from today's Writer's Almanac --

It's the birthday of poet and essayist Robert Pinsky, born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1940) who said, 'I grew up in a disorderly, unpredictable household, jangling alternations of comedy and history, insanity and idealism, doubt and head injury, music and anger, loss and wit.' He's the author of 19 books, including his recent poetry collections Jersey Rain (2000), Samurai Song (2001) and Gulf Music: Poems (2007).

He's been asked many times how he got started as a poet, and has variously answered: 'Imitating Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Frost, Eliot'; 'Reading the dictionary and daydreaming about the sounds of words when I was a kid'; 'Liking entertaining people when playing the saxophone as a teenager.' And another time: 'Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator -- that has always been strong in me.'

Pinsky also translates poetry, and in 1995 he published a new translation of Dante's Inferno. He said that the inspiration to translate Dante's epic work was an accident; it started when he was assigned just one Canto as part of a group project.

In his translation, Pinsky preserved the terza rima rhyme scheme, which Dante invented. It's an interlocking rhyme with the pattern aba bcb cdc ded, etc., which works well in Italian, Pinsky explains, because Italian is rich in rhyme, but 'can put tremendous strain on an English translation.' Rather than 'squeezing unlikely synonyms to the end of lines, and bending idiom ruthlessly to get there,' Pinsky explained that he decided on a more flexible -- though still systematic -- definition of rhyme. He keeps the consonant sounds at the ends of words the same, even though the vowel sounds may differ greatly. It's a system he borrowed from W.B. Yeats, and it's sometimes called 'Yeatsian rhyme.' In the opening Canto, for example, Pinsky has as rhyming triads in the terza rima the words 'tell/feel/well' and 'sleep/stop/up' and 'night/thought/it.'

Robert Pinsky's The Inferno of Dante begins:

'Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangle and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I'll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder
Off the true path...'

Notes on rhyme from Robert Pinsky's own 'Translator's Note' in The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1995)

Indeed, Mr. Pinsky. Congratulations and honors to you this day, May there be many more to you.

Carpe Verve!

Happy birthday, Mr. Pinsky.

MaryAnn, it's interesting to see this fragment here, and if the rest is as good I want to read more. I've always sworn by Ciardi's translation, with its airy but precise terza rima and lofty point of view. From these lines here, though, I feel something darker stirring, so much more Anglo-Saxon in rhythm ("in dark woods, the right road lost", "the old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter") that one almost feels a caesura pulling from the middle of each line. I like the freedom of this, and it surprises me how much more immediate this feels. If I had it in hand, I wouldn't put it down until face to face with the Mystic Rose. Ciardi's translation seems to say "This is as close to the Italian of Dante as English can get"; Pinsky's seems to reply, "This is the poem Dante would have written had he spoken English."

So ... off to the bookstore.

Rob, just be aware that Pinsky did only the "Inferno," not the whole Comedy. (Someone else is considered the best for the rest -- can't remember his name, but it's not Ciardi.)

Well, The Inferno is the real guts of the poem, isn't it? I mean, you can feel the heat of his passion for the evil people of his day. The other two sections feel kind of obsessive/compulsive — Dante the completionist. Although I did rather enjoy ascending through the spheres, a journey through a Medieval cosmology. And Il Purgatorio is, by definition, neither here nor there.

To tell the truth, I've never read The Divine Comedy.

(But then, I've never read The Iliad, The Odysey, War and Peace, Madame Bovary, or the Bible, either.)

So many books to read, so little time.....

What are you waiting for? In order of preference, I would read them in this order: Madame Bovary, War and Peace, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Bible In order of helping you understand Western literature, I would recommend this order: The Bible, The Iliad, The Odyssey, War & Peace, Mme. Bovary.

What are you waiting for?

I've been working like a dog on the course I'm teaching -- religion + poetry (drum roll, please, to accentuate the irony (chutzpah?) of an agnostic who's never read the Bible teaching such a course). But my students and I are having a heckuva good time.

One book I'd like to get to when I'm through w/ the course is Karen Armstrong's In the Beginning, which is her take on Genesis. I figure that will be enough Bible for me. (Like you, I heard lots of the NT stories in Church as a kid.)

I'd like to read Bovary and a bit of The Iliad, but I have so many other good books on my list of to-read books as well... Trouble is, I read The New Yorker and NYT Book Review cover to cover every week, and the Wash Post at length every day, and then there's cooking, washing clothes, etc. etc. I'm just not reading as much fiction as I used to.

Read any good poets lately?

"Read any good poets lately?" Hard to say. I have such an intense relationship with poetry, it's not something I do every day. I read the poetry in The New Yorker, but most of the time that doesn't move the needle for me. I don't care for their fiction, either, but their non-fiction is, of course, first-rate. In truth, I've been on kind of a Kindle kick lately, so I've been buying way too many books and just spindling down the list. If you haven't tried a Kindle yet, I recommend it. It has some drawbacks, but there is a lot to be said for being able to take a library with you wherever you go – and for being able to download any book you want whenever you want and just about wherever you are.