John Dixon button, if you don't know of him, well, I rather I should say, John Dixon,
Martin is somebody that you almost certainly won't know unless you've got the book of John Dixon button illustrations,
which I edited, which came out a few months ago.
These illustrations by John Dixon Button were made in the 1890s.
They were for a translation of the inferno by one George Musgrave.
They appeared in the translation when it was published in 1953,
a year after the death of John Dixon button, a year after the death of George Musgrove.
Since then, they've been hidden away, and the place where they been hidden is Lady Margaret Hall Oxford,
because they've been left to a Lady Margaret Hall by George Musgrove,
who had them had copyright of their own and had quite a large body of Dante material.
All of that down to material, including the drawings, will have to the college.
For some decades, the drawings were displayed in one of the corridors, which came to be called [INAUDIBLE] Passage.
The drawings were then taken down, but the name stayed and it still held passage.
They are very fine drawings, which do I'm certain deserve to be seen by a wider public.
When I say wider public, I really mean a public of any sort whatsoever, because the drawing simply sat in a poster of all the coloured,
which is where they were when I first came to this collection, then in a filing cabinet at the base, the base of the library.
So they are unknown. They should not be note.
I think you will appreciate if you go and take a look, which I do hope you will do.
If you haven't done so already and with that little bit of blurb for John Dickson button,
I'll pass over to Nick, who will conduct the poetry proceedings.
All right, I'm as Nick, hopefully,
and I'm the co-editor with Bernard O'Donoghue of the next books that we're launching here on weekend and from which we are going to be reading
and you'll see me bobbing up and down every now and then to introduce the the different readers and the different four of them on video,
actually as well. And first of all, then before I give a bit of an introduction to the book,
I'd like to just give space for publisher Angela Jarman of ARC Publications to say a few words about the project.
Thank you, Nick. I'm absolutely delighted to be here.
This is a very special occasion for Arc.
It's the first time we will have come into contact with any of you and we've been working on the book for, well, we've we published it in in July.
But before that, we worked very intensely on it for about three months.
We first heard about this project about three years ago when our translations editor, Jeanne Post-fire,
told us that she'd had a very interesting proposal from Nick to publish a new translation of packet
audio edited by him and Bernadette Donohue to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante's Death.
And we thought it was interesting, but it never really came.
We didn't come face to face with it until earlier this year, and then we realised that this was a very special project.
It was something that it was really a new venture for.
It was a much more academic book than usual poetry books.
We publish a lot of poetry in translation. But here was a completely different sort of translation with, I think, 16 translators,
all Anglophone poets, but bringing a very different feel to the whole volume.
There was an awful lot to do as I was. It was a complicated layout.
It was a very detailed manuscript and we had to decide how to lay it out to make sense.
And there was an awful lot of what to read and we were rather daunted, but we buckled down.
But I have to say we couldn't have done anything without Nick.
He was absolutely pivotal in the project. He was first stopped.
He presented us with a very clean manuscript. I imagined that he had been working very hard with all the translators for months, if not years.
But, you know, we had this beautifully clean manuscript as we laid it out.
And as you know, various queries arose.
We got in touch with Nick, and he always replied promptly.
And then the proofreading, I learnt huge amounts.
I didn't. I have to confess, I knew nothing really about Dante and I really enjoyed the proofreading.
But it took I was the best part of two weeks. It was a mammoth job.
But you know, this is although this is one of the most complicated projects we've undertaken.
It really is one of the books that we're most proud to have published.
And, you know, today brings everything together, and it's wonderful to meet many of the people who made the book what it is.
So thank you very much. Thank you very much for the four, for the kind words, Angela.
And it was a pleasure to work with you as I should be seeing a debut gracious deed,
which is as how some scribes and the copying of manuscripts of the media.
I mean, it could spend all of my allotted five minutes on giving thanks.
And first of all, to the publishers,
the publishers Angela and Tony Award for accepting and producing the volume in such an elegant style to also Angela,
as mentioned, the editor of the series. Professor Jean Post-fire of UEA.
She agreed to support the project on the very day we submitted the proposal and continued
to deal just as promptly with any ongoing questions and for debt for today's arrangements.
More things more immediately for today's arrangement.
We're hugely grateful fall to l'image for hosting us to my friend and colleague Peter Haynsworth,
who is also a contributor to the Volume two of the expert organising team of Helena
Beveridge and Aaron Woodley to torch the Oxford Research Centre in the humanities
for publicity about these Don't--you Festival events and to the Oxford Dante
Society and Richard Cooper for generously funding the drinks that will follow.
Going much back, much further in time to the genesis of this project as poets in purgatory.
A project to present Dante through different poetic voices has evolved over the opening decades of this millennium.
It was perhaps first inspired by those 2001 Southbank readings of Cantu's from the inferno,
in which three of our present contributors indeed took part.
