Translating The Undivine ComedyRoberta Antognini

My first true and mindful encounter with Dante took place in 1986. At the time, I was a student at NYU starting a PhD in Italian after completing my laurea in Milan. Before our first class, Teo Barolini, our young Dante professor, provided us with a bibliography, syllabus, and a meagre course description that read:

This course consists of a guided tour through the selva oscura of the first half of the Divina Commedia: Inferno I through Purgatorio XVI. We will discuss interpretative issues, regarding — for instance — the allegorical question, the poem’s intertextual currents, its relation to the other texts in Dante’s canon, et al., but all such discussion will be grounded in our object of primary focus: namely, a thorough knowledge of the text.Beginning of page[p. 350]

Knowledge of the text! Paradoxical as it seems, for an Italian university student in the eighties who had prepared her exams mostly relying on secondary sources, or at most reading texts on her own, it was a dream come true.

Little did I know then that in 1999, thirteen years later, Teo Barolini would ask me to translate her second book, The Undivine Comedy, into Italian. It was my first experience as a translator (and the beginning of a love affair with translation that never faded — even though it was my last stab at a non-fiction work). I learned, so to speak, to translate in the field, like most professional translators do. Although I knew nothing of translation theory or the history of translation, and therefore had no particular critical awareness of it, I had a background in the history of Italian language: this allowed me to engage in a translation strategy that involved a simple, careful, and almost maniacal reading of the original text (after all, in their day-to-day work, translators follow a strategy rather than a theory).22See Giancarlo Marchesini, ‘Teorie della traduzione e strategie traduttive’, in I saperi del tradurre. Analogie, affinità, confronti, ed. by Clara Montella (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2007), pp. 45–69 (p. 45). I regret not having kept a translation diary such as the one which, in imitation of the great American translator of Italian fiction, William Weaver, I would ask my students to keep years later when, as a result of my experience and subsequent fascination with the translation of The Undivine Comedy, I developed a course on literary translation at Vassar College.33See William Weaver’s various publications of and about his translation diaries: ‘In Other Words: A Translator’s Journal’, The New York Times, 19 November 1995, Sec. 7, p. 16; Weaver, ‘Pendulum Diary’, Southwest Review, 75.2 (Spring 1990), pp. 150–78; Weaver, ‘The Process of Translation’, in The Craft of Translation, ed. by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), pp. 117–24 <https://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/resources/babelgadda/babeng/weavertranslation.php> [accessed 23 April 2025]. A translation diary is a reflection on the translation process and its strategies, on problems encountered and decisions made, in an autobiographical key based on one’s individual experience: something halfway between theory and practice.44Bruna Di Sabato, ‘Tradurre il testo non letterario’, in I confini della traduzione, ed. by Bruna Di Sabato and Antonio Perri (Limena: Libreriauniversitaria.it, 2014), pp. 47–69 (pp. 47–8). Once very rare — translators contented themselves with writing reflections in the form of essays in journals —, books written by translators on the translation process are becoming increasingly frequent. Both have enormous pedagogical value.Beginning of page[p. 351]

Though I wasn’t a Dante scholar, I nevertheless considered myself a specialist in the field. After taking Teo’s classes at NYU, I felt assured of my knowledge of the Commedia, and, instinctively, I felt that the intertext generated by translations is an essential part of the reading of a work and that mine, too, would contribute, in its own small way, to ensure the survival of Teo’s book.55 As Walter Benjamin claims in his 1923 famous essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’: ‘Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original — not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life’. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 75–85 (p. 76). Many scholars have since appropriated the idea of translation as the ‘continued life’ of the original. As Susan Bassnett states: ‘For, as Benjamin also reminds us, it is the translator who ultimately assures the survival of the text. By translating, a text reaches a wider pool of readers than the original author can ever have imagined’. Susan Bassnett, ‘Intricate Pathways: Observations on Translation and Literature’, in Translating Literature, ed. by Susan Bassnett (London: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), pp. 1–13 (p. 13). Likewise, as Cattani and others state in the introduction to their edited issue of Ticontre: ‘Le traduzioni generano un intertesto e si inscrivono nella storia delle letture di un’opera, che contribuiscono a creare; esse assicurano il ciclo di nascita e rinascita continuo dei testi’ (‘Translations generate an intertext and are part of the reading of a work, which they contribute to creating; they ensure the continuous cycle of birth and rebirth of a text’; translation mine). Paola Cattani, Matteo Fadini, and Federico Saviotti, ‘In principio fuit interpres’, Ticontre. Teoria Testo Traduzione, 3 (2015), pp. 3–12 (pp. 10–11) <https://teseo.unitn.it/ticontre/article/view/957/957> [accessed 23 April 2025]. It took more than two years to complete my translation. Throughout that entire and memorable time, Teo and I — both strong believers, like Calvino, in the collaboration between author and translator — remained in close contact.66This collaboration, writes Calvino, first arises ‘from the translator’s questions to the author’. Italo Calvino, ‘Tradurre è il vero modo di leggere un testo’, in Calvino, Mondo scritto e mondo parlato (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), pp. 85–91 (p. 88). In 2003, the translated edition was published by Feltrinelli Editore in Milan.

