Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

THE Inferno, we are told, is the most frequently translated work of
European poetry. This is hardly surprising, but it begs the question of
why anyone should undertake to add to the mountain. All I can say is that the poem is fascinating, poignant, terrifying, beautiful and strange, and that in order to try to understand it better I have been working on a version of my own while hoping that readers might find it has something to add to the existing array of translations. What I have wanted to suggest is, firstly, the pungent, dank, abrasive physical immediacy of Hell, with its lakes, towers, graveyards, cliffs, ruins and insanely ingenious prison-castellations, its vast, minutely inventive programmes of torture, its swarming population of demons and damned souls. I have never read a version of the Inferno that was not interesting, but I have at times felt that the glare and heat of Hell have been diminished - an experience akin to watching an old print of a film. Perhaps this has something to do with ideas of fidelity which are more likely to preserve the poem than to reveal it. In attempting to write equivalents to terza rima there is an obvious danger that the poem will be sacrificed to the success of rhyme. The English thus produced may belong in a kind of translatorial limbo, unable to cross over into the realm of plausible usage. What is impassioned may become merely strenuous; what is particular and concrete may appear merely generic. One way of trying to avoid this is to work in blank verse, with its enormous flexibility, momentum, weight, pace and grandeur, and its congruence with the human voice. The choice of form is, of course, intended as a tribute to the original.