Saturday, August 4, 2012

The Inferno . . . With "Star Trek?"

So there's a new, modern translation of Dante's Inferno.  You can read the original article, as well as the author's comments here.  Written by Mary Jo Bang, it hopes to translate the vernacular Italian that Dante used in the 14th century into something that modern readers can understand.  To that end, she has replaced much of his original language with things like Star Trek, John Wayne Gacy and Eric Cartman.  This isn't really a translation anymore; it's akin to the mash-up of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and the spate of other classical mash-ups that we've seen in the past few years.  None of that is particularly bothersome to me--I enjoyed . . . and Zombies because the author, while taking his subject matter seriously, realized that the book itself wasn't that serious.  He did it for fun, and because people seemed to like it.

Reading Bang's account of her rationale for replacing another author's words for her own, she decides that the temporal and cultural distances between Dante and us have made it difficult or impossible to access his work.  But what she seems to fail to realize is that it's okay if we don't immediately access his work.  That's fine.  We use his images still, but in ways that are wholly original to our time and place.  I find her reasoning distressing, at best.  Even more, this is no longer a simple translation but a re-telling of the story that excises the rigor of the original and replaces it with something cheap and lazy.

But hey, the way things are going it'll probably be adopted as required reading in public high schools.

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