One more element is necessary to complete this picture. The year 1999 was also my first as a visiting assistant professor at Vassar College, and I trusted that translating a book on Dante would greatly improve my academic English. I also trusted that such a close reading would help me enormously in writing my own book when the time came. Again, in Calvino’s words, ‘tradurre è il vero modo di leggere un testo’; ‘si legge veramente un autore solo quando lo si traduce’ (‘translating is the true way to read a text; you really read an author only when Beginning of page[p. 352] you translate them).77Italo Calvino, ‘Tradurre è il vero modo’, p. 87, and ‘Sul tradurre’, in Calvino, Mondo scritto e mondo parlato, pp. 47–59 (p. 51, italics in the original). Calvino was probably not the first and definitely not the last to say so, as it has become a common motto in translation studies. Unfortunately, as a demonstration of how little consideration is given to translation, Vassar never considered my work as an academic publication. Many years have passed since then, but regrettably, in terms of the visibility of the translator, not a lot of progress has been made — though some publishers in Italy, notably smaller presses, have started to add the translator’s name to the book cover.88Not Feltrinelli, the Italian publisher of The Undivine Comedy, or not yet at least. Edith Grossman, the celebrated literary translator who recently passed, ‘was among the first to insist that on any book she translated, her name appear on the cover along with that of the author, a practice that publishers had traditionally resisted for both financial and marketing reasons. They liked to think that they could wave “a magic wand” and turn a book from one language into another, she joked in the interview. “And no human is involved. No human who needs to be paid?”’ (Rebecca Chace, ‘Edith Grossman, Who Elevated the Art of Translation, Dies at 87’, Obituary, The New York Times, 4 September 2023 <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/books/edith-grossman-dead.html> [accessed 24 April 2025]). In her essay on translation, Grossman wrote: ‘Putting to the side for a moment the dire state of publishing today or the lamentable tendency of too many publishers to treat translators cavalierly or dismiss them as irrelevant, the fact is that many readers tend to take translation so much for granted that it is no wonder translators are so frequently ignored. We seem to be a familiar part of the natural landscape — so customary and commonplace that we run the risk of becoming invisible’. See Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 26–27. The notion of invisibility is quite prominent in recent translation studies. It was employed rather polemically by Lawrence Venuti in his 1995 volume The Translator’s Invisibility. This idea derives from a conception of translation as a ‘second-order representation’ vis-à-vis the original, ‘whereas the translation is derivative, fake, potentially a false copy’.99Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 6. In order to make the original stand out, translation must become invisible, ‘producing the illusion of authorial presence whereby the translated text can be taken as the original’,1010Ibid. an idiomatic translation that favours readers of the target text by adapting it to their expectations. The difficulty seems to be that translation is halfway between art and craft, and as a result, its standing among the intellectual professions seems to be the most abused.1111See Laura Bocci, Di seconda mano (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004), p. 49.Beginning of page[p. 353]

