Floyd Collins: The Eternal Pearl 

Dante:  Paradiso, translated by David Rigsbee

Salmon Poetry, 2023, 225 pp.

Review by Floyd Collins

No less an authority than Samuel Johnson observed: “We must try its effect as an English poem; that is the way to judge the merit of a translation.” David Rigsbee’s version of Dante’s Paradiso, the third canticle that comprises the Florentine master’s immortal Commedia, captures memorably the dulce stil nuovo (“sweet new style”) adopted by thirteenth century Italian poets from the troubadours of Provence. Rigsbee comments: “It was cadences I was after, the embedded clauses and swirling recursiveness that English allows so well.” If Beatrice Portinari, Dante’s beloved, previously celebrated in his La Vita Nuova, serves as the poet’s celestial docent throughout the Paradiso, Rigsbee’s guide is none other than his daughter Makaiya, who points out to him that no other practitioner of the language arts has devoted himself exclusively to translating the Paradisointo English. Rigsbee ably approximates Dante’s obsession with numerology, those multiples of three, in which each stanzaic pattern resembles a bee’s waxwork mosaic charged with sweetness: 

The world’s lamp rises to mortals at different points, 

but where it joins four circles with three crosses 

it reaches a better course, moves in conjunction 

with a higher star and like this anneals and stamps 

the mundane wax more in its own image. 

Note the repetition of o and i sounds in the locutions “points” and “joins” intimating that the “world’s lamp” laps a precious oil that congeals to “mundane wax.” Nevertheless, this once molten stamp bears heaven’s imprint as a divine seal. 

            Throughout the Paradiso Rigsbee’s pilgrim looks to Beatrice, his angelic psychopomp, for both guidance and instruction: “Turn your mind to God in gratitude. // He has brought us to the first star.” Rigsbee’s lyric acumen continually aims for the diamond lusters that embody each facet of the sublime: “We seemed in a cloud as brilliant, hard, / polished, and dense as a sunlit diamond.” If the ensuing stanza seems more ethereal, the surfaces and textures of the language prove otherwise:

The eternal pearl received us

the way water takes light rays into itself

and yet remains indivisible.

The nacreous flavor of the adjective-noun combination “eternal pearl” amply demonstrates Rigsbee’s facility with words. He amplifies this effect by a commingling of aspirates— specifically w sounds in the phrase “the way water” and the repetition of hard a sounds with which he loads the second and third lines of the tercet quoted above. For Rigsbee, as with the great Italian poet of light, words betoken a dwelling in absence. Moreover, he explains in the introduction to his translation the dual nature of Dante’s Beatrice: “while Beatrice is clearly the ideal, she remains an historical woman.” Paradoxically, she must negotiate the hierarchies of grace for the Florentine poet as no pope or prelate will suffice:

If in love’s warmth my flame swells 

with a radiance never seen on earth 

beyond vision’s capacity to perceive 

don’t marvel; it comes from perfected 

vision that sees the good, and the more 

it sees, the more it is drawn there.

But Rigsbee’s Dante knows himself to be a creature of time and fate even if his adored Beatrice is not: “What / then of me, who by nature am made / for mutability, subject to every change?” Perhaps he fears the gates of Paradise will close and a trilling lark collect its keys and hang them in heaven. In short, his soul is not yet fit and seasoned for its passage to a higher sphere. Rigsbee proceeds to underscore his protagonist’s erudition, but does so by proxy of the Tuscan poet’s gracious lady. Beatrice lends utterance to these lines: 

Think of the Greeks’ great commander whose

Iphigenia wept for her beauty and made

wise and foolish cry alike when they heard

the wretched account of that dreadful rite. 

Rigsbee has recourse to both assonance and consonance in this passage. Note the alliterative cadences in the epithet “Greek’s great commander” alluding to Agamemnon, the feckless Mycenean king who brutally sacrificed his daughter to gain a fair wind for Troy. Here Rigsbee utilizes internal rhyme through the repetition of “whose” and “foolish” when referring to both the hapless victim and the general outrage at this heinous crime. He then comes down hard on the metrical register as he strikes a half-chime between “wise” and “rife.” Only a translator who also happens to be a highly skillful poet could achieve such telling felicities in a scant four lines. Euripides scratched into papyrus his tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, drawing on the matter of Troy that derives mainly from Homer’s Iliad and other epics attributed to the blind poet, such as the lost epic, Cypria. Dante’s Beatrice cites instead:

You have both Testaments, Old and New,

and you have the Shepherd as constant guide

this much will suffice for your salvation.

