Purgatorio: A New Verse Translation by W. S. Merwin

by Dante Alighieri, W. S. Merwin (Translator)

Overview

“Were Merwin not one of America’s most admired poets, he would still be as famous as translators get.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In the foreword to his new translation [of Purgatorio], Merwin . . . writes feelingly of his 30-year obsession with the poem. And indeed, the flaws as well as the virtues of his new rendering may be said to stem from a profound reverence for the original.” —The New York Times

W.S. Merwin’s rendition of the Purgatorio is considered a pinnacle and highlight from a prolific and celebrated career in poetry and translation. The most neglected and arguably the most rewarding book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Purgatorio finds Dante undertaking the arduous journey of scaling the terraces of Mount Purgatory. Presented in a bilingual edition with the translator’s notes and commentary, Merwin’s interpretation of Dante’s great poem of sin, repentance, and salvation is a profoundly moving work of art and a luminous translation for our time. When asked why he translated this book, as opposed to the Inferno or Paradiso, Merwin responded, “The Purgatorio is more like life.”

From “Canto XXII”:

And I went on, lighter than I had been at the other passageways, so that without effort I climbed after the swift spirits,
when Virgil began, “Love that is set alight by virtue always sets alight another if only its flame can be seen shining out

W.S. Merwin is one of America’s greatest poets and translators. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, most recently for The Shadow of Sirius. He lives in Hawaii, where the Governor declared Merwin’s birthday—September 30—”W.S. Merwin Day.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556594618
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	222,833
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

W. S. Merwin has authored dozens of books of poetry, prose, and works in translation. A beloved voice in American literature with steadfast commitments to environmentalist and anti-imperialist causes, Merwin is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders (1971) and The Shadow of Sirius (2009). His most recent volume is Garden Time (2016). Merwin has lived in Hawaii since 1976, where he and his wife restored the barren land of a former pineapple plantation into a haven for endangered palm species. In 2010, The Merwin Conservancy was founded to preserve Merwin’s literary legacy, home, and palm forest and to serve as a retreat and study for the arts, environmental advocacy, and community education. Merwin has been recognized and awarded numerous prizes throughout his career, including fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.

Read an Excerpt

Canto XXII

By this time the angel was behind us,
the angel who had turned us toward the sixth
circle, erasing one stroke from my face,

and had told us that they are blessèd whose
thirst is for justice, and he confined his
words to “thirst,” without the rest of the text.

And I went on, lighter than I had been
at the other passageways, so that without
effort I climbed after the swift spirits,

when Virgil began, “Love that is set alight
by virtue always sets alight another
if only its flame can be seen shining out,

so, since the hour when Juvenal came down
among us, into the limbo of Hell,
and brought me tidings of your affection,

my good will toward you has been as great
as one can feel for a person never seen,
so that now this stairway will seem short.

But tell me, and as a friend forgive me
if excess of confidence prompts me
to loosen the rein, and speak now as a friend to me:

how could avarice ever have found a place
within your breast, taken up as it was
with all that wisdom your own zeal had put there?”

These words at first led Statius to smile
a little, and then he answered, “All
you say is a dear token of love,

but in truth, things have a way of appearing, often,
that provides misleading grounds for doubt
because the real cause of them is hidden.

Your question shows me that you believe
I was avaricious in the other life,
no doubt because of that circle where I was.

Now you should know that avarice was too far
away from me, and this lack of measure
thousands of moons have been punishment for.

And if I had not righted my concerns
when I had understood the passage where
you cry out, as though enraged at human nature,

‘To what, oh accursèd hunger for gold,
do you not drive the appetite of mortals?’
I would feel the jousts down where the weights are rolled.

Then I learned that our hands can spread their wings
too wide in spending, and I repented
of that as of my other wrongdoings.

How many will rise without most of their hair
through ignorance, that takes away repentance
of this sin through life and at the last hour!

And you should know that the counterfault,
in exact opposition to every sin,
here withers, along with it, from its green,

so that if for my cleansing I have stayed
among those people who lament avarice,
that happened to me because of its opposite.”

“Now, when you sang about the cruel weapons
and of the twofold sorrow of Jocasta,”
said the singer of the bucolic songs,

“it does not seem, from the notes Clio touches
with you there, that you were yet made faithful
by the faith without which good works alone fail.

If that is so, what sun or candles lighted
the darkness for you so that from then on
you set your sails to follow the fisherman?”

And the other to him, “You first showed me the way
to Parnassus to drink from its grottoes,
and it was you, after God, who first enlightened me.

You did what someone does walking at night
holding the lantern behind him so that
it does him no good but makes wise those who follow

when you said, ‘The age is growing new again.
Justice returns, and the first human time,
and a new progeny descends from Heaven.’

Because of you I was a poet, because of you
a Christian, but to show you better
what I am drawing, I will reach out to color it.

The whole world was already pregnant
with the true faith, which had been sown
by the messengers from the eternal kingdom

and those words of yours that I have just quoted
harmonized so well with the new preachers
that my visits to them became a habit.

In time they came to seem so holy that
when Domitian persecuted them
they never wept without my own tears falling,

and for the rest of the time that I was there
I helped them, and their upright behavior
led me to hold all the other sects in scorn.

