Reading Response Prompts
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These
prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and
to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond
to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather
explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however,
attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose
to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day,
you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each
of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.
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Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading 260-77; Dante Alighieri, Inferno Canto V in seven translations (Carlyle, Ciardi, Mandelbaum, Musa, Pinsky, Singleton, Sisson) |
Manguel clearly admires Rilke’s translation of Labé’s sonnets more than the originals. Do you agree? If you do, does Rilke then do Labé or the reader a disservice, as Samuel Johnson and George Steiner would argue? To whom does the translator owe the greater obligation: the poet or the reader? And which is the superior goal: to render the original into the new language with the greatest fidelity or with the greatest skill?
Dante’s terza rima form presents daunting difficulties to any translator attempting to bring his works into the English language. To put it simply, terza rima is a sustained rhyme scheme, and rhyming in Italian is much easier than rhyming in English. As a result, any translator has to make a fundamental decision about form. Does the translator attempt to reproduce the terza rima form, even though it will lead to either strange word choices, twisted syntax, or both? Does he or she switch to some other kind of verse form in order to preserve a sense of formality, even though verse forms are not interchangeable in their effects on the reader? Does he or she loosen the rules for terza rima in order to make the verse in English sound smoother and more natural? Or should a translator simply give up on the terza rima form and render Dante as prose? These seven versions of Canto V from Dante’s Inferno represent many different approaches to translation. Which choice or choices make the most sense to you?
Each of these translations can be said to have its strengths and weaknesses. Which you prefer depends upon your priorities. Make an argument that one of these is the best translation by defining your criterion for what makes a good translation and explaining how your choice fulfills it.
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