Atheist Clive James' hymn to God

Philip Harvey | 09 June 2014

Dante's Divine Comedy translated by Clive JamesRumours of his death are greatly exaggerated, but Clive James has since 2010 made a public art of dying. He has been suffering for some time an advanced stage of terminal leukemia and emphysema. Breathing is difficult and he saves his energy for his writing. Public appearances are rare. Faced with mortality in extremis the poet-critic stays in his adopted home of England, regretting he may never visit Australia again.

It is in this intense moment of re-evaluation of life, especially his own, that we read James' new translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Possibly no great poem is so immersed in the connections between our life here and now with life after death.

Dante lived an existence in Florentine politics and might today be little more than a historical footnote, but exiled in midlife to Ravenna, he transformed that trauma into a living testament about the worlds he knew: the worlds of action and contemplation, the classical and medieval worlds conjoined. James translates the opening:

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found
Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to me ...

Some translators abandon all hope of getting perfect terza rima (an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme) in English, opting for non-rhyme or half-rhyme. It seems James decided to translate into quatrains back in the 1960s. This was a momentous decision because he was locked into doing the whole thing in four-line verses and could not go back. His determination is admirable, though his belief in the quatrain less so.

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=41499#.U5HeULlOX5o

Here's one of his recent poems.

Sentenced to life, I sleep face-up as though
Ice-bound, lest I should cough the night away,
And when I walk the mile to town, I show
The right technique for wading through deep clay.
A sad man, sorrier than he can say.

But surely not so guilty he should die
Each day from knowing that his race is run:
My sin was to be faithless. I would lie
As if I could be true to everyone
At once, and all the damage that was done

Was in the name of love, or so I thought.
I might have met my death believing this,
But no, there was a lesson to be taught.
Now, not just old, but ill, with much amiss,
I see things with a whole new emphasis.

My daughter’s garden has a goldfish pool
With six fish, each a little finger long.
I stand and watch them following their rule
Of never touching, never going wrong:
Trajectories as perfect as plain song.

Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known
The name for Japanese anemones,
So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone
Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees
Without my seeing them. I count the bees.

Even my memories are clearly seen:
Whence comes the answer if I’m told I must
Be aching for my homeland. Had I been
Dulled in the brain to match my lungs of dust
There’d be no recollection I could trust.

Yet I, despite my guilt, despite my grief,
Watch the Pacific sunset, heaven sent,
In glowing colours and in sharp relief,
Painting the white clouds when the day is spent,
As if it were my will and testament –

As if my first impressions were my last,
And time had only made them more defined,
Now I am weak. The sky is overcast
Here in the English autumn, but my mind
Basks in the light I never left behind.

TLS, May 2, 2014