just finished rereading Inferno, and I can't wait to starting reading Purgatorio (and then eventually Paradiso later this year). I enjoyed the Ciardi translation more than the Wordsworth translation I'd read the first time around, if anyone agrees or differs on that (or prefers another translation altogether).
There's far, far too much I've been thinking about Inferno, so I can only say honestly that it's astounding as a vision that's simultaneously poetic, theological, cosmological, and thrilling. Even that statement is fairly lame as to all that Dante was up to. Also, I can say honestly that I'm furious that the Comedy wasn't required reading when I studied literature in college.
I have only read two translations, Ciardi and Pinsky (and Pinsky only for the Inferno of course, though I wish he would do the others). I really liked what Ciardi achieved, and his notes are very good. Of the three, I like Purgatorio best. Pinsky's use of off-rhyme works as a representation of the Terza Rima in English.
Noted — Pinsky is one I hadn't heard of. And I'm excited to finish the Comedy, starting with Purgatorio next.
Ciardi, in his notes and in his introduction, admits up front the approximation of his translation, rather than the exact match (he calls it the best failure he can manage). His emphasis is on transmitting Dante's selective vocabulary and his three-line muscularity for the Inferno, rather than keeping the strict three-line rhymes and so remaking the poem's feel to achieve a rhyme scheme that English doesn't quite have. I'm partial to this: the experience of the language beyond rhyme, which Ciardi manages in his "dummy terza rima" of three-line stanzas. Of course it'd be controversial, but it's a translator's choice I better understand by learning about other translators' choices from you (and others).
I like Ciardi a lot, too, even though Sayers accomplishes the terza rima. And no, the Divine Comedy wasn't required reading for me, either, as either an undergraduate or a graduate student (though nobody was *stopping* me from reading it, so I guess I shortchanged myself, as part of the whole misspent-youth package), which is why I made my kids read it in high school.
Curious it wasn't required for y'all either, though I suppose specializations have existed a long, long time. My curriculum opinions usually turn out to be whims, but requiring at least a decent portion of the Divine Comedy for students studying all kinds of literature makes sense, given how the poem makes classical, medieval, and biblical histories into literature.
And I am glad you required it of high schoolers. How do they take to it?
Yeah . . . I'm trying to think if I remember ANYBODY reading Dante when I was an undergrad (Vanderbilt, 1980s) or graduate student (U of Memphis, U of Utah, 1990s). My not remembering doesn't mean nobody did, but I know I did not, until a lot later.
As for my own kids, we read it on a very basic, "look, it's not actually that hard" level. Three of my four went on to read it as part of their university's core curriculum, but I wanted to be sure everybody at least had run their eyes over it before they left my house. Varying levels of enthusiasm, but in truth, it wasn't actually that hard to track what was going on, which was all I was asking.
A couple of mine read the Longfellow translation for the simple reason that it was available online, and I could link readings in an assignment blog I kept for them. They were migrating back and forth between home and the college campus where they were taking dual-enrollment classes, and as much as I'd have liked to get a little precious about holding the physical book in the hands and all that, not to mention what translation we used, the bottom line was that books were easy to lose, but they weren't going to misplace their laptops. Longfellow is not my favorite translation, but they read him just fine.
I too just finished Ciardi’s Inferno and am starting Purgatorio. I settled on this translation because I could get an ebook version and make the type easy on my tired eyes. 🤷♀️
My kids read the Sayers translation and much preferred it. Her notes are 🔥
Good to know (I'll just set a date to read the Sayers translation 1-2 years from now, for fun).
Does Sayers keep some approximation of the terza rima? What Ciardi does with the three-line structure definitely helped me along and settled me into the verses' rhythm.
Yes, Sayers keeps the rhyme—nearly the only translator who does. It necessitates some inaccuracy, for which the reader forgives her simply because of the degree of difficulty involved. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.247916/page/n1/mode/2up
She maintains the whole form really impressively , including the quatrain that resolves each canto. Ciardi does tercets (middle lines don't rhyme with anything) and a closing couplet, if memory serves me? So he gestures toward terza rima, but doesn't try to replicate the form exactly. I do really like his translation and his notes, but I should probably give Sayers another go.
