Book Beat; 84

We're going to talk about a boxed paperback edition of The Divine Comedy my data which is in a new translation by John Chardy poetry editor of The Saturday Review. The book is published by New American library and we will be back with Mr. Chardy in just a moment. This is book Age week introducing you to leading authors and critics. This program is made possible in part by the National Book Committee and the American Booksellers Association. Your host is Robert Crumb a daily columnist for The Chicago Tribune and a contributing editor of book world the Sunday Literary Supplement of the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post. John I know this is a long term project for you what did you begin the first of your three translations about 1947. I was teaching at Harvard at the time and I won of the text to use with undergraduates. I began looking through the translations that exist and they all seemed wrong. I began doing passages I simply didn't have to I think. The

Inferno was published and I believe 54 maybe 53. That was about as far as I was going to go at first that I had. A preacher Roman I had a year at the American Academy in Rome when I got started on the Purgatorio haven't done that much I had to gone through the party so I'm glad I did. Well I've done other things but I've been at it for over 20 years. Yeah well it's had very good reviews. How good is your talent. Excellent. Well I speak the language but daddy didn't I mean I Dante as you as you know much earlier at night and some people think they speak Italian when they learn opera operatic attacked it speaks to what your problems the translation problems in terms of understanding that I want to end it because I simply used the annotated texts and why the language invaded. Oh I shouldn't say they did well the language presented problems in

evolution as when you read Robert Burns a chart you know you need footnotes to Shakespeare Shakespeare and those those are explained in annotated texts. It isn't so much the language down he used a simple language I think it's fair to say that a simple language with a knowledge complexity of thought. And trying to ponder out the intent of what he was doing and that involves long chases through the commentators to see who was in jeopardy and won in what why and then you come up with an interpretation that seems right. Well how did why did he write the Divine Comedy do we know. Yes the problem was in great detail. Dante was a Catholic of his time at the end of the Middle Ages the end of the run of his fourteenth century. Yes the opening date is thirteen hundred he began it Sunday as light as all that he has a little prophetic stretch and that he is writing in let us say that Jayne ate as if

that ain't a hundred and can prophesied of all right here as you say when he gets of the cells and that's a pretty good lead. Of course. He tells us of the very beginning. Dante had been occupied by politics. He was one of the ruling council of Florence that was part of what led to his exile and he had been concerned with what he called material philosophy and had not paid enough attention to God which a good man should do and his view of things and the Divine Comedy is an intellectual man's real agonizing with himself to reshape his attention to the ultimate good. Well this is the journey of it. It is an allegory of course but it's it's a chose on the Garridos method yet readable one isn't it. I think enormously rate it will not in terms of just sitting down and skimming because it can't be done that way. Dante is one of the most for science writers in existence. She wouldn't advise speed reading Dante. No there's no way of speed reading

Dante when for example he says midway in our life's journey he has in mind the biblical three score and ten which means 70 is which means in my thirty fifth year he was drawn into 65 and therefore that means the thirteen hundred. This sort of precision is not. I was about to say not common. It hardly exists. And not just about the courts but the kind of intensity that he brings to it. It's like a piece of knowledge when they enter get music you pick up one same one that opens an interpretation you pick another thing that suggests another interpretation. But in terms of this possibility Dante had mis directed his attention. One of the central sins is the Middle Ages called acedia Sloss failure to pay enough attention as to one's devotion fighting to put his attention where it

really counts. And this is his exercise in doing it. Human Reason cannot approach God. It's a dim foreshadowing. Virgil might be said to represent human reason in the simplest allegorical interpretation and he was sent to Dante and his confusion by Beatrice. Let's say that she is divine revelation. The cell has to die and not to be given the new way of perceiving that is necessary for understanding and for beginning to understand God. Virgil takes Dante up through the top of purgatory. The journey is this long. Ah there was a descent into hell to the recognition of what sin is. That it's the long climb up purgatory to the renunciation of what Say it as one sin is stripped away. The soul is weightless and can mount at this point virtually. And his last remark to Dante is

a lot of the ice of crown and Miter. You may now obey your inner impulse every impulse to evil has been removed from you and everything you do has to be good because an evil impulse and at this point Beatrice takes of. I see Beatrice as the simple soul and one science issues from the hand of God the simple so she was not an intellectual. She was born with his natural goodness. I think this is her role in the in the fall. And had there's a natural impulse to good from the very beginning Dante vein an intellectual has to has to labor the hard way to get to it. You see unless you become as little children you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. And this is his total psychic What shall I say. Determination to reshape his attention and bring it to the good.