One of these contributors, another very good friend and colleague, Bernard O'Donohue,
became closely involved at the start and has nurtured the whole project not only at a sequence of reassuring editorial lunches,
but also crucially by recruiting many of the crew of this lovely chill del ingenue.
And it's that crew, the contributing poets who deserve huge thanks for bringing us now into the harbour.
Six of them here in the front row, you will hear reading in person today.
Others have contributed by video. One of them, sadly, is not present in either form, but his work will be here.
The poet and scholar Michael O'Neill began his contributions to poets in purgatory as early as 2008,
and following his death in 2019, we decided to dedicate the whole volume Legato Contemporary, as Dante puts it, to his memory.
We'll be hearing some of his work later on, the poets have rendered this purgatory with a rich diversity,
as Angela's pointed out, rich diversity of Anglophone voices, speaking from a variety of cultures and in a range of forms,
from blank verse to varieties of taps Auriemma, as well as this complete translation in the book.
We also included as a prelude a group of poems that reflect upon this, this second part of Dante's Cambodia,
and as a postscript, we have included in the book translations of some lyrics by Dante, his predecessors and contemporaries.
We're now going to sample some of this diversity, beginning with that prelude of poems called about purgatory.
And the first of these is on video, and it's reading by the of a poem by the New Zealand poet Jan Kemp.
At the beginning of this poem, I quote two lines from Dante Algerie.
I turned to the right and considered the other poem and saw four stars never seen except by the first people.
The last word in the poem is the Maori word for love.
Wrote. Crooks Australis tape pactio out to hit the Southern Cross.
He never saw this coming out of four stars. He knew they existed.
Hot map of home our palm. Hemisphere where we know where we are upside down near the pole.
Somehow, he knew Eaton is here, and we hand on the sunrise from Mount Karani, a flaming cabinet.
And stunted Pilgrim could have climbed up out of the shaft, plumper Jerusalem to stand ankle deep in the Pacific.
On a show near the kerb, medicks awestruck at seeing his cardinal virtues in cannot wait on the milk, Niasse and Taurus.
Justice, Prudence, Temperance and fortitude rocks the gods had flung out of the back yard, making space to plant the herbs of faith, hope and aroha.
Two items. First, his own poem, Interim Auto, and then Michael O'Neill's poem detained Jamie.
This is an image, the poem is from way back about 20 years ago, I wrote.
It takes an image from purgatory. Nicole Bernard would know maybe 20 or 21.
Dante uses this word. Harimoto corresponds to tremor or in contemporary Italian terremoto an earthquake.
So it just the playing of that ultra motor inside the mountain earth begins to
move its joints and spring the links that pegged it down the funds of chests.
The tchotchkes and wedges of feldspar and chirps a daylight's owl screws back from rock that's spilling derelicts her nest,
then quiet plugs the air, a twist of wax behind the quiet.
A code of silence hums until Earth moves again, this time in earnest, dumb,
mutters so dumb mutters rigid tongue delirium run at the verge of the crack,
the gapes at the heart of things that widens the normal watchtower from its sunken gateway to the parapet as the tide and coils.
This means in purgatory, a soul pinned to the rock has broken free.
More of that. Nick mentioned the dedication to my brother in law from Michael O'Neill and my sister poses a bit of a note about that too.
Like to read from the beginning of Michael's writing life in his critical work as well as in his poems.
He was a constant figure of reference and renewal.
So he was very pleased to be included in after Dante and would, I'm sure, have been delighted by the book's dedication to him.
I'll read Michael's poem. I mean, personally, myself, Michael and Nancy, there's a sense that anyway, detained.
Day after day, the sky, a tempered blue that's hardly changed in Hue.
You start trying to grasp the purgatory of the envious with islets sown.
The late I was forgiven, but not quite forgotten. The slothful racing ahead soon out of sight.
The discourse and the glimmering of heaven. All these to change you from the summer's slow, accelerating slide towards oblivion.
The swimmers and the water's undertow. The punches and the tough resolves in tatters.
The minor torments dealt by mid-June. Mosquito and too much sun inertia over great matters.
The rubbing sandal and the brand new blister.
The hint of violence after silence shatters the litany intoned each night of other, if also flawed, accounts being you raised the more content to be.
There were no rain nor hail, no snow, no Jew could fall and where thoughts grew into a dream whose substance has not vanished,
as if belief survived, as if in fact it flourished.
It's. Thanks, Jamie.
And I do remember Michael mentioning when he first took on this translation task that it would be a good holiday
project and there were sort of echoes of of holiday experiences in that the next our next reader is Bernard Mike,
revered co-editor Bonuses Donohue, who is going to read We're now onto Cantu's from the Purgatory.
And Bernard is going to read to part of Cantu to the second half of Canto two, in which Dante meets Casa de La.
Well, but I have to say initially is very obvious, which is that I'm hugely grateful to Nick for overstating so much my involvement.
I mean, I was a I was a strongly encouraging presence and some of the meetings beforehand, but the work is all Nick's really into.
