Pieta - more notes
In "Dante and the Lobster", we see Belacqua agonising over the seemingly impossible translation of Dante’s “great phrase” “qui vive la pieta quando è ben morta” (Inferno xx:28); whether to translate it as "pity" or "piety"...
From the original: In the Inferno, Virgil reprimands Dante, the pilgrim, for his compassion for the damned: "Here pity/piety lives when it is dead".
The Latin root for both pity and piety is pietas; the Italian word pieta refers to either pity or piety (or, as in Dante, to both). In 'The Divine Comedy', Christian piety and pity can mean the same thing.
For Virgil, writing from a Roman (and pagan) perspective, pieta meant "the subordination of personal compassion to a political duty that served a national destiny decreed by the gods." (Phyllis Carey, "Stephen Dedalus, Belacqua Shuah, and Dante's Pietà")
For Dante, writing from both Roman and Christian persectives, pieta would seem to infer both morality and devotion. "Morality opposes evil; piety aids the good." (Karl Vossler, 'Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times')
In the Inferno, where moral evil is explicit, piety is seen as a moral stance. Conversely, in the Paradiso, with opposition to evil being no longer necessary, the moral will is indistinguishable from piety (Vossler). In Dante, human piety evinces varying degrees of participation in the holiness of God.
Different translators offer slightly different versions:
Robert and Jean Hollander (2000 - verse): "Here piety lives when pity is quite dead."
John Sinclair (1961 - blank verse): "Here pity lives when it is quite dead"
Wallace Fowlie: "Here piety (to God) lives when pity (to man) is dead."
It would be great to line up all of the different versions next to each other, line by line, and just compare them, perhaps in the order in which they were translated - the original, the Longfellow, all the way through to the Hollander. There's a 1997 attempt at doing it here, but it only compares three translations with the original, and only two cantos of the whole thing.
I'm going to try to get hold of Robert Pinsky's 1994 verse translation - the US Poet Laureate, he's been criticised for sounding too much like he just, all of a sudden, got really good at using magnetic poetry, but from the extracts I've read, it seems like a very approachable version of the text. It seems like every text in this course has something to do with Dante, or The Descent, I guess they're very resonant myths and ideas through the ages...
From the original: In the Inferno, Virgil reprimands Dante, the pilgrim, for his compassion for the damned: "Here pity/piety lives when it is dead".
The Latin root for both pity and piety is pietas; the Italian word pieta refers to either pity or piety (or, as in Dante, to both). In 'The Divine Comedy', Christian piety and pity can mean the same thing.
For Virgil, writing from a Roman (and pagan) perspective, pieta meant "the subordination of personal compassion to a political duty that served a national destiny decreed by the gods." (Phyllis Carey, "Stephen Dedalus, Belacqua Shuah, and Dante's Pietà")
For Dante, writing from both Roman and Christian persectives, pieta would seem to infer both morality and devotion. "Morality opposes evil; piety aids the good." (Karl Vossler, 'Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times')
In the Inferno, where moral evil is explicit, piety is seen as a moral stance. Conversely, in the Paradiso, with opposition to evil being no longer necessary, the moral will is indistinguishable from piety (Vossler). In Dante, human piety evinces varying degrees of participation in the holiness of God.
Different translators offer slightly different versions:
Robert and Jean Hollander (2000 - verse): "Here piety lives when pity is quite dead."
John Sinclair (1961 - blank verse): "Here pity lives when it is quite dead"
Wallace Fowlie: "Here piety (to God) lives when pity (to man) is dead."
It would be great to line up all of the different versions next to each other, line by line, and just compare them, perhaps in the order in which they were translated - the original, the Longfellow, all the way through to the Hollander. There's a 1997 attempt at doing it here, but it only compares three translations with the original, and only two cantos of the whole thing.
I'm going to try to get hold of Robert Pinsky's 1994 verse translation - the US Poet Laureate, he's been criticised for sounding too much like he just, all of a sudden, got really good at using magnetic poetry, but from the extracts I've read, it seems like a very approachable version of the text. It seems like every text in this course has something to do with Dante, or The Descent, I guess they're very resonant myths and ideas through the ages...
posted by David | 10:09 PM
<< Home