The “Shepherd” could be either the author of the Psalms or Christ who ushered in the new covenant modifying the sacred pact made on Mount Sinai. Interestingly enough, Rigsbee declines to gloss over the anti-Semitism so prevalent in the Middle Ages even when the speaker is Dante’s Beatrice:

If evil greed tempts you astray,

be men, not silly sheep, to whom the Jew

resident among you may snicker in derision.

One detects in the glottal c and k sounds of “snicker” a genteel albeit contemptuous snort. Thus, Rigsbee’s adroit diction conveys sotto voce the foibles of Dante’s medieval world. In his own Paradiso, John Ciardi renders the same lines thus: “lest the Jew among you / find cause to point his finger in derision.” For all its virtues, Ciardi’s version seems downright prosaic when compared to Rigsbee’s. Canto V of the Paradiso proves crucial with regard to the Commedia’s narrative trajectory because it marks the second transition to a higher realm:

And just as an arrow pierces its mark

before the bowstring has even come to rest

so did we shoot up into the second realm.

Rigsbee here strikes an intertextual resonance between the Dante’s Commedia and Homer’s Odyssey inasmuch the celestial bowstring recalls the humming gut of Odysseus’s great horn bow as the fatal dart is sped through the axehead sockets in the Greek hero’s megaron. In blink of an eye, the blood of the false suitors will stain the limestone walls of the vengeful Ithacan’s stronghold even as Dante and Beatrice ascend to new heights. Once more, the pitch and timber of Rigsbee’s lexicon enhances Dante’s original text beyond our expectations. 

            To contemporary readers the account of Beatrice and Dante’s ascent to ultimate perfection would seem a study in theological discourse, ecclesiastical debate, and church history if Rigsbee’s translation were less engaging at the level of language. During the last one hundred years, Christianity has become rooted in the cult of Dionysius, one in which the Redeemer ultimately comes by a dark way. This is the antithesis of the Florentine poet’s vision, in which the devout pilgrim ultimately aspires to inscription in the heaven of the fixed stars. In Canto IX Dante reaffirms his devotion to Beatrice:

“O blessed spirit,” I said, “requite

my wish and show me proof that you

can be the mirror of what I think.”

Here the vocative “O” acquires the dimensions of an oval-shaped reflecting surface more likely to be precious metal than glass. A veritable cavalcade of disaffected souls who achieved transcendence in the fullness of time appears therein: “I was called Cunizza, and I shine here / because this star’s light overcame me.” Her peregrine spirit invokes a belligerent forebear:

some time ago a warrior descended

and put the countryside to the torch.

Both he and I share the same root. 

If their common lineage lies deep in the blood of kings, Cunizza has renounced her looting and rapine for the serenity of spiritual rectitude: “She fell silent then and seemed / to turn away to other things.” As before, Rigsbee’s figurative language eclipses Ciardi’s:

That other joy, already known

to me as precious to her then came 

into my sight like a fine, sun-struck ruby.

            One gleans in Rigsbee’s version a ruby brimming blood. Among precious stones, it ranks just below the diamond and sapphire. Ciardi renders the simile thus: “like a fine ruby struck by the sun’s ray.” His trope lacks radiance when compared to Rigsbee’s; if the ruby is not a jewel of the first water, Ciardi’s stone appears to be an oddly stagnant surface. This isn’t so in Rigsbee’s rendition. His can be likened to a lapidary’s loupe or monocle that readily detects Dante’s desire for beatific refulgence. In translating the Paradiso Rigsbee has taken upon himself an exceedingly difficult task. Unlike Dante, Europeans and their New World descendants no longer live in a sphere of perfect Christian synthesis. In the Florentine poet’s day, the tripartite structure of the Commedia would have been immediately recognized as symbolic of the Holy Trinity. If that is longer assured, Rigsbee compels our interest by imposing his own graceful mode of versification on Dante’s Tuscan dialect. Yet in Canto XXII, his utterance evokes Beatrice’s candor when she enlightens Dante regarding their whereabouts:

Don’t you know you’re in heaven?