Now I'm taking down various translations from the shelf. I don't have anything like an exhaustive library, but I do have some choices here. For example, I have but really haven't read John Hollander's, which is in blank-verse tercets that don't have to resolve themselves in any way because there's no end-rhyme.
I think I have Mark Musa's, too. I've read some of that but don't remember what he does about the form.
It occurs to me that the challenge in writing terza rima (which my autocorrect keeps wanting to call "Tereza Rima") is how to end it --- you go on braiding up your rhymes, and each middle line gives you the next stanza's first and third lines, but you have to end somehow.
Obviously the traditional thing is to make the final stanza a quatrain, making the previous stanza's middle rhyme the second and fourth lines of that quatrain.
But you could opt to end on a couplet using that rhyme. OR you could use the a-rhyme from the first stanza as the middle end-rhyme in the last stanza, so you complete a circle.
Just . . . in case anybody was going to go write some terza rima, or Tereza Rima, as my autocorrect has again styled it. It is fun, and the problem of how to end it is part of what makes it fun to write.
And finally, a few years back in Plough Quarterly my friend Andrew Frisardi, a translator and Dante scholar, reviewed Mary Jo Bang's translation of the Divine Comedy, panning it --- but in a way that taught me lot that I didn't know, and with a concluding discussion of other popular translations. It's behind a paywall, but you get one or two free articles if you're not a subscriber. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/which-dante-translation-is-best
Also, I can't read, as in print on book covers. My Hollander translation is Jean and Robert, not John. And as Andrew points out, their translation is not really blank verse, because the number of stresses per line varies, for reasons he details in his essay (if you can't access it, those reasons boil down to the translators' desire not to pad out the lines with non-original filler to make the meter)
I am amazed that nobody has yet praised the Hollander's translation. I had read Dante before, but I only truly fell in love with Dante when the Hollander's translation arrived. Highly, and I mean Highly, recommended. I wouldn't think of using anything else for teaching purposes. Every time I have used it in a class, it gets universal raves.
I finally finished Dana Gioia's Pity the Beautiful, and began reading Theodore Roethke's Collected Verse. Pity the Beautiful ends on a personal poem which I found deeply moving in its description of loss borne through seeing the person's life refracted through the life of someone else. Of the Roethke's, I really liked The Adamant in the way it suggests the content of "thought" and I wish I had written No Bird.
Frederick Turner has a tribute to Dana Gioia in the Spring edition of Expansive Poetry Online.
I only know a few, and that just the commonly anthologized, of Roethke's poems. Of that generation, in which I read a lot, for some reason I didn't dig into his verse. Maybe it's time.
I am also much more familiar with the other members of that generation, especially Louise Bogan. I am enjoying discovering him now. Another poem of his I really liked was On the road to Woodlawn, and its very clever presentation of the first person narrator. I actually don't like My Papa's Waltz quite so much: it tackles a difficult and important topic to be sure, but the conceit is a little belaboured.
I do like the line about the mother's countenance that could not unfrown itself. More than the pots and pans jouncing off the shelf, that detail seems perfect and true.
Thank you for your post along with the beautiful image of Erato, Muse of Poetry. As a dream analyst/author/teacher, I offer a several-week online series following the nine muses, daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus. This past Tuesday I spoke of Urania in my weekly presentation, a synchronicity with your presentation today. The Muses rise through the mysterious voice of dream (visionary lucid waking dream or dream of sleep), taking us beyond what our eyes perceive, awakening us to deeper meanings, helping us understand better ourselves and our place in the Cosmic Design. Abundant blessings to all who find themselves traveling the magical realm of poems, ancient and modern. Erato
and her sisters await, poetry calling to us. Many thanks for your post. https://janetpiedilato.substack.com/
I'm reading Sextus Propertius & the French poems of Rilke.
I'm writing a talk/reading to keynote a University of St. Thomas poetry conference in a few weeks. No one has ever handed me 90 minutes before (except John Dingell in an oversight hearing) and it's taking me longer than I expected.
Sextus? I wouldn't even let him touch us.
🤣😂🤣