In their introduction to one of the few collections of essays devoted to the translation of non-fiction works, authors Bramati and Regattin complain that even though the linguistic problems one encounters are not very different from those of literary translation, unlike literary works, the translation of texts belonging to humanistic or scientific disciplines has so far not attracted much attention from scholars.1212Alberto Bramati and Fabio Regattin, ‘Tradurre saggistica divulgativa: un’introduzione’, Lingue Culture Mediazioni/Languages Cultures Mediation, 6.2 (2019), pp. 5–10 (pp. 5–6) <https://doi.org/10.7358/lcm-2019-002-brre>. And yet, Western thought on translation in the modern age begins with the great humanist Leonardo Bruni and his brief unfinished treatise De interpretatione recta, which describes his translation from Greek into Latin of Aristotle’s Ethics. Broadly speaking, a scholarly work could be considered an ultimate form of intralingual (or endolinguistic) translation that is, according to the seminal definition by Roman Jakobson in his 1959 essay on translation, an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs in the same language.1313Roman Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 138–43 (p. 139; italics in the original). The other two kind of translations are: ‘interlingual translation or translation proper […] an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language’, and ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation […] an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ (Ibid., p. 139). Translating a scholarly work is in some respects more complex than translating a literary work. In fact, it entails not only analytical competence with regard to the source text and reproductive competence with regard to the target text, but also knowledge of many different fields and authors, which makes it very close to scholarly research itself.1414See Johanna Monti, ‘Alla ricerca della conoscenza. Quali strumenti per la traduzione saggistica?’, in Tradurre saggistica. Traduttori, traduttologi ed esperti a confronto, ed. by Clara Montella (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2010), pp. 143–61 (pp. 144–46). Furthermore, like a literary work, it’s a creative act, it demands aesthetic attention, the ability to hear the true voice of the author. In Leonardo Bruni’s words:

[A translator] must possess a sound ear so that his translation does not disturb and destroy the fullness and rhythmical qualities of the original. For since in every good writer […] there is both learning and literary style, he and he only will be a satisfactory translator [interpres] who is able to preserve both.1515Leonardo Bruni, The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni. Selected Texts, trans. by James Hankins (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance Society of America, 1987), p. 220.Beginning of page[p. 354]

Even though Teo Barolini’s voice was loud and clear, I had to listen carefully to give Italian readers the same immersion in the text she was able to provide, echoing her authority, passion, and fierceness. Sadly, none of the correspondence between the two of us during that time survives — Vassar changed its e-mail software in 2003, and I was not able to retrieve any of the old messages. However, Teo had kept hard copies of some of it. One comment I made while working on the first two chapters stands out:

Your writing is as dense as the concepts you express. But the fact that I understand every single word because it is as if I were listening to you while you’re teaching is of great advantage. The problem is that I want to respect your ‘density’, your choice of words and composition, without rendering the Italian syntax less fluid than English, too heavy.

So, as I moved bag and baggage1616‘Armi e bagagli’: this very appropriate idiomatic expression belongs to Bocci, Di seconda mano, p. 28. into Teo’s text, slowly and meticulously translating the dense, cohesive pages of The Undivine Comedy, it occurred to me that, in a way, I was repeating my student experience. As I quickly discovered, the biggest challenge was that Teo’s writing is so deep and intense, so concentrated that while studying her book, a student would be likely to underline almost everything; similarly, I struggled to keep up during class because I wanted to write down her every word. And still, everything is so wonderfully clear, so perfectly ‘densely clear’. In another email, I would define her style as ‘cumulative’: that is, repetitively accumulating new encounters with the ‘new’. It is almost as if she, by commenting on Dante, had become Dante himself, adopting his own style in which everything counts, nothing is superfluous, and the writer’s understanding of the subject runs incredibly deep. In rereading my translation nineteen years later, I find myself in the exact situation of ‘finding the new within the old’, repeating the spiral-like structure of the transitional cantos described in The Undivine Comedy at the end of chapter 3, ‘Ulysses, Geryon, and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition’:

[…] transition, history, life itself are spiral-like, ever going backward in order to go forward (as the pilgrim goes anomalously Beginning of page[p. 355] backward in order to go forward from the usurers to Geryon, and Geryon backs into the spiral), ever finding the new within the old.1717Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 73, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text.

([…] la transizione, la storia, la vita stessa sono a forma di spirale: indietreggiando sempre per poter andare avanti (nello stesso modo in cui il pellegrino deve, in modo anomalo, tornare indietro dagli usurai per andare verso Gerione, e Gerione deve indietreggiare prima di intraprendere il suo volo a spirale) trovando sempre il nuovo nel vecchio.)1818Teodolinda Barolini, La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio. Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale, trans. by Roberta Antognini (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003; repr. 2013), p. 109.

