|
While I prefer to use the Sayers translation, it has the added value of really wonderful notes--the best I've seen in an English translation. She was an Oxford Scholar herself and a member of the famous Inklings {the only woman in the group}. In her notes she incorporated many comments from The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante by another Inkling, Charles Williams. These notes are remarkably perceptive and if I'm using my Kindle, {I use the Ciardi version in that case} I keep the Sayers pb volume handy to note her useful comments in the "Images" section and see what Williams has to add. For instance, this is his telling comment on the justly famous Francesca and Paolo section:
"It is always quoted as an example of Dante's tenderness. So, no doubt, it is, but it is not here for that reason . . . . It has a much more important place; it presents the first tender, passionate, and half-excusable consent of the soul to sin. . . . [Dante] so manages the description, he so heightens the excuse, that the excuse reveals itself as precisely the sin . . . the persistent parleying with the occasion of sin, the sweet prolonged laziness of love, is the first surrender of the soul to Hell--small but certain. The formal sin here is the adultery of the two lovers; the poetic sin is their shrinking from the adult love demanded of them, and their refusal of the opportunity of glory."
|