It's been wonderful being in his hands and we're extremely grateful to our for doing such amazingly beautiful job with the book.
And it's it's staggering, really. So, so that's the things, but my version is very it's very plain style.
In fact, it could be called blank versus some a blank canvas, I think.
And it's at the furthest removed from following the formalities of the original letter streamer and anything else, really.
And the second, well, you know, and sure.
But the second part of Canto two is and Dante and Virgil have fun and still in the hands of kids who have moved on,
and they see the people being brought in the newcomers to focus audio and by the angel and the the newcomers are surprised to see Dante in particular.
Of course, the spirits who are spotted by my briefing that I was still alive for so astonished that they all turned pale
and just the way a crowd will gather to hear the latest news from a messenger carrying the olive branch.
And no one cares if they're trampling each other.
So these spirits blessed, though they all were jostled for a good view of my face, distracted from their path towards perfection.
Then I saw one of them push right to the front to hug me with such particular affection that he inspired me to do the same to him.
Shadows with substance only on the surface, three times my arms closed up behind him and passed straight through him back onto my chest.
I flushed embarrassed, I suppose. And then this shadow pulled backwards with a smile and a following unsupported nearly fell over.
Gently, he told me, I must take it easy. And then I knew who it was.
I begged him to pause a while there and to talk to me. He answered me just as I like you as a living body freed of it.
I like you still. So yes, I would pose with you.
Where are you going? Dear Kassala, when I've made this journey, I'll be returning back to where I live.
But what have you been robbed of so much time?
He said to me, no, no injustice has been done me, if the angel who picks when and whom he pleases has chosen many times to leave me here.
His action executes the will of justice for three months.
It is true he's taken out without a protest, whoever wants to go.
I was facing the shore of the Tiber as Wilshire meets the sea and so turns salty when I was with mercy gathered in by him.
He's flown just no directly to that harbour because that is where they all first assemble those who are not condemned to sink to [INAUDIBLE].
I said to him, if this new disposition of things has not destroyed your memory or your gifts,
which used to satisfy every desire I had, please will you?
Comforts my poor soul with music. It's totally worn out with coming here encumbered still with my whole earthly body.
Love speaking with great yearning in my mind. He started then to sing so very sweetly that the memory of it still echoes deep within me.
My God, I hate myself and all the people with us were so enchanted by us that the minds of all of us had room for nothing else.
We were all taken up with concentration on his singing and Kato and flexibly upright shouted, What are you doing all your idol songs?
What is all this negligence and hanging around? Hurry to the mountain to clean off the field stops you seeing the divine.
And just like when doves packing a free to ropes, it's utterly absorbed with the rich pasturing calm without the usual flashiness.
If something comes along that frightens them with a sudden rush to take off from their eating, distracted know by a more pressing concern.
Likewise, I saw this new assembly leave the singing and turn towards the hillside like people scattering off in all directions,
and Virgil and I were as fast as anyone.
My last observation to say that I replaced my translation of the title of meant it with this line from his translation,
which comes at the end of the book. Thank you. Very. That's next, but I think it was lying from a walking element to me, Nigeria is better, right?
Our next contribution is via video, and it's Alicia Sterling's poet and translator who lives in Greece, but is has connexions with LNH.
She translated for us both Cantu's three and 29, and her reading is going to be of the the second half of Canto three,
where Dante encounters Manfred in the amongst the elite, the souls of the late repentant in A. Purgatory.
Count to three is Elisha Sterling's. I'm going to read a section from camp to three.
My name is Alisha Stallings and Virgil and Dante.
I've met a crowd of souls oh, chosen souls whose ends were good, said Virgil.
By that piece sublime that waits you, as I've understood. Tell us the way.
How can we climb? Where is the mountain slope less steep?
Who learns more or less abides last time? And just as from the fold come cheap?
First one and two, then three, the flock stand meek and faces Earth, where keep and if one walks, the rest will walk.
And when he stops huddled in place, meek, mild, not knowing why they bark.
And so a few with modest face bellwethers of that happy crew approached us at a solemn pace when those
in front could see eyes through a shadow rightward in its aim to the cliff and rent the lights in to.
They hesitated as they came and shrank back somewhat and the rest not knowing why did just the same.
No need to ask for, as you've guessed, a human body cleaves the light upon the ground, Virgil confessed.
Trust me. Don't wonder at the sight he would not seek to scale this wall where he, not backed by heavens, might then turn around.
We heard them call to us that where the caravan waving is back and lead us all
wherever you are once all began turned back to face me as you go and recognise me,
if you can. I turned and stared handsome, just so fair haired with noble aspect blessed but one eyebrow split with a blow.
Humbly, I could not attest to knowing him, and at my mild denial, he showed high on his breast, a wound I Manfred.
And he smiled, grandson of Empress Constance.
Please, when you go back, seek out my child, their ancestors of Sicily's and arrogance pride see that she knows the truth.
That when these injuries pierced my flesh with lethal blows, I gave myself to him and cried.