Inspired by these words that so beautifully describe ‘transition’, with my ‘student eye’ I retraced Geryon’s steps — as Barolini observes, Geryon must recoil in order to start his spiralling journey down the ravine: ‘Come la navicella esce di loco | in dietro in dietro, sì quindi si tolse’ (‘Just like a boat that, starting from its moorings, | moves backward, backward, so that beast took off”; Inf. 17.100–01)1919Unless otherwise stated, quotations from the Commedia are from Dante Alighieri: ‘La Commedia’ secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). English translations are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82). — and was totally and newly engrossed by his function as a means of transportation, a tool of transition, a ‘ferryman’, a ‘translator’, if you wish, of the old into the new: the English translate/translation/translator originates from translatum, the past participle of Latin transferre, to bring from one place to another. Geryon embodies transition, the rite of passage Dante must overcome in order to go from one part of hell to another and, in this particular episode, from one canto to another.2020‘[…] il volo di Gerione […] assume quasi i caratteri di un rito di passaggio, configurandosi come una mise en abîme dell’intero percorso oltremondano dantesco’ (‘Geryon’s flight […] almost takes on the characteristics of a rite of passage, configuring itself as a mise en abîme of Dante’s entire otherworldly journey’). Massimiliano Corrado, ‘Omai si scende per sì fatte scale. Il volo di Gerione e di Dante’, in Lectura Dantis romana. Cento canti per cento anni, ed. by Enrico Malato and Andrea Mazzucchi, 3 vols (Rome: Salerno, 2013–15), i.1: Inferno. Canti i–xvi (2013), pp. 526–72 (p. 526), translation mine. Geryon literally carries Dante, the pilgrim and the poet, on his ‘groppa’Beginning of page[p. 356] (‘rump’; Inf. 17.80) from the shore to the bottom of the ‘burrato’ (Inf. 16.114), the ravine that divides the seventh and eighth circles.

Furthermore, Geryon’s definition of ‘ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna’ (‘truth that has the face of falsehood’; Inf. 16.124)2121Here the English translation is from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 vols (Boston: Osgood, 1875). makes him essential from a textual perspective, reminding us once again of the translation process, the progression that sees the new text sprouting from the original, always on the verge of being menzognero. The idea that translation is untrue, unfaithful, is part of its history. According to David Bellos in his book Is that A Fish in Your Ear, the origin of this mistrust lies in oral translation during the Ottoman Empire, between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries. The sultans and members of their court had ‘a paranoid suspicion of forgery, and as a result writing was not used for all purposes of state’.2222David Bellos, Is That a Fish in your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (London: Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 124–30 (p. 123). Particularly problematic were communications with Western Europe. Initially, the task was handled by the Republic of Venice, which recruited young apprentices, giovani di lingua, from across the Venetian and Ottoman territories and turned them into trusted translators of Ottoman Turkish and Arabic into Italian. Called tercüman in Turkish, and dragomanno in Italian, dragoman in English (from the Arabic targuman, ‘interpreter’; targam, ‘to translate’), they eventually became a hereditary caste. Because of their inevitable loyalty to the sultan (they were essentially enslaved), Europeans diplomats never trusted them. Thus, they were associated with deceitfulness and fraudulence, which led to the likely origin of the famous Italian proverb ‘traduttore, traditore’.2323Maxim from Giuseppe Giusti, Proverbi toscani, ed. by Gino Capponi (Florence: Capponi, 1873), p. 268.

In The Undivine Comedy, Barolini uses the expression ‘Geryon principle’ to define Dante’s strategy when describing something the reader will find difficult to believe. This principle stems from the depiction of the pilgrim’s first encounter with the monstrous Geryon:

Dante uses the ‘Geryon principle’, for instance, when in Inferno 28.112–19 he writes that he saw Bertran de Born holding his head in his hand just like a lantern (note that in both cases, Dante employs the verb to see). As Barolini explains:

