Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

den. A perfect plot in the massing of time, lost already walking. Faced

with the seemingly inexhaustible pool of translations into English of

Dante’s Inferno, I decided to collate all translations archived at the Brit-

ish Library up until May 2000—seven-hundred years after the date

¤xed by Dante for the start of the Comedy’s journey.

Forty-seven exemplars emerged from this process. The resulting piece was
¤rst presented as a recorded text-sound piece with the Irish composer Ciíaran
Maher, who, Bergvall recalls, “worked on the vocal fractals from this record-
ing to create a 48th variation running underneath the recording.” The trans-
lations were then alphabetized, the list thus collapsing historical time and
emphasizing the relativist nature of translation. The resulting musical struc-
ture emphasizes similarity where we might expect difference, and yet the al-
phabetization (“Halfway... ,” “In the middle of... ,”) reminds the reader
or listener that no two of the translations are exactly the same. As Bergvall
explains it:

Unlike the graphic causal horror of linear travel, these point by point

interceptions spin a spiraling musicality, its horror is abstracted, a

build-up of interrupted motion, pulling together into a narrative of

structure, stop-start, each voice trying itself out, nothing looped, yet

nothing moving beyond the ¤rst line, never beyond the ¤rst song, never

beyond the ¤rst day, the forest walls, the city walls, my body walls. Hav-

ing to look for points of exit, further in, further down, rather than

out.^14

The chain of variations thus produced is fascinating in the delicate shading
of its differences: the “dark wood,” for example, appears again and again, and
yet the wood is also “sunless,” “gloomy,” “darkling,” and “obscure.” Some
translations use archaic language and rhyme:

Midway the path of life that men pursue

I found me in a darkling wood astray

For the direct way had been lost to view (#31)

Some are slangy:

Halfway through our trek in life

I found myself in this dark wood,

Miles away from the right road (#7)

222 Chapter 11