I woke this morning muddle-headed about dreams and trying to recall what grandiose scheme I had had about righting the world\u2019s wrongs. That didn\u2019t seem possible, so then I turned my mind, as one does, to the question of making a translation of that poem by St John of the Cross which begins \u2018En una noche oscura\u2019, and is usually, in English, given the title \u2018The Dark Night of the Soul\u2019.<\/p>\n
This is an important poem for me and I\u2019ve been thinking for some time that I could do with working out more exactly why I give so much importance to poetry. As a teenage person I took refuge from the bewilderment of life, and the difficult certainties of love, in books. There weren\u2019t that many books in the house (but there was a\u00a0Complete Works of Shakespeare,<\/em> so I read that), and there was an excellent library in Croydon. They allowed you to borrow a couple of books at a time, and there wasn\u2019t a rule to stop you going back the next day and taking away another two.<\/p>\n I used to return suitcases full of books and they were kind to me about the fines. So that way I read books that I heard about (War and Peace, <\/em>Victor Hugo, Kafka) and others that I found browsing the shelves (imagine the impact in the 1950s on a sixteen year old birdwatcher of\u00a0The Hawk in the Rain<\/em>).\u00a0The Faerie Queene Book 1<\/em>\u00a0was a set text, so I borrowed a Complete Spenser and read the rest of it. Same with the Prologue to Chaucer\u2019s\u00a0Canterbury Tales:<\/em> and his\u00a0Troilus and Criseyde<\/em>\u00a0led me to Henryson\u2019s\u00a0Testament of Cresseid,<\/em> and so on. And then a second hand bookshop opened down the hill from the school.<\/p>\n I think I must have been looking for epiphanies or some resounding Road to Damascus experience. Something that would explain with certainty what life was for.<\/p>\n As a small child I was much taken with the story of Samuel and the Voice that called to him in the night. How pleasant to be given that assurance. Of course there have been many \u2018mini satori\u2019 moments on the way, what Gaie Houston has called \u2018not a full-blown\u00a0aha<\/em>\u00a0experience, but a\u00a0squeak<\/em>, just the\u00a0ah<\/em>, perhaps, without the\u00a0ha<\/em>.\u2019 The tall bush in sunshine beside the footpath from the end of Court Wood Lane to Farleigh, covered in honeysuckle and surrounded by a cloud of white admiral butterflies: the redstarts flying up from the path by the hedge: Mr Etherington reading aloud the entire \u2018Rime of the Ancient Mariner\u2019: \u2018Western wind when wilt thou blow\/That the small rain down can rain\/Christ, that my love were in my arms\/And I in my bed again.\u2019 The realisation that the bird I could see at the top of the ash tree was a great grey shrike: the realisation that the word for the feeling I was experiencing is \u2018love\u2019: \u2018It fell upon a little western flower\/Before milk-white, now purple with love\u2019s wound.\u2019 Wordsworth\u2019s \u2018Tintern Abbey\u2019, Matt Arnold\u2019s \u2018Dover Beach\u2019, poems by Henry Vaughan, the birth of my brother, the births of my daughters.<\/p>\n And so on. I\u2019ve become aware that this writing might have become narcissistic (too much about me). So I\u2019m enlisting the help of another poet, Chrissy Williams.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Lost \u2013 Dante\u2019s Inferno, Canto 1 Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita At one point, midway on our path in life I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Halfway through the story of my life <\/p>\n Chrissy Williams<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Notes on this poem<\/strong><\/p>\n Acknowledgements to various translations of Dante\u2019s Inferno, Canto 1, lines 1-3, by Appelbaum, Cary, Carson, Kirkpatrick, Longfellow, Mandelbaum, Musa and Sisson.<\/p>\n I belong to a generation whose history lessons were marked by simple assertions, for example \u2018the Renaissance began after the fall of Constantinople\u2019 (1453). Amongst these was the notion that \u2018modern\u2019 literature began with Dante and Petrarch, who wrote in an Italian that we recognise today. So, the first three lines of the first epic poem of the Modern era. This has importance, it has status. It also has meaning (I\u2019ll get to that in a moment). What Chrissy does (first of all) in her twenty one lines is show us the possibility and the impossibility of translation. And poetry itself is a primary example of translation: the notions, impulses, of thought and feeling are translated into words that convey something of the original experience and hopefully add to it. Coleridge says somewhere that poetry is \u2018the best words in the best order\u2019, and another thing that this poem does is show this labour in progress \u2013 \u2018gloomy wood\u2019 \u2018dark wood\u2019 \u2018gloomy wood\u2019 \u2018dark forest\u2019 \u2018forest dark\u2019 \u2018dark wood\u2019. Who does not fear the shadows when lost in a darkening wood? And here\u2019s another thing, all the poets mentioned in the Note (an important part of the poem) at the poem\u2019s end, repeat the struggle for the \u2018best\u2019 words and their repeated efforts build into the poem a sense of refrain (important characteristic of poetry). It sings. \u2018Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song\u2019.