And don’t you know that all is holy here,

that every act here issues from pure zeal? 

In the ensuing Canto, Beatrice chides Dante, who fixes his gaze upon the loveliness of her countenance rather than more exalted visions:

Why so enamored of my face

that you do not turn to the beautiful garden

that blossoms under Christ’s radiance? 

The plosive b in “blossoms” belies the floral delicacy of this sacred plot. Doubtless, each petal is suffused with a light less temporal than the dawn’s. Ironically, in the locutions “face” and “radiance” Rigsbee resorts to a subtle end-rhyme that underscores Beatrice’s dual role as both muse and subliminal inamorata. Only Rigsbee’s considerable gifts as an original poet enable him to achieve such tonal felicities. Beatrice continues to both encourage and enlighten Dante: “There is the Rose in which the Word / became incarnate; there are the lilies / whose fragrance marks the good way.” Rigsbee savors the r and o sounds in the locutions “Rose” and “Word,” rolling them like ripe berries on the tongue. He is less concerned with the etymological roots of language than with the sensual pleasures of Dante’s text. Less orotund are the delicate labial l sounds in “lilies.” The lily’s six petals recall the multiples of three that Dante cleaves to throughout his Commedia. Traditionally, the flower adorns coffin lids but at Easter evokes the Holy Sepulcher hewn into limestone, burst white cerements, and the Resurrected Christ first-footing his way through the garden before the sun fires one opal in the dew. He relies on olfactory sensation to guide him out of the grave and into the new millennium. If Rigsbee’s translation endows Dante’s original with a lyric intensity lacking in other versions, this can be attributed in no small measure to his gift for original verse. Like W. S. Merwin and Seamus Heaney, he puts his own indelible stamp on Dante’s Italian vernacular. In Canto XXXI of the Paradiso, Beatrice resigns her dual role as Dante’s mortal and divine guide, consigning him to St. Bernard of Clarivaux’s tutelage. But the poet appears loath to acquiesce to the change: “I said at once, ‘Where is she?'” The saint replies that Dante’s beloved has been translated to a higher realm:

If you look up to the third circle,

highest degree, you will see her enthroned

where merit ordained she should be.

Here the Florentine lyricist invokes the lady who has reigned as his muse from boyhood to late middle age:

O Lady, in whom resides my hope, 

and who for my salvation was suffered 

to leave the imprint of her feet in hell, 

it is thanks to your excellence 

and power that I have recognized virtue 

and grace in all things that I have seen. 

Rigsbee opens with the vocative “O” and echoes this device with the o sound embedded in the locution “hope.” The “virtue” alluded to in fifth line quoted above speaks not only to Beatrice’s innate goodness but also awakens in the poet an awareness of the Greek “arete” or excellence. Thus, Dante’s most gracious lady allows him to attain a spiritual refinement that otherwise would have been beyond his capacity. Here Rigsbee reveals that his protagonist is nothing if not humbly aspiring. Even in Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso, when St. Bernard addresses the Blessed Virgin on Dante’s behalf, we see how the poet’s genuine muse remains the pubescent girl who inspired La Vita Nuova: “see how Beatrice and all the Blest, / with clasped hands, join my prayer.” The closing lines of the Paradiso return us to a realm at once sublime and hauntingly numinous:

At this point my high fantasy failed,

but now I could find myself turning like a wheel,

and I felt my desire and will impelled by that

Love that moves the sun and other stars. 

David Rigsbee has bequeathed to us a translation of Dante’s Paradiso destined to endure.

 

---

Copyright 2024 Floyd Collins

Floyd Collins is the author of Waking Past Midnight:  Selected Poems (2023), a collection of essays on contemporary poets, The Living Artifact (2021), and Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity 2003). His poetry and critical prose appear regularly with The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Kenyon Review.