By underlining what is apparently least verisimilar in his representation, and by letting us know that he fully shares our assessment regarding this material’s lack of verisimilitude, which he does by posing as reluctant to represent it lest we lose confidence in him, the narrator secures our confidence for the rest of his story. […] By urging us to identify heightened drama with decreased verisimilitude and credibility, Dante is subtly encouraging us to accept his text’s basic fictions and assumptions: sodomites dancing in a circle under a pouring rain of fire or usurers sitting on the edge of an abyss with purses around their necks […] are acceptable, but flying monsters are not and therefore require the author’s direct intervention. In this way the poet becomes the arbiter of our skepticism, allowing it to blossom forth only in authorially-sanctioned moments of high drama. […] these passages are the most exposed weapons in a massive and unrelenting campaign to coerce our suspension of disbelief, a campaign that the history of the Commedia’s reception shows to have been remarkably successful. The Geryon episode, however, constitutes an even more profound poetic gamble […] for its emblematic verse is a double-edged sword and may be approached from the perspective of its last word, ‘menzogna’, as well as from the perspective of its first word, ‘ver’. Rather than emphasize the poet’s claim that his poem is a ver and remains such no matter what marvels it is forced to recount, we could ask: Why does this truth, this comedìa, have a faccia di menzogna? The answer is that even a comedìa, in order to Beginning of page[p. 358] come into existence as text, must to some extent accommodate that human and thus ultimately fraudulent construct, language. (UDC, p. 61)

Even a comedìa, then, must ‘translate’ and rely on its audience’s suspension of disbelief. The passage, the transition between what Dante sees and what Dante writes, implies a pact of truth between him and his readers. The same awareness with respect to writing occurs when translating. Too much adherence to the original text can be detrimental to its content while, on the other hand, excessive interpretation betrays the original text. Finding the right balance is never easy. Precisely for this reason, Geryon’s episode is one of the richest and most significant of the entire Commedia: Geryon is suspended/balanced between cantos, between the seventh and eighth circles of hell, between the violent and the fraudulent. Geryon, Barolini argues, ‘serves as an outrageously paradoxical authenticating device’, so much so that he also ‘serves as the poem’s very baptismal font’ (UDC, p. 59).2424I will take the opportunity to provide an errata corrige: my translation, I realize now, ‘betrays’ the original, since I rendered ‘outrageously paradoxical authenticating device’ with ‘paradossale dispositivo di autenticazione’ (Barolini, La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio, p. 90), thus forgetting outrageously, which implies the very idea of a violation on Dante’s part: in other words, playing God. I probably felt the accumulation awkward in Italian, but I could have easily solved the impasse by simply transforming the adverb into an adjective: ‘paradossale e oltraggioso dispositivo di autenticazione’. In Dante’s own words: ‘per le note | di questa comedìa lettor, ti giuro’ (‘by the lines | of this my Comedy, reader, I swear’; Inf. 16.127–28).

Applying Barolini’s observation about Ulysses to Geryon, the guardian of the eighth circle is ‘textually privileged’ as well.2525‘The many readers who have glorified Ulysses (like those who have glorified Francesca, Farinata, Brunetto, and Ugolino) were privileging a figure who is indeed privileged by the poet, not morally or eschatologically but textually and poetically’ (UDC, p. 51). His presence extends over two cantos — Inferno 16 and 17 — and 128 verses, the length of an entire canto. Equally important is Geryon’s textual position on the border of the first half of the first canticle. Paolo Cherchi describes canto 17 as ‘a busy railroad station, where a number of tracks end and new ones originate’,2626Paolo Cherchi, ‘Geryon’s Downward Flight; the Usurers’, in Lectura Dantis. Inferno. A Canto-by-Canto Commentary, ed. by Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 225–37 (p. 225). while Massimiliano Corrado depicts it as a sophisticated narrative matryoshka.2727Massimiliano Corrado, ‘Omai si scende’, p. 547. In trying to grasp Beginning of page[p. 359] these many layers, Dante scholars have produced dozens of varying interpretations. Reading them is almost as compelling as reading the two cantos themselves.2828In addition to the commentaries of Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. with commentary by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–97), i: Inferno (1991)) and Enrico Malato (Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. by Enrico Malato, 3 vols (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2021– ), i: Inferno (2021)), among the endless bibliography on the subject I have read: Enrico Proto, ‘Gerione (La corda – La sozza immagine di froda)’, Giornale dantesco, 8 (1900), pp. 65–105; Glauco Cambon, ‘Examples of Movement in the Divine Comedy’, Italica, 40.2 (June 1963), pp. 108–31; Vittorio Sermonti’s commentary on cantos 16 and 17 in L’Inferno di Dante (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 233–42 and 247–56; Emilio Pasquini, ‘Il canto di Gerione’, Atti e memorie, 3rd ser., 4.4 (1967), pp. 346–68; Franco Ferrucci, ‘The Meeting with Geryon’, in Ferrucci, The Poetics of Disguise. The Autobiography of the Work in Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, trans. by Ann Dunnigan (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 66–102; Roberto Mercuri, Semantica di Gerione. Il motivo del viaggio nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984); Paolo Cherchi, ‘Geryon’s Downward Flight’; Susan Noakes, ‘From Other Sodomites to Fraud’, in Lectura Dantis. Inferno, pp. 213–24; Massimiliano Corrado, ‘Omai si scende’; Luca Marcozzi, ‘Dante vince la guerra della pietà’, in Lectura Dantis romana. Cento canti per cento anni, ed. by Malato and Mazzucchi, i.1, pp. 484–525; Gennaro Ferrante, ‘Il paradosso di Gerione’, Rivista di studi danteschi, 20 (2020), pp. 113–33. My personal take — influenced by a ‘translation’ strategy, which, between the two fundamental and eternal directions (free or literal), leans towards the literal, in the sense of an extreme attention to the original — compels me toward a rational reading rather than a symbolic one. This may be anachronistic with respect to Dante’s mindset, but it seems to me that in the end what Dante does is attempt to translate what he sees as literally as possible.