Who always willing mercy shows dire were my sins and yet so wide, infinite goodness and embrace that all who seek it fit inside.
On an island where I'm working, Jeremy McKendrick, I'm afraid quite hard today.
And he's going to read now his own translation of the first the opening of count to eight.
Jamie. Thanks, Nick.
It was already the hour at which seafarers turned tenderly towards the vanished shore and the two friends who paid them farewell.
They are the novice pilgrim Thiel's heart stricken to hear far off the rolling clang of bells that seem to mourn the day's decline.
When my ears began to close the portals as I stared at one of the souls who had risen to call for quiet had something to tell.
He joined together and lifted both his palms, but his eyes were on the east as if to say Why should I care for any lights but yours?
So devotedly and with such sweet notes, did take Lucas Sun rise from his throat that I lost all sense of self and my senses reeled well.
The others are sweetly and devotedly accompanied that soul through every verse, keeping their eyes fixed on the wailing stones.
Now read to sharpen your gaze for here. True truths covering as thin as goals, so to pass beyond will ask for little force.
I saw that silent one and August company stunned fixing their eyes upon the sky,
poised between hope and expectancy, and I saw two angels swooping downwards.
Each brandished, so each brandished a flaming sword.
Its end blunted. Instead of being pointed.
The regiments, the green of bright new leaves fanned by the wind of their green wings, rippled and fluted and falls behind their flights.
One of the pair lights it just above us, the other opposite so that effectively all the souls between them were protected.
The blonde hair could be clearly seen, but the eye recoiled from the countenance, confused by all the radiance from the Virgin's lamp.
They've made their descent, so, Delos said to guard this valley from the serpent, who's a rival's eminence, that's not knowing when it would appear.
I looked around and chills with fear. Huddled close beside my trusted guide then said Sodano, let don't.
Let's go down to the valley to speak with the great souls who will surely welcome you both with great acclaim.
Q. Next week to Angela Layton translated Cantu's nine to 11 the three countries in the collection.
So she did. She's also translated. She has translated 09:59 closely, but she preferred and I liked the idea of including this point.
Her poem, which actually appears in the Prelude, is a poem about purgatory, which is entitled to Dante on reflection.
Canto 10 Purgatory. Angela. Thank you.
I'm going to do what Jeremy did and just put some water.
All right. This is the counter you'll remember in which Dante is oddly distracted and waylaid
by beautiful artworks that he sees in the purgatory and particularly by a marble,
the leaf of the Annunciation. So in this poem, which starts off being a fairly close translation,
but then moves away and becomes a kind of commentary, I'm trying to keep to the rhythm of the original.
That's the four beats to a line. But I, unlike Alicia's wonderful suprema, I let lime just happen when it can.
I think I'm trying to bring out something modern in Dante here, and it's that weird surrealism in the landscape,
as well as the element of comedy in the poem, but perhaps to a kind of sense of questioning that goes a little bit against the theological grade.
Dante on reflection. So this is the way to go, however you summarise the sin, calibrate the soul to follow a road to the ends of the world.
That's door clang shut. Was I out or in?
Over my shoulder, you to see lapsed lot's wife was salted to an upright stack,
but he and I pressed on through to a [INAUDIBLE] stonewalled yet finding some permissive path that pitched and rolled under our feet.
My dear poet warned me, Now use your art.
Just dance. Balance, dare to dream.
How a passage might carry you through and out.
It was madness. I knew sheer lunacy to think we could find our way in the waning moonlight.
Squeeze our shapes through the eye of a needle to clear this world and discover another.
But we did somehow emerging elsewhere on a plane, a blank, a flatness,
so sheer we stepped out blindly trying to find our feet designed by a ground that stretched to nowhere.
Lonely as [INAUDIBLE], Byron, as a waste.
And though it seemed endless measure less to man yet a mountain rose and near where we sat and edge gave suddenly onto nothingness.
I searched the fathomless scene all round trying to map that country of the mind, its wild carousel of heights and depths.
And that was when I saw suddenly quite close to a cliff of White rising beside me.
Impossible. It seemed a marble sheet, but beautifully finely carved in relief.
Finer than porcelain. Sharper than light than icicles.
Shaped by nature overnight. And I traced an angel with the grace of a man announcing all hail wings rippled with flight.
The words in my ears from the hollow of his mouth matched my deepest heart's desire, as if the scaffold marble sliced sounds out of air.
Was it memories? Knife and a palombi?
No whiteness met like breathlessness. My outstretched hand.
I could dream caress each dumbfounded sense.
In deaths, heartland of pain and penitence, we're sweating wounded souls, staggered up the helix track sorry.
Flesh bound states bound for the summit to be freed from themselves.
I paused to follow the Stones allure.
It's speaking lines flickering, a cry ancient, a story rehearsed every day and wishing littered these faithful prayers.
And then I remembered my own heart. My own art's still horde of echoes gathered from ages before.
