468
PARTISAN REVIEW
There is none of Merwin's distrust of skill or dexterity in Dante; his
sweetness is always undercut by the stringency of technique. He could
even be said to worship structural difficulty, for the justice of form is a
manifestation of the divine mind.
This love of difficulty is essential to the aesthetic of the Proven<;:al
lyric. And the way Dante's Proven<;:al lines at the close of Canto
XXVI,
written as though spoken from the mouth of Arnaut Daniel, are worked
so flawlessly into the Italian's terza rima demonstrate something of his
verse's close relation to the lyric tradition of Arnaut:
EI comincio liberamente a dire:
"Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman,
qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vas cobrire
...
Ara vas prec, per aquella valor
que nos guida al sam de l'escalina,
sovenha vas a temps de ma dolor!"
Poi s'ascose nel foco che Ii affina.
Sheer technical effort (here, the employment of rhyme in two languages)
is demonstration of the "valour" which is needed to climb up Mount
Purgatory. Merwin translates these lines as:
Freely he began
to
speak to me:
"Your courteous question gives sLlch pleasure
to
me
that
I
will not and cannot conceal myself from you ...
ow I beg you by that power
that is leading you to the top of the stair,
while there is time remember how I suffer!"
Then hid himself in the fire that refines them.
Valol~
however, is not really "power," though this is also how Charles
Singleton translates it. Within the context of troubadour verse, "valour"
is a talent, ability, or strength. It's also a quality of character (something
like "virtue") found in God, Beatrice, and Dante's soul. A key concept
in troubadour cosmology,
valor
is extremely hard
to
translate into a sin–
gle word. Yet Merwin, having familiarity with living Occitan, should
certainly know better than to follow Singleton in his use of "power," for
that suggests a theological force emanating only from God which leads