Beatrice was a real person wasn't she. She was I think so that was a better response than I was a girl of Florence and you know that painting of the sea is Beatrice crossing the bridge and he held his hand over his heart. She must have been about 14 at the time. And she died before terribly long not sure the date of death but she was still a young girl. And so her soul is in heaven and Dante went on and he married Jemima. They do not aim and had children. But Beatrice was not really a person in his. She was a person she was a physical person but she was an ideal you know. She was an image left over I think partly from courtly love tradition and partly because he needed of a literary purposes and celebrates her on the beat and I was at the end of the veto of his first book he leaves there and he says he will not mention

her again until he writes that off it has never been written of any mortal woman. It was kind of a dream girl and let's just say we don't know a great deal more about Dante would do about Shakespeare do it. We know quite I think we know a little more about Shakespeare. Oddly there is no scrap of writing that survives and he's had a base of I but we have nothing to know which would so that it will you know there is a lot of purportedly written by Dante to one of his patrons but it's certainly a forgery. Nevertheless he was a prominent citizen of Florence. His son wrote about him. Look out Joe. Within fifty years of doubt his death had become the first professor at the University of Florence. Friends in common friends began to annotate the Divine Comedy and bought a cello illustrate other stray sometime later.

So that without knowing exactly where I was at 12:00 on January 15th you have a fair picture from outside sources. The citizen the Florence and has his position in town. The fact that he went to the Vatican on a diplomatic council that was exiled in his absence was not allowed to return his property was forfeited and he went off into exile and that we lose track of where he went there's a legend that he went to Paris as a legend that he visited London the as the as the tomb and rather than a but that period is hard to follow Nevertheless his public life influence from outside sources and from what he says himself allows a fairly substantial reconstruction of his life. Well what do you what do you think makes him such a great book. There are qualities I suppose the thing we admire. Put those TS out there said Dante and Shakespeare divide the

five to one of the reasons for the Lodge Innes if Shakespeare is not only that he wrote good plays but put them all together he saves the invented and populated something like a total in your own advice. By the time you get through you feel that you have run through a total understanding of the human race. Actually there are a few figures that do not appear in Shakespeare. One certainly is the holy man I suppose. Allowance and Romeo and Juliet as some sort of holy but is not a fully developed character. One of the things you get out of the Divine Comedy which I think of as the greatest metaphoric construction in the Western tradition and the Western European tradition. There is no profit what it is to be. That is not right to form and consequence an interrelation within this single modest amount of its total.

Why don't you teach anymore. You were at Rutgers and Harvard and University Michigan I guess Kansas City University before the war and then and have been for 70 is not rock is it and I enjoyed teaching for a time and then it began to get in the way of work I want to do. Frankly I began to feel guilty at times why should I spend my weekends working on student papers when I had my own papers to work on. I finally took the plunge and resigned. Some years ago and I just really want and you turned out quite a bit of your own work since I've been free. How many how many books have you done since 61. Cause you had some started and partially completed I'm sure in the three years after I finished after I quit teaching I actually published 11 books some of them one non books that were little things. While one was a small children's poem that was made up into a book with a large illustrations. But I didn't write them and this time I was writing all the time but these were projects I had been working on for a long time that never could get finished because of academic responsibility.

This is a rather pompous question but what is the state of poetry today or how is that. That's not answerable we won't know. Ask me in a hundred years now what I meant as far as the number of people writing in public perception of it and poets who are solvent. Why do you say we have a divided audience. Years ago people used to speak of the made in the on made poets by analogy to a bed the rumpled poets and I suppose fairly Gaddy and Ginsburg were the fathers of the of the OP. I suppose the most carefully made poet we have is Richard Wilbur who tucks everything exactly in the place of Master of grace and of technical virtue ASA thing. Right now. There was a very strong movement among poets some poets to hate every formality. Robert Bly goes around making enormous pronouncements

rhyme is dirty if you use me to somehow be train the spirit of the age. Galloway canal it goes around saying that there should be nothing between the poet and the poem just the strong overflow of sailing. Well I can't buy that you are dealing with an artifice. Supposing a man sits at the piano and simply let strong feeling out was forgotten to do is exercise and is not bothered to learn how to play the thing. I don't think what you get out of it is music. These allowed manifesto Mike as I think the non poets and the anti poets know why they want statement they want content they want certain social positions as outlets. In my view. Everyone who doesn't buy these principles according to Blago has sold out. Well I don't know what that means except that someone is disagreeing with someone. But the

