38. Rhyme and reason: Dorothy L. Sayers, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement
This collection offers us 12 papers read by Dorothy Sayers to various academic and literary societies between 1946 and 1957: some reprinted from the Proceedings of the societies, and some here printed for the first time.
The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement makes good, I think, the distinction it proposes, but does not convince me that this distinction is very fruitful. Thus it leads us to an unexpected re-interpretation of the Idylls of the King. I tried it out by re-reading some of the best of them, and I thought it worked.
But the trouble is that it made no difference to the qualities I already liked and disliked in them. I continued to like and dislike them just as much as before and in just the same way – which leads me to doubt whether this distinction has really much to do with the reality of a poem as a poem.
Four of the essays are concerned in varying degrees with Dante, and of these the richest is that ‘On Translating the Divina Comedia’. I suppose we are not all agreed as to the two characteristics of Dorothy Sayers's own Dante. One, eminently laudable, is the apparatus. No doubt there are some errors: but as a whole it is a model of judicious popularisation which has already proved useful to thousands. Such work was never more needed than now and is in very short supply.
The other characteristic is more controversial. As a translator Dorothy Sayers is the arch-rebel against the Cary tradition. It had represented Dante as an earlier Milton. She discovered for herself Dante as the exciting story-teller, the writer of high comedy, even the writer of low farce.
Nor is there the least doubt that the very un-Miltonic qualities she saw in Dante are really there. The question is whether her reading of Dante did not exaggerate them or whether the colloquialism and comically violent rhythms by which she tried to represent them did not carry the exaggeration further.
A passage in the essay shows, I think, how she arrived at her practice and suggests a possible error. She is undoubtedly right in thinking that the passage on military music in Inferno xxii must be read as burlesque: its attachment to the Rabelaisian slapstick of avea del cul fatto trombetta makes this certain.
But can she be right when she finds in quando con trombe, e quando con campane the lilt of ‘Diddle-didle-dumpling, my son John’? The resemblance seems to me extremely faint. In so far as it exists at all it depends upon the fact that the English line is really two lines and that the Italian similarly breaks in two after trombe. But don't all Dante's lines so break when read by an Italian?
His verse has a caesura in the proper sense, as English has not – for to use that word of the syntactical pause which may come anywhere in our line and need not come at all is a confusion. We English tend to read Dante to the rune of our own decasyllable. It looks as if Dorothy Sayers did. As a result, lines which do not submit to that treatment (most will) stuck out for her as they do not for the Italian reader, and the effect she tries to reproduce by her metrical extravagance does not exist.
This does not of course dispose of her version. It goes to one extreme in trying to correct another. It will presently be corrected by some of its successors. Such is the history of translation.
Two of the most cogent essays are ‘The Work Tools of Learning’ and ‘The Teaching of Latin’, and it would be too much to hope that they will influence educational practice. The book everywhere exhibits the style and temper for which the author was both loved and hated. The essays are full of cheerful energy. The young people would call them ‘bonhomous’.
By a bonhomous writer they mean one who seems to like writing and what he writes of, and to assume that his readers will mostly be people he would like. I think that this last assumption is what infuriates them.