And before I had brought the Greeks to the rivers
of Thebes, in my poem, I had been
baptized, but fear kept me a secret Christian,

pretending for a long time to be a pagan,
and this tepidness kept me circling
on the fourth circle more than four centuries.

You then, who had raised the cover hiding
from me that great good of which I am speaking,
now on the way up, while we have time,

tell me, where is our ancient Terence, if
you know, and Caecilius, and Plautus and Varius?
Are they damned? And in what kind of place?”

“They, and Persius, and I, and many others,”
my leader answered, “are with that Greek to whom
the Muses gave more milk than to any other,

in the first circle of the blind prison.
Time and again we talk about the mountain
that has with it forever those who nursed us.

Euripedes and Antiphon are with us there,
Simonides and Agathon and many other
Greeks who once adorned their brows with laurel.

There one may see, of your own people,
Antigone, Deiphyle, and Argia,
and Ismene, with her old sorrow still.

She who pointed out Langia is seen there;
there is the daughter of Tiresias,
and Thetis, and Deidamia with her sisters.”

After that, both of the poets were still,
intent once more upon gazing around them,
free of the ascent and of the walls.

And by that time four of the handmaidens
of day remained behind, and the fifth one
at the chariot shaft drove upward its burning horn,

when my leader said, “I believe we must turn
our right shoulders toward the edge, and go on
the way we were going, around the mountain.”

What People are Saying About This

Harold Bloom

W.S. Merwin's Purgatorio is a wise and eloquent version of what seems to many of us the most welcoming part of the Commedia. Once again Merwin demonstrates that he is a courteous and generous troubadour whose poetic gift is copious and heartening.

Richard Howard

It is only justice that Merwin should translate this cantica dedicated to 'natural' powers, the most human narrative of Dante's enterprise, 'remade in the way that trees are new, made new again when their leaves are new.' It is the absolute of transience both poets are caught up in, a mortal communication which has entangled Merwin in that certain twist of idiom we recognize as the style of solicitude: affectionate, absorbent, ardent. What better preparation for the absolute of Paradise than these mortal lights that must yield to eternal?

Robert Pinsky

At last the Purgatorio can be read in English as a work of art. Art, including the art of poetry, is an important presence in this the central book of Dante's Commedia, and W.S. Merwin's gorgeous, accurate rendering is worthy of its great original.
— (Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States)

Foreword

In the years of my reading Dante, after the first overwhelming, reverberating spell of the Inferno, which I think never leaves one afterward, it was the Purgatorio that I had found myself returning to with a different, deepening attachment, until I reached a point when it was never far from me...Of the three sections of [The Divine Comedy], only Purgatory happens on the earth, as our lives do, with our feet on the ground, crossing a beach, climbing a mountain. All three parts of the poem are images of our lives, but there is an intimacy peculiar to the Purgatorio. Here the times of day recur with all the sensations and associations that the hours bring with them, the hours of the world we are living in as we read the poem.

Editorial Reviews

"Merwin has attained a transcendent and transformative elevation of beaming perception, exquisite balance, and clarifying beauty.”—Booklist

“But Merwin shows us that the discipline of attention, ‘a time of waiting / hoping to hear’, is enough. There are few great poets alive at any one time, and WS Merwin is one of them. Read him while he is still contemporary.” —Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

“In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page.” —Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Book

From the Publisher

Forty years of producing highly reliable renderings of French and Spanish poetry and drama have culminated in what is bound to be hailed as Merwin's grandest translational accomplishment. Following on the heels of last year's The River Sound and the verse-novel The Folding Cliffs comes this deft and smooth interpretation of Dante's "second kingdom in which the human spirit is made clean/ and becomes worthy to ascend to Heaven." It is only fitting that a poet so absorbed in environmental concerns engage this most earthen section of the Commedia, with its suffering characters and unkind landscape bringing into view sharpened images of ancient and medieval political, moral and erotic life. At the book's center, love's visionary force is revealed in the simplest declarative tone: "Neither Creator nor creature ever," Virgil instructs the wandering pilgrim, "was without love, my son, whether/ natural or of the mind, and you know this." Virgil's steady tutelage reaches its pinnacle in canto 22, where Statius quotes his messianic eclogue and Dante-as-poet absorbs lessons about writing poetry by overhearing their talk. Soon after his guide's dramatic departure, Dante's focus on nature gives way to the transcendent Beatrice. At its best, Merwin's characteristically open-ended syntax allows him to capture the charged encounter's troubling, if not terribly visceral, effects: "so I broke under that heavy burden,/ with tears and sighs out of me pouring,/ and my voice collapsed as it was leaving." This translation is something of a companion volume to Robert Pinsky's Inferno in the many ways it supercedes in elegance those of Singleton and Sinclair, which had been the last century's standards. (Apr.) FYI: Also in April, Copper Canyon will issue The First Four Books of Poems by Merwin, which includes his 1952 Yale Younger Poets volume, A Mask for Janus ($16 256p ISBN 1-55659-139-X). Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In an age that provides more and more opportunities to enjoy blockbuster thrills and to behold dazzlingly real-looking terrors, the fewer and fewer occasions we get to experience authentic human feelings anew are not to be wasted. Despite its shortcomings, Merwin's new Purgatorio is one such occasion, and we should be grateful for it.
—The New York Times Book Review

Daniel Mendelsohn