contemporary scene is always troubled and confused because time has not had a chance to sort things out. And anyone who makes a judgment right now about what time was sought out is vain I reckon. Listen there's a mystery to a pong. I think what everybody is trying to get at is a kind of a language construction that will remain memorable poem is either memorable and sticks to human memory or it is forgettable and gets forgotten or a great many forgettable point it seems to me. And there are many forgettable poems kept alive under forced draft by the American school system. I tell you I am I kind of fearing fan do you like an affair and I do indeed and I wish more people would read him and that he hadn't died so fairly young as a matter of fact I just reviewed a marvelous album an anthology of 100 American poets by spoken and then theology of voice recordings and I regretted in my radio that Kenneth Herring was not represented. Thank you.

Because they should have been but I was in touch with those Klein very distinguished director spoke and he said there is no fear in recording. Oh yeah and then I got a letter from someone who had read the radio and said so and so he thinks has a tape of such incidents. So I sent that off to those Clyde and he's going to see if you can find it. Indiana University might have something possibly they publish him you know to publish stuff. But it's a tough one that was a that was a there was no existing record in known of hot training for example. Right there is that was a story that he had done a tape for a radio station. Klein ran it and he finally located the station but they had cleaned out the tape in one of the periodic of what a shame it happened. I don't know how you became a poet John you were of course when you were navigator or a rear gunner during World War I wasn't either you were a flight I ended up as a as a got a

not a rare gun and I was a little old for the aviation cadets made it out of the wire and I did get through navigation school. And I received a commission the discharge to accept a commission. But the day before I was supposed to be commissioned I was busted to buck private because I had signed and I had signed some petitions when I was a graduate student in the Dies Committee didn't like them and decided I could not have a commission. Well it saved my life. Everybody I graduated with lots of the ATF lost and within a year they'd all been chewed out by the way things are live and they want to live where you go. I ended up in the Pacific but two years later after another two years in schools what are you flying in the 2099 the big stuff. Well you wrote some excellent war poetry. Well I wrote a lot of poetry but when did you start writing poetry. Oh I was always full in around with some sort of writing and I really began to take it seriously in my sophomore year I went to Bates College and

loste and then my freshman year and in the middle of my sophomore year I transferred to tops which was in my backyard and I was running out of money and I had certain emotional problems. And there I met John homeless and he was a very fine poet and a great teacher. And instantly I knew this is what I had to do. I ended up be not employable in the cause of it my family wanted me to go to law school and I sort of said yes but I kept taking English courses until because I wanted to and I graduated as an English major with no job available at the University of Michigan I missed scholarships I could live on so I went there. When you were there when you were married then you don't know I got married after the war. Oh I see. I was I was a drifter I couldn't have supported the wives. I when I did teach for a couple of years before World War Two I would teach for one semester and then just take.

Well I'm amused by your reference to the dice committee barring you from getting a commission because you saved my life in front of them. What I was going to say you had trouble with the recent committee of Congress. Well if you call that a committee. Whatever they were they on an honorable rigid as I call it of the hawg wallow in those already decided that my opposition to his committee made him a suppressive. But you would have a great many names on the on the list for if you had people who didn't like his committee route and he decided that I had allowed the national committee to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee he used my name on its letter I had and I had signed some petition as my my point in signing petitions is that I agree with what is said I don't care who else has a grain whether I happen to agree with that statement as made the next petition of non-secular I'd sign I'd say no I don't want to sign that one. If that's not understood the right to petition has destroyed the right of free speech is just wrong. They'd say they tell me that some of the

people on that National Committee to abolish the act will comment as I don't know I never went to any meetings I allowed them to use my name. I agreed with the statement as made that's all my saying that supported what the committee was using it as an as a blacklist proposed blacklist for colleges. Are you guessing that hire these people although this is a spurious committee they set out to survey the colleges like just sekret Rebs does International Dictionary lists 3000 colleges universities and junior colleges in the United States. They send out letters to about one hundred twenty six. 52 are sorrows less than fed a steady sex or so answered what they want and. About 25 others gave them partial answers. And most of the rest on the go chase themselves it was none of the business which they should have done. They ended up with the equivalent of about 52 replies A survey of 3000 colleges and then made this big announcement about what they had discovered about the college lecture circuit I got to