As we begin canto 16, Dante and Virgil are in the third section of the seventh circle where the violent against God, nature and art are punished. They have just left Brunetto Latini and they are now close to the Flegetonte waterfall that flows into the deep ravine (l’alto burrato) that divides the seventh from the eighth circle, Malebolge, where the sin of fraud is punished, the third and final subdivision of hell. Canto 16 opens with ‘’l rimbombo’ (‘a murmur’) of water falling into the next circle. This projection towards the future is immediately interrupted by the arrival of the three Florentine sodomites, and it resumes once again with the sound of water that is now much closer. Indeed, it has become so loud that it is hard hear. After the long simile comparing the waterfall of Phlegethon to that of the Acquacheta river in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, Geryon then takes over the scene from the moment he Beginning of page[p. 360] is first evoked by a mysterious rope, one of the Commedia’s puzzles about which scholars have gone to great lengths trying to explicate its meaning (definitely a ‘translation’ problem). Dante tells us (Inf. 16.106–08) that he had this rope wrapped around his waist and with it he had once thought to capture the ‘lonza a la pelle dipinta’ (‘the leopard with the painted hide’; l. 108), which we remember from the first canto as one of the three fiere. Rather than the monster itself, it is the expectation of Geryon that occupies the stage. Virgil attracts Geryon to the bank of the burrato by throwing Dante’s knotted and coiled rope into the chasm. This is all the letter of the text tells us.2929As Vittorio Sermonti observes, this is a very simple passage from a literal point of view (‘Brano semplicissimo, sotto il profilo letterale’; L’Inferno di Dante, p. 240). The literal reading — the throwing of the rope as the only way for Virgil to make the monster aware of their presence, a reading that has had its supporters — as opposed to the allegorical interpretation is interestingly reminiscent of the dualism of literal translation vs. free translation. Barolini favours a ‘metapoetic interpretation, based on the traditional interpretation of the cord as a symbol of fraud’ (UDC, p. 63 note 45). For a quick review of the most recent interpretations, Enrico Malato (La Divina Commedia, i: Inferno, p. 435) refers to Marcozzi, ‘Dante vince la guerra’, p. 524 note 50. Dante expects something to happen after the tossing of the rope: ‘“convien che novità risponda”’ (‘“and surely something strange must here reply”’; l. 115). From this simple observation and temporal slowdown begins Dante’s textual reflection, which, in its extraordinary conciseness, links ‘il ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna’ with the ‘note | di questa comedìa’. Only later will we finally see Geryon:

Geryon materializes by swimming upwards, as if emerging from the water like a diver returning to the surface after having released the anchor. He is truly swimming in the air, with his body stretching and shrinking. But once at the bank, he will not emerge completely: in the following canto, Dante tells us that Geryon had pulled his head and torso out of the burrato, but not his tail that flickered in the air like that of a scorpion: he describes Geryon as standing like a rowboat pulled ashore, partly in the water and partly on land, in transition. Geryon’s description continues at the beginning of canto 17, first introduced by Virgil (who is the only one to speak for the remainder of the canto; for differing reasons, neither Geryon nor Dante will say a word): ‘“Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza”’ (‘“Behold the beast who bears the pointed tail”’; Inf. 17.1). From this point forward, Geryon is always described in animalesque terms: ‘fiera pessima’ (‘squalid beast’; l. 23), ‘bestia malvagia’ (‘malicious beast’; l. 30), ‘fiero animale’ (‘brute animal’; l. 80). Geryon is a filthy image of fraud — the sin punished in the next circle — with its sharp tail infecting the world.

