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Dante toward Beatrice. Instead, Dante's extraordinary skill-writing of
Arnaut in the forms of Arnaut's own Provem;al-is itself a demonstra–
tion of
valor.
Effort is the way the poet shows his love.
In "Poetry Rising from the Dead" Merwin identifies Purgatory as a
place of "reunions with poets, memories and projections of poets," amI
he remarks on the "several suggestive parallels" between the Odysseus
passage in the
Inferno's
Canto XXVI and the same canto in the
Purga–
torio,
wherein Dante encounters Arnaut Daniel. He writes, "When I
was a student" the
Inferno's
Dante-Odysseus encounter "caught me by
the hair." When he describes Ulysses as a modern figure who
"attemptls] to break out of the limitations of his own time and place by
the exercise of intelligence and audacity alone," the flawed hero sounds
a lot like his own mentor, the author of the
Cantos.
And when he admits
that "translation of poetry is an enterprise that is always in certain
respects impossible, and yet on occasion it has produced something new,
something else, of value, and sometimes, on the other side of a sea
change, it has brought up poetry again," again it's hard not to think of
Pound. Surely the Dante-Arnaut meeting would also have particular res–
Ol1anCe for Merwin, for not only was the Proven<;:al master a funda–
mental element of the Poundian curriculum ("Provence was as key to
Pound as it was to Dante," as Charles Wright says), but Dante's meet–
ing with Arnaut is the source for the phrase
"i!
miglior fabbro,"
with
which Eliot dedicated
The Waste Land
to Pound. Is it possible that Mer–
win has forgotten that in the first letter sent to Pound in
1946,
he asked
for some introductory volumes on Proven<;:al?
Merwin only notes Pound's recommendation of Binyon's translation.
According to "Mirroring the
Commedia:
An Appreciation of Laurence
Binyon's Version," Robert Fitzgerald's contribution to
The Poets' Dante,
"[Pound] all but took a hand in the translation." Merwin takes a swipe
at the Binyon; he says he found it "terribly tangled," yet Fitzgerald justi–
fiably argues that "Pound could be wildly wrong about some things but
not ... about a rendering of Dante in English verse." Though it was also
admired by Auden, Binyon's translation is "peculiarly disregarded,"
Fitzgerald writes, yet it is the one "that most nearly reproduces the total
quality of the original poem." Pound said of the piece, "I don't know of
any that is more transparent in sense that reader sees the original through
it. A translation that really has a critical value, i.e. enlightens one as to
the nature of the original ... it is like a window with glass so polished
that one is not aware of it, one has the impression of the open air."
The "tangled" quality that Merwin notes also irritated Pound at first,
"but on reflection," says Fitzgerald, "he had come round to seeing that