The river from which, no, so the. Three times that she'd fled fugitive as dream, my sweet poet nudged me.
It was time to go, but I ducked, delayed, slunk round to stay.
Gazing at that Angel's momentous invitation to sing death's 9-1-1 to a child while pierced with foresight.
Any mother denies she knelt to answer with heart broken eyes.
So something truer than right or wrong.
The measured use and heavenly rewards gave me pause and held me dreaming where that marble effigy gently to the cliff face.
How no arts, no how it's low skill to feel.
Where else but elsewhere, the Dream's own place?
I searched since calculus to discover what's grace?
Thank you for this wonderful parallel dream story. We now have two contributions on readings on video.
The first of these is from the former poet laureate of Jamaica, Lorna Goodison.
I first encountered Lorna at that Southbank reading of counters from Inferno in in 2001,
when she gave a terrific rendering of what she called Mr. Brown.
That was a brunette or Latina and an infant of 15.
And I was when we got this project going, I was really determined to try to get her, get her to contribute.
And so she did very, very generously, and she has.
She has translated Canto 12, which is one of the Cantu's It on the circle of Pride.
And this is one that I can't do that begins with all those examples of overweening pride,
and you'll see that that no longer exists and gives this kind of inflexion of both Jamaican and in this one instance, West African culture.
Go to purgatory you. Evelyn will collect bullet holes of the same size.
The poor soul and me step in step side by side for as long as my good teacher allowed it.
But when he said forward up himself and leave him for like men who set out for the keys, each was received by paddling their own canoe.
I raise up myself and stand up to my full height so that I could walk tall, dignified and upright, although my thoughts still did bend down low.
I moved on and was following most obedient in my master's footsteps.
We were already picking up pace when he checked me, said lawyer GIS.
In order to see a way clear, you need to set up what is on his walk, where where you are lifting up and putting down your feet.
Just as holding in some church floors, tombs are inlaid underfoot,
so the details of a life lived are engraved never to be forgotten, always preserved.
So a memorial to the departed remains the gaze on when their dear ones go there.
A picture brings tears on when the tender hearted appears by memory to one side.
I saw a depiction of that same one he created more handsome than his terrible matinee idol, reeling down like lightning from the skies.
On the other side, I saw Iris, who scammed us struck by lightning bolt and lying down their comatose cramp and called upon to ground.
I saw those timbers pile on Mars, gone men all bearing arms, gazing at the scattered body parts of their father, Joe and other big time gangsters.
Nimrod I saw demented under his mighty works, confused and dazed, looking in vain to his followers,
spangled in bling and glitter in the land of Shiner O'Neil being.
I see your eyes running with cold water that is OCO representing on that pathway betwixt seven and seven dead.
Pick me on what a subject for LA meant your working soul stopped by your own sword on top of Mount Gabor,
where need of rain or dew water will hear after fall or tricky?
Far and Nancy is just so I see Oh there so half a spade are full of grief.
Unfriended on the threads of your mischief works spun on the web or airborne?
No, you can no longer be a menace to us with your hard face. Fuzzy, a chariot racing to come hollow where overbearing statue.
Unseen to hundreds, stony path was the ultimate highest price as he made his own mother pay after she betrayed his father for jewellery.
I'm there also, I beheld a sequence of Senator Kerry being shot up in the temple by the young assassins.
You trained and exited and left him for dead. Is sure the troubles, the endless cycle of violence, strife and riots.
Yes, that must set off when she open up her mouth and brag to my Sirius always bologna want.
Will his blood I will follow up of. It should only a Syrian run like Bolt from the road after Hala Furnace death.
And in the graphic images, we saw the corpse of the slaughter don himself.
I saw Troy the city. Once green, it fell to ashes ruins or ill clad man.
How you were pictured in those scenes reduced, reduced, reduced.
What skilled master artist did Light and Shakya rescue all those features, or was it made them appear so impressive?
The bona fide art lovers take it as a table with their dead for.
The one supposed to be alive?
Look at me on you any I to those events as they could not see any more than me when I beheld the scenes upon the pavement.
So exalted itself. On we sure did. Yes, your children of Eve don't bother to even look under your feet.
Next thing you will go and see the evil path you are treading.
So by now, we pass further around the mountain, leaving more of the Sun behind, and I certainly was not paying much mine.
I've been taking notice of when he, who always walked in front on the lookout, gave a heads up, do not be looking idly about.
This is how you must proceed as forward. Be attentive. CNN is not preparing to come this way.
We hold on a six had made of the day is coming back from service, all due respect.
Get your radio, set yourself right.
So the sheriff will consent to bear our guide as we take of what path all this stuff this day will never dawn again.
Second, second and last video contribution is from a very experienced translator of Dante, Steve Ellis,
who recently completed having complete, having translated and fellow in 1994, then has now completed the whole of the local media.
And he allowed us to reproduce four of his Cantu's in the in the book, and here he is reading the account of the envious Canto 14,
the Kanta, which explores the relations between the nobility in Tuscany and in the Romania.
