Dante’s Infernal Fart and the Art of Translation PAUL BAROLSKY Like Flaubert, and like many authors in his wake, I have always aspired to write a book about nothing —un livre sur rien—or at least an essay about nothing, even though I doubt such a piece would be well received in the academic world in which I am enmired.1 But no matter! Although my reach exceeds my grasp, I have approached the ideal of nothingness by contemplating the translation of a single phrase in Dante in which the poet refers to a blast of wind, which is, though more than nothing, far less than physical or substantial. This essay is a gesture, an exercise— a first step away from the world of matter towards a mere but mighty puff of wind. My airy aspirations lead me to the Divine Comedy and a single resounding burst of air, a pneumatic noise worthy of Pantagruel or Falstaff. I speak of a humorous moment in Dante that is acknowledged as such by many but by no means all the poets and scholars who have explicated the poet’s great work. As I will suggest, commentators often rush by this moment and do not give themselves, or their readers, ample time to savor Dante’s crude jest and the fun of it. In a recent review of translations of Dante’s Inferno by Clive James and Mary Jo Bang (and of Dan Brown’s novel of the same name) the formidable critic and polymath Joan Acocella suggested that there are by her count “something like a hundred English-language translations” of the Divine Comedy. Although I have been collecting English translations of Inferno for the last forty years or so, somewhat haphazardly , I admit, I am far behind her in my reckoning. I arion 22.1 spring/summer 2014 have in my collection only about thirty translations and I am ignorant of those I am missing. Even so, I find much to learn from the numerous translations I do have at hand. To overstate a point, I have never met a translation of the Inferno I did not like—for one reason or another. Back in the 1970s when the Charlottesville Dante Society met regularly to discuss Inferno, we always had with us, in addition to the original, the translations of Sinclair, Singleton, Ciardi, and Sayers. As we pondered the text, we discovered at various junctures that no single translation seemed to suffice, that each of our translators offered us something distinctive. Our understanding of what we were reading was enriched by multiple translations. There were many possibilities. Over the years I have required that my students in courses on Italian Renaissance art history and literature read Inferno . Doing so, I have turned to various translations to guide me in my understanding Dante, as I in turn have sought to guide the students. Our poet speaks in many voices, from the vulgar and obscene , to the sublime. Students who struggle with the elevated language and complexities of theology are easily delighted however by Dante’s more coarse-grained passages, such as a few details in canto 21, where our pilgrim and his guide Virgil meet Malacoda or “Evil Tail,” and his band of demons. These creatures, one might say, are the antitheses of the militant angels of paradise. At the conclusion of canto 21, having witnessed the punishment of those sinners guilty of graft who are driven into a pool of boiling pitch, Dante and Virgil are about to continue their journey. At this point the devil-inchief gives our pilgrims a rousing derisive send off. In the final line of the canto we read of Malacoda: “et elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.” Although the identity of this devil has been debated, we will leave that matter to the “glossators,” as we pause instead to enjoy and take delight in Dante’s humor . Just because he is deadly serious doesn’t mean our poet is without a sense of humor that we might savor. dante’s infernal fart and the art of translation 94 In the most literally precise translation of the description of the devil’s culo available, Mandelbaum...