Dante Alighieri, Id-Divina Commedia

By Dante Alighieri

Translation to Maltese by Alfred Palma

Published by Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2021

I confess to feeling awed and frightened in writing about this book. In fact, I am not really reviewing it at all. I will just be jotting down some very random reactions to the overwhelming energies this wild cascade of genius generates. Only the audacious or the presumptuous would dare to speak about it. The rest stutter. I count myself with the rest.

Dante Alighieri has survived seven centuries, and his flame shows no signs of dimming. A failed politician, his memory outlives that of thousands of mob-stars hero-worshipped in their lives; an amateur theologian, he left a deeper imprint on the perception of the infinite than most professional theologians ever did; a psychoanalyst who mined the torments of the spirit well before the birth of psychoanalysis. But above all, one of the greatest poets ever, master wordsmith able to morph the agonies of hell, of God-withdrawals, the anguish of extreme passion into unbearable beauty.

Vincent Apap’s monument to Dante Alighieri in Floriana.

His Divina Commedia had, no, has, a message for the whole civilised world. Witness to this are the literally innumerable translations into most languages and dialects of the world. It is claimed to be the most translated book in history, after the Bible. Into English alone I have counted no less than a hundred complete or extended versions, though Britain started rather late, with Charles Rogers publishing the Inferno on its own in 1782, and waiting for a complete rendition by Henry Boyd till 1802, a relatively late starter. One of the last, and more acclaimed translations into English is the 2003 Inferno by Michael Palma. No relation, just a happy coincidence.

For Malta, the Commedia had a double significance – the universal one that intertwines inextricably with the Christian culture of Europe. We shared that with the rest of Christianity. But in Malta, Dante found himself also playing an unexpected role. When Britain stepped up its efforts to neutralise the centuries-old Italiante culture of the island, to forcibly turn the Maltese into incongruous parodies of our colonial owners, the majority of the Maltese resisted for years and years this forced betrayal of one’s roots. They resented being genetically modified half-casts.

They hung on defiantly to their Italian cultural roots, traditional for ages. The artificial impositions made little headway, except with the usual bum-worshipping stooges. It only succeeded when the abolition of an inveterate civilisation was imposed by legal diktat in the 1930s and by fascist bombings in the 1940s. In this struggle for resistance, Dante, his genius and his universality became more than ever the rallying cry, the symbolic icon of the stubborn patriots who would not be bribed by the 30 pieces of silver on offer from the colonial paymaster.

The reliance of Malta on Dante was massive; on the other hand, Dante’s relation to Malta is tenuous indeed. He does mention Malta (Paradise IX, 52-54) – a focal point of suffering and penance. He might have been referring to our island, renowned in Italy as a place of punishment since 1223 when the whole rebellious male population of Celano near l’Aquila in the Abruzzi, was forcibly uprooted from their hometown by Emperor Fredrick II Stupor Mundi and deported to Malta.  Or, on the other hand, Dante might have had in mind the Torre di Malta, close to Padova, or Malta, the Viterbo prison renowned as exceptionally cruel places of detention.

Gustav Doré, The Titans in Hell. Illustration for the Divina Commedia.

A line of incoherent gibberish with which Dante starts Inferno VII, 1, has been interpreted by some hopefuls as archaic Maltese. It states Pape satan, pape satan aleppe. Does it transliterate the Maltese il-Papa x-xitan, il-Papa x-xitan għeleb? I recall my elders rooting for this version. Palma translates it as ‘Bieb ix-xitan, bieb ix-xitan kemm rebaħ”.

The only complete rhymed translation in Maltese, which follows as closely as humanely possible the original meandering of thought, the original cadence, the original inflexions

Dante is said to have worked about 12 years to complete his Commedia, later called Divina. Alfred Palma began translating it in 1966 and sent it to print in 1991. A monumental work, an equally monumental translation. The only complete rhymed translation in Maltese, which follows as closely as humanely possible the original meandering of thought, the original cadence, the original inflexions.  A free translation in loose verse would have been daunting, a rhymed one appears almost supernatural. It gives the lie to a dismissive George Borrow: translation is at best an echo.

Gustave Doré, Charon, illustration for the Divina Commedia.

How faithful is it? I have not followed the parallel Italian original and the Palma translation, line by line, but when I did, the concurrence is simply amazing, even when the exigences of rhyme made fidelity to the Dante discourse extremely challenging.

An Italian platitude insists that tradurre è tradire. Yes it is, in the hands of poor translators. Ugo Mifsud Bonnici dubbed Palma’s version “kapolavur ta’ traduzzjoni” with the added merit of being pure poetry, in itself. Who can question that? I found myself reading and rereading some terzets, swirling the words round my tongue, like an aged cognac.