Who is it? Rounding on Mt. Hood before death has followed him up?
Who could open and shut his eyes? I have no idea, but he's not alone.
You're dearer to them, you ask, but do it nicely, so [INAUDIBLE] speak.
So two schools we're talking of be led to each other on my right.
They're raising their faces to speak. One said, Oh, so bound for heaven, but still growing fixed in your flesh for charity sake.
Please tell us who you are. Well, from your state of grace, a measles as a thing never heard of must die through middle Tuscany,
a stream of coils from a felter order a 100 plus miles in length from beside it.
I bring this body. There's no point saying my name, since so far it's not much known.
If I could flesh out your meaning by my understanding, he replies, it's the avenue you're referring to.
The other asks, why did he hide the name of that river like a man concealing something horrible?
Well, the soul who is us, this replies, I don't know.
It's good, though this valley is blotted out because from its head in part, that's densest of the mountain chain.
The Pelorus was broken off from to where it finally gets to restore what the sky absorbs from the sea, from where each river has slowed.
Virtue is seen as an enemy fled by all like a snake by some curse of the place or
by bad practise that nature's have so changed the people of that woeful valley.
It's as if they have Cersei as pastor. Amongst filthy pigs, whose feeding should be acorn's no human food.
It begins its miserable be and is coming down, it meets Kurz next full of snarling, empty of power that turns its melts away and scorn.
It rolls on down. And as it swells that accursed luckless ditch, he finds all the dogs become wolves.
And then, all through its deep gorges, he meets such a set of crafty foxes they don't fear any trap being set.
I don't care that others hear me that good for this man, if he notes what's true spirit discloses to me.
I see your grandson now, Hunter of those wolves terrorising the old, the Bank of the Bloody River.
He sells their flesh as it still lives. The butchers of like old meat, a non-league life and his old order in blood he exits.
Dahlia Wood left so that in a thousand years, it will never received the same.
Like people hearing awful news show woeful faces as they listen wherever the threats come from.
So I saw the other so attentive getting disturbed and distressed as he grasped what was spoken, the words of Ward.
The others look made me eager for their name, so I asked, pleading with them.
The one who first spoke to me began. You want me to behave to you as you wouldn't do to me.
But since God wants to use you as such a showcase for his grace?
I agree. So I was Guido Del Duca, my blood bird.
So with envy that if I saw anyone's happiness, you'd see my face getting vivid.
I reaped straw from such seed here. O Human Race setting your heart where brotherhood is excluded.
This is really a prise of honour of the House of Kalgoorlie.
But now no one is the heir of Hezbollah.
And not only is his blood shorn of the good graces of living from shore to shore, from the pole to the mountains, it's a wasteland of poisonous twigs.
So too late, which is no for any garden to grow, whereas good lead seal Harry may now deeper Trevor Saddle Guido de Kapena.
Oh, Robert AC. All degenerates now in Bologna was fabulous line well buried in the false skills in finance, a noble offshoot of a modest step.
Don't be amazed. Tuscany If I cry recalling men like Guido de Peralta or Galeano, that's one of ours.
Federico Tinu also in his circle. The Trevor Sarda, another Staggie family, both of them with no successors, knights,
ladies and all the deed sparked by our love and courtesy would now all hearts.
A brutish gold bertino or one vanish away since your family's one of many to die out to avoid contamination.
Tanya Cavallo does well not to breed and Bad Castro car or worse, you spalding.
Such a problem brood the Pagani should call a halt to after the devil dies, even though their reputation is gone for good, ogling the phantom limb.
You're OK, since no more are expected now to darken or to derail your line.
But go now, Tusken. All I desire is to weep rather than say more.
Our talk has made me so glum. We are now moving into the later contours of the poem and Michael O'Neill, the late Michael O'Neill,
to whom the volume is dedicated, translated count, who is 21 and 22, as well as part of Council of 28.
And I thought that we would not read it aloud, but I've just put it,
we've just put on screen a few lines from it, and we could just observe a brief silence while we look at them.
Thank you. And I should just point out also that that phrase the soul's free to change its chamber is also
the phrase that is attached to the dedication to Michael O'Neill at the beginning of 2000.
We now have another short message from another contributor, which will be displayed on the screen from Andrew Fitzsimons,
who is working in Japan and has a big new volume of haiku translations coming out.
And he translated three Cantu's 23 to 25.
And he quotes here from the beginning of count to 23.
We now move to two readers to round off the the cantos from the focus for you.
Gene Drake Hot, who is already a very distinguished translator of, amongst other things, the middle English poem Pearl has translated for us.
Cantu's 30 and 31, which, like Perlin, is another encounter a difficult encounter in a paradise garden.
And she's going to read a couple of passages from Cantu's 30 and 31.
Jane. So, yes, I couldn't have been more pleased.
Thank you, Nick and and Bernard, for the suggestion that I I might translate Qantas 30 and 31.
