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John Albert Macy. The Critical Game
The Critical Game
Table of Contents
DANTE IN ENGLISH
DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
NIETZSCHE
TOLSTOY
MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS
JOSEPH CONRAD
A CONRAD MISCELLANY
STRINDBERG
TAGORE
REMY DE GOURMONT
SWIFT'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN
WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS
BIOGRAPHIES OF POE
BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
ABRAHAM CAHAN
THOMAS HARDY
GEORGE BORROW
SHELLEY
H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA
JOHN MASEFIELD
SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES
GEORGE MOORE AND OTHER IRISH WRITERS
JAMES JOYCE
D. H. LAWRENCE
Отрывок из книги
John Albert Macy
Published by Good Press, 2019
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The poet exists for us. That is an excellent idea. It is our privilege to take what we enjoy and reject what we do not like or understand. I cannot be interested in Dante's ethics, which interested him so profoundly and is the bone of his thought. His "stern indignant moral," as Carlyle called it, is for me no part of the beauty of the "mystic song." I cannot regard without suspicion, even in a New Englander, Norton's statement to Dr. Dinsmore that the quality of the Commedia, other than its beauty, which attracted him to Dante was "his powerful exposition of moral penalties and rewards." Other than its beauty? What does that mean? If the qualities of the Commedia can be separated (Dante happened to believe that they can not be), let us throw the ethics, the penalties, and rewards to the four winds. Let us keep as much as we can grasp of the beauty of the episodes, the images, the phrases, the structure, whatever gives delight.
The beauty of the fifth canto of Inferno does not depend on the ethical fact that the carnal sinners are punished, but on the poetic fact that their pathetic loves on earth are recalled and that their punishment is vividly, physically dramatized. The tragic pity and terror of it break through the baldest translation stripped of the enchantment of the original verse. Many English poets have been tempted to try to render that famous fifth canto. Mr. Arensberg has made the best version that I have seen. His version is in the terza rima, a difficult thing to manage in English, and he succeeds in making a good English poem, a shade finer than a mere tour de force. I doubt whether he or any other poet can so well translate the entire Commedia in the same form, though the attempt has been made. The terza rima has never been quite naturalized in our language. Even such a master as Shelley can not turn it perfectly. We imported the sonnet as easily as the apple and we made some French forms grow thriftily in our hardy garden. The terza rima remains artificial and foreign, peculiarly Italian and more peculiarly Dante; he made it his own and moved at ease in its exacting rigidities. He was in thought and form a diabolical magician.
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