 I feel in a privileged position to dispense these top marks. In 1958, the bug to translate Dante into terza rima Maltese captured me and, quite recklessly I plunged headlong. By the end of the first canto, I had to acknowledge defeat, as my dream strayed into nightmares. Palma persevered to a full hundred masochistic cantos.  Some are obviously born marathon runners, some will not even shine as short-distance sprinters. When I came to write this ‘review’, a silly nostalgia pushed me to look everywhere for the manuscript of my first bite at Inferno Lost but, thankfully, it seems to be mislaid, and hopefully for good.

I possibly owe my devotion to Dante to our common experience of political exile. For partisan reasons, Florence had exiled the poet, and the hurt of banishment and the bitterness of injustice found vent in his verses. “You will experience how salt the taste of the bread of others is and how tiring is the way up and down other people’s stairs”. Palma translates this lament of the exile – B’tiġriba l-aktar morra int għad-tara / Kemm huwa mielaħ ħobs in-nies barrana / Fit-tlugħ u nżul targithom kemm għabbara (Paradise XVII, 58-60). I too, a toddler, for five years knew how salty the bread of strangers tasted while my father languished illegally behind East African barbed wire, guilty of the unpardonable crime of anti-colonial aversion.

Agnolo Bronzino, posthumous portrait of Dante Alighieri, c. 1532.

The 700th anniversary of Dante’s death (in 1321), provided the occasion for the Klabb Kotba Maltin together with the Italian Cultural Institute and AZAD, the Academy for the Promotion of Democracy to come together to launch a second, more lavish, edition of Palma’s masterpiece.

An exemplar of Palma’s first run is preserved in the library close to Dante’s tomb in Ravenna, which houses a copy of every known translation of the poet. Few seem to know that Dante’s burial place has a connection with Malta. His marble memorial there was willed and paid for by the Venetian Ser Bernardo Bembo, whose son Pietro Bembo became a renowned knight of Malta, an outstanding man of letters and eventually a cardinal too. That he was also the passionate lover of Lucrezia Borgia, the love-child of a problematic pope, added lustre to his name.

Malta marked the anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1265 with a first important translation of the Divina Commedia, the unrhymed one by Erin Serrracino Inglott. Only the Inferno part was published in 1964, the final Purgatory and Paradise sadly remain to this day in manuscript form.

Serracino Inglott a fine man of letters himself, produced a version radically different from Palma’s. The latter aimed at legibility, at capturing the reader; the earlier was fired by Saydon’s fascination with the original purity of the language, sometimes at the expense of clarity. Everyone can read and digest Palma’s translation. It takes a man of some learning to penetrate Serracino Inglott, though the euphonics of his words can be enchanting. And it is said that the tough process of translation gave birth to the compilation of Serracino Inglott’s memorable dictionary. Collateral benefits.

The history of Maltese translations of the Commedia starts long before Serracino Inglott. Guzè Galea first sketched that chronicle in 1940, followed by Paul Cachia in 1966 in a London University publication. It would seem the very first pioneer was Richard Taylor who in 1864 published a verse translation on the Conte Ugolino canto (Inferno XXXIII). Taylor, despite his English surname, could be highly critical of the British administration and distinguished himself as a prolific and pungent satirist and poet. His complex, brief, often contradictory and adventurous life still needs to be explored better.

Giovanni Sapiano Lanzon who in 1905 took up the baton, published a translation of the whole Inferno in prose. He also rendered the Conte Ugolino (1899) and the Francesca da Rimini (1913) cantos in verse.

He was followed by a lesser-known Alfredo Edward Borg who in 1905 started the publication of the whole Divina Commedia in Maltese verse. Other anonymous partial translations are recorded too. Palma had numerous scouts to lead the way, most less gifted than him.

I was tempted to squeeze in some reflections on the relevance of the Commedia today. But I would only be duplicating what Louis Galea, today’s president of AZAD, has already done exhaustively in the introductory part of the book, together with other contributors, like Massimo Sarti, director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Fabrizio Romano, the Italian Ambassador, Claudio Marazzini, president of the venerable Accademia della Crusca and world authority on Italian linguistics who also delivered an electrifying speech during the book launch; Joe M. Brincat, Richard Muscat and Fr Marius Zerafa.

In this book I discovered an unsuspected side to Louis Galea I had not been aware of before. A profoundly enlightening analysis by Mifsud ­Bonnici also enriched the book launch.

In the first canto of the Inferno Dante meets a beast that is hungrier after having gorged itself than it was before the meal – e dopo ‘l pasto ha piu fame che pria. I bet that will happen to you too – the more of these verses you devour, the hungrier you will be for others.