In a way, it has been something of a pilgrimage for me to the wellspring of, you know, visiting the wellspring of that,
of those passages I know so well from Paul written, you know, less than a century later.
So I'm going to read two passages one from each can to brief brief passages,
which which for me felt particularly reminiscent of of of similar echoing moments in the Perl poem that there are two moments where
Dante stands still stilled and dazed by the by the beautiful and and and then reprimanding his scolding presence of Beatrice.
So it's a moment in Canto 30, I'll read when he first sees her, he first sees her again after what he describes as so long ago.
He sees in the visionary procession across the water. And then I'll read the opening of Canto 31,
in which Beatrice confronts Dante directly over over his having fallen so, so easily for earthly pleasures.
I have seen at the beginning of the day the eastern sky, a haze of rosy red,
while all the rest serene and cloudless lies and how the sun's face rising through the air is shadowy and veiled,
and how the mist allows the eye to rest and linger there.
So in the same way behind that cloud of flowers,
which blossomed from the angels hands and fell below them in the chariot and around the
figure of a woman appeared to me her dress like a life flame beneath her cloak of green,
her white veil wreathed in olive leaves.
And at that moment, although so much time had passed since when I last stood trembling in her presence, dazed and overcome,
even without looking at her now, my spirit felt the fire of that first love touched to the core by her hidden power.
And this is Beatrice really winding up now.
This is the beginning of of Canto 31, without a trace of hesitation on her lips.
Beatrice continued turning the sword edge of her speech full force towards its tip.
Let us hear your thoughts from there across the river. Tell the truth.
Gain pardon facing such a charge. You must confess.
I stood confused. All force drained out.
I strained to speak. My words were spent before they left my throat.
She waited just a moment, then asked, So is it not the case?
The water hasn't yet erased your darkest memories from you.
Fear and panic together drove my faint reply.
A yes, so quiet on my lips as to be audible only with the eyes.
The it's appropriate that we end the Cantu's, including also a couple of lyrics to the very short lyrics at the very end,
but we're ending the sequence of Cantos with Patrick with Snoop's translation of Canto 33 into full text rema.
And it's very it's very pleasing to to report that that that Cantu was described as admirable in the TLS just recently.
Patrick. Well, good evening and thank you for being here.
We're running a bit short of time, so I will try to restrict my introductory remarks the minimum, as Nick said.
I've attempted to to do this canter into tetes arena,
and I think Dante devised this rhyme scheme to try to make the narrative sort of addictive to the reader.
You just have to read on. Well, I found it addictive as a translator.
And I initially intended just to do a few test sets and then maybe I can talk to.
And I ended up three cantos short of the end of Paradiso in this closing section to the purgatory.
Most of the canto is taken up by a diatribe by a 3K in which he expands an ominous pageant which is taking place in the previous canto.
And this is followed by a diatribe not the first in the comedy and not the last
either against the corruption of the church and predicts divine vengeance to come.
Having finished that, she then instructs Matilda, who is for want of a better word,
a salt nymph who lives in the earthly paradise and who is referred to as the lovely woman in Dante's
text instructs Matilda to take Dante and the soul of stations of 1st century A.D. Roman Poet,
who has managed to wangle himself a place in in purgatory to take them to the River U.A.E, which restores the memory of good actions.
We recall that both Dante and stations had previously been in the River Lisa, which wipes out the memory of sin.
I think there are times when some of us could do with rivers like that anyway, with slower steps and with a brighter sheen.
The Sun was hugging the meridian ring, which varies by the point from which it's seen when as an escort who's accompanying a
group walking before them often will stop if he finds a trace of some strange thing.
Just so the seven women has stopped still near thin shade like mountains cast under trees, green leaves and black flowers on an icy rill.
In front, I thought I saw the Euphrates and Tigris issue from one origin, then flow off like friends parting ill at ease.
You light and glory of all people in the world. What are these waterways that well up here then split from where they both begin?
The answer to my question was to tell you that request, Matilda to reply.
As though she had some censure to dispel, the lovely woman said he has had my account of this and much else.
I have no doubt at least his water did not veil his eye.
Three said perhaps thinking about more pressing things which are well known for slowing the memory blocked his mental vision at.
But see, you know, over there, it's flowing, lead him to it.
And then, as is your use contrived to get his failing powers going?
Like noble souls, which offer no excuse, but take their plan from what another planned as soon as outward signs of set it loose.
The moment she had taken me in hand, the lovely woman moved and said to stations come with him in a womanly command.
Rita, if my manuscript were more capacious to write on, I describe, if not in full, that an actress draught that left me still voracious.
But as it is, this second Canticle has run through all the pages designated.
Arts bridle then makes that impossible. I made my way back feeling renovated from that most holy stream as new plants rise green
with new shoots and reinvigorated pure and prepared to scale the star filled skies.
Thank you. Nearly run through all the pages designated now we're just going to close with a couple of lyrics from the postscript to the volume.
