I'm glad
to be home from Eugene, Oregon, and back with my son and his momma. I had a
great time at the Dante in Translation conference. Every presentation was
interesting in its own way, and many of them were top notch. My thanks go out
to the Dante Society of America and the University of Oregon for putting on the
conference, to my friend Greg Parks for letting me crash on his couch all
weekend (what a stroke of luck that I have friends in Eugene!), and to my
parents for paying for the plane tickets as my birthday gift.
Before going, I was worried that a lot of people
at the conference would turn their noses up at me. After all, I am nobody to
them, and it is a bit audacious for some nobody to translate Dante into terza rima. However, I was
pleased to find my fears unfounded. Everyone I met at the conference was kind
and supportive, even enthusiastic. Thank you to Gina, Warren, Christian,
Simone, Ron, Antonio, and Albert for providing a warm and inviting environment;
I hope to meet many of you again at future events. Thank you to Mary Jo Bang
for a nice discussion about different perspectives on translation (our
approaches are vastly different, after all), and thank you to Sandow Birk for
autographing my copy of his Paradiso.
Thank you to everyone else I met for a number of good conversations about
Dante, literature, and history.
I think I'll end this post with a poem about
translation. I wrote it after seeing an image of Dante's death mask (a plaster
cast of his face made upon his death). Appropriately, it is in terza rima, and it is ten lines
long (which I like to think Dante would have approved of). To anyone who
happens to read this, please enjoy:
The Mask of
Dante
How vain,
to want to see the poet’s face
so long
after his death. As if I’d find
some
vestige of his wisdom, or some trace
of all his
words, some aspect of his mind
within his
face. What, even, would I ask
of these
sad eyes, this craggy nose, these lines
set in by
his life’s grief, if these lips cast
in stone
began to speak? The face, perhaps
like every
face, is nothing but a mask;
and
I try not to see, but wear, the mask.
J. Simon
Harris
Raleigh,
North Carolina