tell them off the cuff and I was insulted when I find they got this report in the newspapers it sounded ominous and find they listed people by name and number of appearances and fees and when I got to the details of my sins it listed man said three for three appearances in two years total four thousand dollars. While I was a bit indignant at first only $4000 for three lectures. But one of them was probably a tie and that happened sometimes. But here's my my total tag for the two years is $4000 on my total and that my total grows for that two years was closer to one hundred seventy thousand dollars and I want the pike at buy therefore I don't buy that column a subversive that gave me status with my kids at that kind of added look at as I say that that fat fascist slob as a as a radical with a new tone of respect my heart longs. As I prepare to that of God as I said above that who takes my name takes a fanatic

problem to fiddle with my status with my credit line status and don't you go pike around me. But you've been thrown off the list. I was taken off the list. Yes the pressure was more than the spurious claim good good homie how many people did they take out the late only eight of those who were those who were on the list for opposing the House Un-American Activities Committee and as the clerk of the committee said it was merely self-serving. Yeah to put the opponents of this committee in that category. I don't really spend my nights with Abbie Hoffman I've not met him. I don't really know why Mike wrote it. Yes I am not intimate with Jerry Richardson we had met. Well I found it ruefully amusing when I saw it in the paper I had my good heavens look where charity is now you know I was mad when I said out of a good thing I'm a writer they gave me material for a couple of articles the first of what I did was reprinted very widely and newspapers across the country and I got a nice collection of reprint fees and

if I could I'd want to pour money into my pocket. Generally children's books have you done. It's either 11 or 12 I've lost all poetry all but one. One was a little fable as a matter of fact I've been on a compulsive kick out of children's poetry I hadn't written any for three or four years and suddenly one morning I was having coffee and I little jingle came into my head and I began to scribble it and the next thing I know my wife said I'm going to get out of pajamas it's time for dinner. So I had some gin and she scolded me for not having anything to say I was picking at my manuscript lately and making changes and I said something to the effect that she'd have to forgive me I didn't have the time it would take me to ignore it just then I went up to my study and the next they got it was two o'clock and I got up the next morning and I had some coffee and I began the scrawls of others lasted for about 30 days and I ended up with a stack of children's book I was like and when I get back and start reading them they'll probably turn out to be

John. There's some good ones and that is the wife of the poet lead a hard life you've just made me feel that she probably does. I don't think she leads a life. Well I don't care what you think she thinks a hard life. While she sometimes feels that she's ignored what can you do if you're if you're working and you have to keep your attention on what you're doing. There are plenty of times when I'm just puttering around. Just say you can't expect men and women to get along with one another. When she was a little girl she was holding dollar dollies in her lap and scolding them and telling them to be good and I was doing other things in the back streets of Boston. And then you get these two psyches together and try to get them to live and you try to blame this on her. No I say this to start a fight between you and your wife I want to see that case I am trying to cheer for the fact that we have a difference of sex and God and that's a nexus. But aside from that I think you have to give one another permission I would

like to go touring for example and I hate her and I'd like to go to a place and be that. I look surprised in case the camera was on me was that you used to have a very good CBS network show series television series in which you used to go touring and well you know we really liked it very much. We took our party with us. We took wonderful company for example while I went off and I liked it so once I don't want to go to Europe at this point why would you go take this trip to Spain that was being advertised. I'll be back in a month and you'll be back in three weeks and you'll have that out of your system and I'll have this out of my system. John you can do much translations Let's get back to the no I don't pay for the lesson I don't I don't think I want to do any more translations I've been working very hard at other things but I want time I've got left and that's no longer infinite. I want to do just whatever I find myself moved to Dylan I said and I don't know what it is I didn't know I was going to take a month out of my life to write nothing but children's bones I just got stuff

you know. You had actual reaction from scholars and other people on your on your translation this particular Divine Comedy translation. Well I'm not a devotee scholar. I've stolen scholarship. I don't know what's going on that ship is good for if it's not that a steal. I hope what I've been doing has been poets work and it's sad that by and a lot of the translations of the Divine Comedy and English have not been by poets the philologist by scholars is fairly stilted. While the philologist has a family they have to reach for the cognate which sometimes leads to ludicrous results because Rosati did some of it when he was a little too romantic I feel for words with long phylogeny so I did some Dante translation but he was too genteel he's in the wrong spare and so I doubt a doubt he was a door and he was not a kind of colonial robotic Binion was too

romantic I think but Dudley feds put the problem as well as anyone I think he said. We're never going to know what he said but talking with John Chardy has you boxed translations of the Divine Comedy by Dante. I have just been issued by New American Library. I Bob told me from the Chicago Tribune I'm happy you are with us today and I will be happy for with this get next week and John it's always nice to see you don't get to town often enough. I wish I could thank you for coming. It's too cold to get up so often. Book B has been made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This is the national educational radio network.