This contains lyrics by predecessors and contemporaries of Dante, and the first of these is someone whom Dante regarded as the great predecessor.
The Occitan poet Ana Daniel and Peter is going to read his one of new Danielle's poems, the poems by Emilio Top.
I love Danielle. We should play the done too much admired and imitated, and one of the things he imitated was the 16A by out and out, Danielle.
We say Stinger is a form the torn out Danielle invented.
He wrote one of the second 16A ever to have been written was written by Dante, and it was following the model of Arnold 16A.
If you don't know what it says, Steiner is very, very quickly assessed.
Is a poem of 36 lines.
Basically, it's got six stanzas and instead of rhymes, it has at the end of each line a particular word which is then repeated throughout the poem.
So there is six words splitting the six lines of the poem, which come in the order let's say a b c d e f stanza two.
You start at the end, so you go f line a line next to the end and next to the beginning neck third from the end.
So from the beginning? Right. So mute them in that way and then you start again in the next stanza.
By the time you get to the end of this, you've done all possible combinations of these six words.
The six words stay the same.
Then at the end, to conclude the whole business, you have three lines forming a kind of armoire in which all six words appear.
We reappear in three lines.
So it's a virtuoso saying you can see why Dante called or had charity called Arnold Daniel the Better Smiths or Fabra del Pas La Maternel,
which was a line that was taken up late T.S. Eliot, you may know, and they'll probably know it in the wasteland and applied to Ezra Pound.
So what Dante was enjoying, I think, was the virtuosity and well, I've tried.
I've kept the six six words the ones up there throughout the poem.
I've faced some more difficulties, though they're not about Daniel, because he had some words that had two meanings.
So the word that was soul is also improbable to sell arms.
That is, to put arms on somebody to to wear armour.
So I somehow had to fiddle around with that. I will read out my version of this, which may have its strains.
But one of the strains, I should say is that in the original, and that is you will hear that certain moment.
The uncle, the designate coming a parent with the phrase the sister of the sister of my uncle, who will be his mother.
OK, this is this is a particular the forced way of doing it, which I think are done.
You enjoyed. I think Duncan Hunter enjoyed it too.
So here we are. Thirty nine lines all together and it's an erotic poem love poem.
Daniel was very much a blunt poem, a sensuous, sensuous, sensual approach.
Dante uses this form in his own most sensual love poems known Beatriz, but number three poems poems about a stony woman on the PetroSA.
Anyway, this is from the proposal.
My heart's letter fixed funds to enter that we cannot tear out of me, nor Neil of Meadlo with vile chung arming his soul.
Since I can't risk hitting with brunch or stick, at least by stealth there, when I have no uncle, shall I enjoy love's joy in the air or chamber?
When I call back to mind the chamber, where to my cost, I know no man can enter all treat me worse than brother could or uncle.
I have no limb, not a shake. No, not a nail. More than a child who has to face this thick skin.
So scared am I? She too much owns my soul.
Her body take me, not her soul and cunningly conceal me in her chamber.
It hurts my heart more than blows from a stick that where she is, her servant cannot enter.
I'll always be to her is flesh to nail, indifferent to reproof or friend or uncle.
Even the sister of my uncle. I did not love so much by this my soul as close to her as finger to its nail.
If she agreed, I'd be with in her chamber lover twists me since my heart is let you down to more than
a strong man playing with his thin stick since flower bloomed first on a dry stick and.
Sir Adam, nephew came or uncle, a love is fine as that my heart feels enter was not, I think, embody in soul.
Whether she goes about or stays in chamber, my heart stays closer to her than a nail.
My heart. The fits and clumps its nail to her more tightly than bark to a stick.
She's Joyce Taylor. It's Palace in this chamber. I love her more than cousin of mine or uncle.
And Paradise will doubly joy my soul if they're my final love.
Ever, man may enter.
Our note dispatches Song of Nail and Uncle to please her with the stick that arms, his soul, his designee by marriage entering chamber.
Thank you. That's a very short item, Dante's, and from a contemporary of Dante's, of course, Ana was a predecessor.
Dante's friend, Chino de Pistoia, around 12, 17, 13, 36, outlived Dante and does not appear in the story.
But he was a poet in the new style and he exchanged sonnets with Dante.
And on Dante's death in 13 21, Chino wrote a commemorative concerné entitled Super Lacoste Amore del Altamonte.
This begins by imagining the climb up the mountain of Parnassus and the muses spring on Hellickson.
But then, with the mention of beer outreach, it also recalls the ascent of mount purgatory and the ascent into paradise.
Up there, love on the crags of that high peak, using the skill and style of poet speech who still can climb.
Now the wings of genius lie broken.
I know well that the waters have run dry within the spring, where all who gaze might see their flaws exposed if they looked carefully upon that glass.
Oh, just true, God, who pardons graciously all those who reached repentance at the end.
Take this keen soul who throughout his whole life tended the plant of love to pay outreaches arms at last.
Thank.