<\/p>\n Rishi Dastidar uses the phrase \u2018think like a poet\u2019, and here we have a collection of poets, including Dante, showing us how. In English conversation we have the phrase \u2018mid-life crisis\u2019, often laughed off, but which can mean that the subject is stunned by a lack of purpose and understanding. \u2018La diritta via era smarrita\u2019. \u2018Blurred and lost\u2019, \u2018obscured\u2019,\u00a0 \u2018bewildered\u2019. Literally the lines in Italian that the poem \u2018translates\u2019 are \u2018about\u2019 a middle aged person who has lost their way in a wood. The added in meaning, admittedly based around the assumption that life is a journey with some purpose (which readers might dismiss), is that the narrator has sleep-walked into an entirely lost state of mind. The continuing poem tells how they find, with the help of guides, their way back into meaning.<\/p>\n But Chrissy\u2019s poem is only incidentally about the what happens next. It\u2019s primary concern is with the intensity of the moment when the narrator wakes up to being lost, the \u2018ritrovai\u2019. And Chrissy\u2019s genius is in the realisation that, by repeating the struggle for meaning that the various translations engage with, the reader\u2019s sense of what being lost is like is thoroughly awakened. Hence the repetition of the phrase \u2018I found\u2019. It is wonderfully paradoxical that three lines of poetry become three stanzas, and that the effect is to intensify the potency and importance of the three lines.<\/p>\n The first two stanzas deal with the first two lines, but each has a concluding couplet that elucidates the last two lines. Repetition is key here, the first stanza has \u2018life\u2019 five times, it\u2019s like a bell dinging the sense into the reader\u2019s head. Likewise \u2018found\u2019, four times in stanza two. The effectiveness of the poem is cumulative, the same words, or synonyms of them, are arranged and re-arranged. It\u2019s also noteworthy that the \u2018best words\u2019 , (\u2018dark\u2019 \u2018gloomy\u2019) are very ordinary \u2013 mirroring Dante\u2019s demotic speech. Dear poets, it is not necessary to sprinkle polysyllabic words of latin origin over your poetry.<\/p>\n I have become aware that my commentary on this poem is a parallel process. I\u2019m doing what the poem does, repeating thoughts and meanings, shifting about, searching for certainty, when the certainty is contained in the process. So I\u2019ll stop.<\/p>\n Understanding this poem is perhaps easier if you have been lost in a wood. Literally more difficult in a time when the woods are full of board walks and signposts to the Visitor Centre, but metaphorically easier in an age of acute anxieties.<\/p>\n Readers may like to know that I had something of a \u2018full blown aha\u2019 moment a couple of years back. A dear friend, Martin, has a church near their house where a portrait by Rembrandt lives. I was looking at this and thinking how the dead Christ looks to be a young man who has just been publicly tortured to death for his political beliefs. I had a strong sense (heard no voices) of \u2018ah so it\u2019s all true then\u2019. I\u2019ve not done anything with this moment yet as I\u2019m a rationalist with a strong commitment to an existential psychotherapy. But it does help me enjoy my excitement about Chrissy\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nlines 1-3<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nmi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
\nche la diritta via era smarrita.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nWhen I had journeyed half of our life\u2019s way
\nHalf way along the road we have to go
\nI came to in a gloomy wood
\nIn the midway of this our mortal life
\nMidway upon the journey of our life
\nMidway along the journey of our life
\nI came around and found myself now searching
\nThrough a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost<\/p>\n
\nI found I was in a dark forest
\nI found myself within a forest dark
\nI found myself obscured in a great forest
\nBewildered, and I knew I had lost the way<\/p>\n
\nI woke to find myself in a dark wood
\nGone from the path direct
\nFor I had wandered off from the straight path
\nFor I had lost the path that does not stray
\nMidway in our life\u2019s journey
\nThe straightforward pathway had been lost<\/p>\n