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PARTISA REVIEW
Merwin's prose softens all this considerably:
For the sake of our king we are bound to remain here. For the sake
of his lord a man is bound
to
suffer hardship, to endure the
extremes of heat and of cold, and to lose, if he must, both hair and
hide. Now let every man see
to
it that the blows he deals are heavy,
lest a shameful song be sung of us. The pagans are in the wrong
and the Christians in the right. No one will ever be able to say of
me that I set a bad example.
Merwin's translation makes no indication of the Oxford manuscript's
mysterious AOI notation, most likely the indication of a refrain; he
effectively effaces the original's essential nature, its origin as
song.
Merwin's contemporary (albeit cadenced) prose version of Roland's
narrative has no need for performative niceties like the mnemonics of
assonantal rhyme, for its purpose is not incantation but silent or class–
room reading. In this, Merwin has performed as a kind of
jongleur
rather
than as an epic singer, responding "to the demands of his audience"
rather than "reciting once more an inherited accumulation" (Zumthor).
His nearly forty-year-old
Song of Roland
is elegant and easy
to
read, and
students in "Introduction
to
World Literature" classes will continue
to
appreciate not having to cope with a formally more demanding rendi–
tion . As Merwin contends in the introduction
to
his
Purgatorio,
"A
translation is made for the general reader of its own time and language,
a person who, it is presumed, cannot read, or is certainly not on familiar
terms with, the original, and may scarcely know it except by reputation ."
Why then has Merwin chosen
to
translate Dante's language into
verse? Something Seamus Heaney has written of Yeats in his contribu–
tion to
The Poets ' Dante
is helpful here: "When poets turn to the great
masters of the past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one
which is likely to be a reflection of their own imaginative needs, their
own artistic inclinations and procedures." Heaney's observation could
be applied to Merwin's
Purgatorio
as well as his
Song of Roland.
Though his Dante lacks the formal power of Robert Pinsky'S
Inferno
(with its bracing quality of saltwater or
eau-de-vie),
his gently bending
courtliness nicely accords with the
Purgatorio's
"better waters." His
sonority (Merwin has a perfect ear for vowels and soft consonants) has
the limpid sweetness of spring water. Full of that "dolce color, sereno
aspetto" for which Dante strived, lines such as "the tender color of Ori–
ental sapphire /that was gathering in the serene countenance /of the clear
sky all the way to the horizon" display the translator's self-described