In classical mythology, Geryon was king of the island Erytheia in the Balearic Islands, a giant with three heads, six arms and six legs: that is, with three bodies united on a single torso. He possessed immense herds of red oxen guarded by the monstrous dog Orto. He was defeated and killed by Hercules (the tenth and last labour), who then placed the boundaries of the world right there, in Erytheia.3030Marcozzi, ‘Dante vince la guerra’, p. 518. I perceive here a possible connection between Geryon’s indirect allusion to Hercules’s pillars and Ulysses’s words in Inf. 26.108–09: ‘“dov’Ercule segnò li suoi riguardi | acciò che l’uom più oltre non si metta”’ (‘“the narrows | where Hercules set up his boundary stones | that men might heed and never reach beyond”’). But Dante’s Geryon is only slightly inspired by classical tradition — the monstrous king appears in the Aeneid, but he doesn’t play much of a part. The figurative elements of Dante’s monster derive from biblical and vernacular sources, demonstrating the breadth of his semantic and metaphorical importance. Not only the pilgrim’s rope but Geryon himself is a crux in Dante studies, and interpretations of this figure are far from univocal.3131Mercuri, Semantica di Gerione, p. 13. In Dante’s vision, Geryon is still tergeminus, triple, but within one body. Interestingly, this is consistent with the rest Beginning of page[p. 362] of his vision, inspired by the Christian doctrine of the trinity, one-in-three or three-in-one: ‘era faccia d’uom giusto’ along with the trunk of a snake, two hairy arms of a lion (but no wings!), a body painted with variegated embroidery and the poisonous tail of a scorpion.

The encounter with the usurers, the last sinners of the seventh circle, interrupts the sequence of tercets dedicated to Geryon. Dante meets the usurers while Virgil goes to ask Geryon ‘“che ne conceda i suoi omeri forti”’ (‘“if he can lend us his strong shoulders”’; Inf. 17.42). It is only at this point that pilgrim and readers are finally aware of Geryon’s role as a means of transportation for the pilgrims’ descent into the eighth circle, Dante’s extraordinary nocturnal flight. It is again Virgil who, invoking Geryon’s name for the first time in this canto with ‘“Gerïon, moviti omai”’ (‘“Now, Geryon, move on”’; Inf. 17.97), begins the flight by commanding the monster to move slowly, descending in wide spiralling turns:

Vittorio Sermonti beautifully describes the terrified Dante’s spiral-like flight through the darkness on the back of a monster; the pilgrim attempts to ask Virgil to embrace him but cannot utter a word:

Boat, then spatial eel, then glider, falcon, arrow from a bow. […] Ovid tells us stories of fantastic flights and vertiginous heroics: Dante, the emotion of a night flight flown in flesh and blood. And scrupulously registers the perception of the blind descent in the swirling mists from below, and in the intensification of noises coming from the ground […] in the fires of the city that unfold gradually […] in the compulsion to lean out, in the fear of impact: in his curling up in the void. […] To the reader of the twentieth century, all that remains is Beginning of page[p. 364] to notice how according to the documents in the spring of year 1300 Dante actually flew at night […]3232Sermonti, L’Inferno di Dante, p. 256, translation mine. According to Glauco Cambon, ‘Dante’s aeronautical imagination proves every bit as lively and exact as Leonardo’s; he has overlooked no detail of the concrete experience to be evoked, from the visual to the tactile kinetic and aural impact’ (Cambon, ‘Examples of Movement in the Divine Comedy’, p. 113).

Dante’s initial wonder at the sight of Geryon emerging from the ravine at the end of canto 16 becomes, by the end of canto 17, a sheer physical fear of flying — and not only because he is on the back of a monster (anyone with a fear of flying can certainly relate!) — but also a sense of dread that, like Ulysses, he has embarked on a ‘folle volo’, a foolish endeavour destined for failure. He is but a Dante-translator who is afraid of not being believed by his readers as he faithfully ‘translates’ what he has seen.

