Yesterday I drove across the border into North Carolina to have lunch with the hugely gifted Anthony Esolen, who had flown to Charlotte to record three series of lectures for Catholic Courses (www.catholiccourses.com). As Executive Director of Catholic Courses, I am hugely honoured that we have managed to attract some of the finest Catholic academics to teach our courses. Certainly, having Anthony Esolen teaching three courses on Dante’s Divine Comedy is a hugely impressive feather in our cap. For those who don’t know, Esolen is the translator of the widely-respected Random House edition of Dante’s classic.

As a huge admirer of Dante, I was not about to miss the opportunity to discuss the Italian maestro with his greatest living translator. Esolen was delightful company, vivacious and with a joie de vivre that was positively Chestertonian! Even better, he waxed lyrical about his work on the translation and on one occasion burst forth into a dramatic rendition of his translation of the opening lines of Canto 33 of Paradiso. Heavenly!

I was gratified to have my own view of the Divine Comedy vindicated by Esolen, who confirmed that the modern academy has distorted the study of Dante by concentrating unduly on the Inferno to the detriment of the study of Purgatorio and Paradiso. He told me how the quality of Dante’s poetry, its rhymes and its melody, ascends with the protagonist from the harshness and ugliness of the Inferno to the gradations of beauty to be found on the ascent of Mount Purgatory and through the celestial spheres of Paradise. He explained how he had tried to reflect this opening blossom of Dante’s Muse by opening the translation out to rhyme and melody as he ascended with the Poet towards the Divine Presence. Choosing to employ iambic pentameter, Esolen’s translation shunned rhyme in the ugliness of the Inferno, but increased the number of rhymed lines in Purgatory and more so in Paradise. Finally, he laboured to render the whole of the final canto of Paradiso in rhyme, a majestic achievement.

Having used the Dorothy L. Sayers translation when I taught Dante (before the Esolen translation was published), I asked him what he thought of it. He laughed and said that Sayers had employed the English of an Edwardian gentleman, which jarred with the timeless spirit of the poem, and that her decision to follow Dante’s terza rima, the highly original and demanding rhyme scheme that Dante had employed, had forced her to use archaisms and colloquialisms in order to find the words to rhyme. Terza rima is a challenging rhyme scheme in Italian but is even more so in English, which has fewer rhyming words.

Years ago, when I was researching my book Literary Converts, I interviewed Barbara Reynolds, a great friend of Sayers, who had completed the translation of Paradiso following DLS’s death in the midst of her work on it. I told Reynolds that I desired to learn Italian, not so much to be able to converse with the natives when visiting Rome and other Italian cities, but because I desired to be able to read Dante in the original. I asked her whether mediaeval Italian was as archaic as was Chaucerian English and whether this would constitute an added difficulty for one who learned modern Italian. She informed me that the Italian language had changed much less than had the English language over the 700 year period since Dante wrote his classic, and that it would be fair to say that Dante’s Italian is as close to modern Italian as is Shakespeare’s English to modern English.

I feel deeply honoured to have interviewed Barbara Reynolds and equally honoured to have dined yesterday with Anthony Esolen. As I listened to these two maestros discussing their engagement with the great Italian master, I felt in their presence as T. S. Eliot felt in the presence of Dante, when reading him. Eliot exclaimed that he felt so inferior in Dante’s presence that he felt that all that he could do was to point in the direction of the master and remain silent. I felt much the same as I listened to Esolen discussing his work on the translation of the Divina Commedia. It was not quite dining with Dante itself, a pleasure which is not possible this side of Paradise, but it was the next best thing!