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PARTISAN REVIEW
some of this was appropriate." Pound wrote, "The fact that this idiom,
which was never spoken on sea or land, is NOT fit for use in the new
poetry of
1933-34
does not mean that it is unfit for use in a translation
of a poem produced in
1321."
Binyon's
Purgatorio
begins:
Now hoisteth sail the pinnace of my wit
For better waters, and more smoothly flies
Since of a sea so cruel she is quit,
And of the second realm, which purifies
Man's spirit of its soilure, will I sing,
Where it becometh worthy of Paradise.
Whatever one thinks of his inversions and archaisms, Binyon's subtle
prosody in some way does manage to reproduce Dante's formal effects.
As Fitzgerald beautifully explains, Binyon does not only re-create the
triple rhymes of Dante's terza rima,
it involved a more intimate correspondence. So far as English
would permit, and in the decasyllabic line native to English, he had
imitated the Dantean hendecasyllable, scanning by syllable rather
than feet, but through systematic elisions achieving flexibility in
syllable count.... But this was not all, either. By using fine distri –
butions of weight and accent, he had contrived to avoid the beat of
pentameters and to even out his stresses on the Italian model.
"The 'transparency' valued by Pound in Binyon's version was therefore
a formal achievement," as Fitzgerald says. And even if one does not find
his version aesthetically pleasing, Binyon's terza rima nevertheless con–
tradicts Merwin's assertion that "verse conventions are to a large degree
matter of effects, which depend on a familiarity that cannot, of course,
be translated at all."
Merwin's disdain for the Binyon translation is not simply the rejec–
tion of its prosodic method; it is also a repudiation of Pound's instruc–
tion that a translator must attend to the original poem's sound and
form. Merwin has attempted to purge his translation of Pound's influ–
ence. The result is that rather than revealing (as Fitzgerald put it) "the
movement of the original composer's invention," his
Purgatorio
reflects
the translator's poetics. Though he has written that "I have not come to
use translation as a way of touching off writing that then became delib–
erately, specially, or ostentatiously my own," formally speaking, his