As suddenly as he had appeared, Geryon disappears. If we retrace the steps, we’ll notice that the first time Virgil mentions the monster in canto 16, he uses the word ‘tosto’: fast, speedy, repeated twice: ‘“Tosto verrà di sovra | ciò ch’io attendo e che il tuo pensier sogna […] | tosto convien ch’al tuo viso si scovra”’ (‘“Now there will soon emerge | what I await and what your thought has conjured […] | it soon must be discovered to your sight”’; Inf. 16.121–22). Having completed his function as a transitional vehicle, Geryon vanishes like an arrow let loose from the string of a bow: ‘discarcate le nostre persone | si dileguò come da corda cocca’ (‘and once our weight was lifted from his back, | he vanished like an arrow from a bow’; Inf. 17.135–36). Again, it is noteworthy how the image of the rope — though, of course, a different kind of rope — ends Geryon’s narrative much as it had begun. It is a magnificent double simile: in these last tercets of canto 17, Geryon the arrow is also a falcon who, outraged at not being able to catch its prey (‘disdegnoso e fello’), disobeys the falconer by going ashore with empty beak.

With a Geryon-like spiral movement, let us then conclude these brief considerations by returning to the beginning with an observation on the Italian title of The Undivine Comedy. For better or worse, the title is usually not the translator’s responsibility but rather the decision of the publisher. The problem was not simple: how to render in Italian Beginning of page[p. 365] the perfection of the adjective undivine? There is no way to translate this term into Italian using a single word, which seems to confirm that translation is sometimes impossible. It is one of those typical examples to which Giusti’s proverb ‘traduttore-traditore’ would apply and, as a matter of fact, Roman Jakobson used it as an example for untranslatability in other languages:

If we were to translate into English the traditional formula Traduttore, traditore as ‘the translator is a betrayer’, we would deprive the Italian rhyming epigram of all its paronomastic value. Hence, a cognitive attitude would compel us to change this aphorism into a more explicit statement and to answer the questions: translator of what messages? betrayer of what values?3333Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, p. 143. And see Gianfranco Folena, Volgarizzare e tradurre (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), p. 3.

Of course, translation is always possible, for as Umberto Eco said, it’s only a matter of negotiation.3434Umberto Eco, Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione (Milan: Bompiani, 2003), p. 18: ‘la negoziazione essendo appunto un processo in base al quale, per ottenere qualcosa, si rinuncia a qualcosa d’altro — e alla fine le parti in gioco dovrebbero uscirne con un senso di ragionevole e reciproca soddisfazione alla luce dell’aureo principio per cui non si può avere tutto’ (‘negotiation being precisely a process according to which, in order to obtain something, something else is given up — and in the end the parties involved should come out of it with a sense of reasonable and mutual satisfaction in light of the golden principle according to which you can’t have everything’; translation mine). Umberto Eco’s 2003 book on translation, Dire quasi la stessa cosa (‘saying almost the same thing’) has never been translated into English, but in 1998 Eco was invited by Toronto University for a series of Goggio conferences, whose proceedings were published under the title Experiences in Translation (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001). A few years later Eco was invited by Oxford University to give eight Weidenfeld lectures. These, too, were published under the title Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Phoenix, 2002). Gabriella D’Ina, who for many years was Feltrinelli’s editorial director and our main interlocutor, came up with two possible solutions: Dante senza Dio and La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio, eventually choosing the second title. Translating the original subtitle, Detheologizing Dante, was also challenging: whereas a literal translation of the English ‘detheologizing’ was certainly possible, the absence in the Italian title of the adjective ‘undivine’ would have made it quite ineffective. So, Barolini opted instead for something radically different: Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale (‘Dante and the creation of a virtual reality’).Beginning of page[p. 366]

La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio: in the end, we had to sacrifice the pun undivine in the title of the Commedia, making the witticism not immediately apparent in Italian since it requires an extra step on the part of the reader to grasp it (and, as in Jakobson’s remark, it poses at least one question: why without God?), but the euphony created by the alliterations of e and a and the diphthongs ia and io preceded by the d sound is still quite beautiful.