Varaldo’s All’alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata (1993)

Around New Year’s, while our book club was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy, I serendipitously happened across a reference in Douglas Hofstadter’s Le ton beau de Marot (page 125) to a book of poetry by Giuseppe Varaldo titled All’alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata (“Shahrazad Shall Hang at Dawn”). Hofstadter writes: “In his astonishing tour de force of a book, Varaldo takes roughly fifty classics of Western literature and synopsizes each one in a perfectly constructed classical Italian-style sonnet, in which just one vowel appears.” For example, here is Varaldo’s version of Dante’s Inferno:

Nel mentre ch’è trentenne, l’Eccellente
(nelle Lettere regge, è legge, splende)
ben nel ventre terrestre se ne scende:
ente perenne, sede del Fetente.

C’è gente greve, erede del Serpente,
che freme e geme per veneree mende,
che fece pecche becere e tremende,
che perse fede e speme e se ne pente.

Cenere, selve, belve, pece, sete,
e febbre, vespe, neve…: pene eterne,
e tenebre per sempre, se entrerete!
Emerger preme nelle brezze verne,
tender testé ver belle estreme mete,
nell’ètere veder le stelle esterne.

For Hofstadter’s virtuosically playful English gloss of this sonnet, beginning “At a thirtysomething age, the Great Fêted One,” see page 126. However, Hofstadter’s version, in preserving the line-by-line meaning, lost the monovocality of the original. At some point after that, Brian Raiter took up the challenge and composed the following virtuosically monovocalic English Inferno, along with some quite interesting notes on its design process:

Virgil finds Pilgrim drifting in midnight,
Bids Pilgrim visit sin’s finishing pit:
Insists glimpsing spirits sinking in shit,
Sizzling in pitch, will gift him with insight.

Circling in with diminishing windings,
Visiting kith, slinging witticisms,
Indicting kings with biting criticisms,
Inscribing in ringing tristichs his findings.

Drinking in sights, drinking his fill,
Skirting grim imps with childish tricks,
Sighing, “ ’Tis right: it is His will.”
Pilgrim clings tight whilst Virgil climbs Nick’s
bristling thigh: flipping, climbs still,
Till sighting night’s shining, inspiring pinpricks.

(This is also a good place to mention that within the present decade (the 2020s), “Kinton Ford” (a pseudonym) composed a lipogrammatic English translation of all 136 lines of Dante’s first canto, in full terza rima, without using the letter “e”. Ford’s canto was as recently as 2025-01-02 available online here, but that’s a 404 page now and it’s not even in the Wayback Machine. Luckily I saved a copy back in January; I may post it here later.)

Luckily, Hofstadter’s Le ton beau de Marot (1997) is easy either to buy or to read online. Varaldo’s All’alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata (1993), on the other hand, is tragically difficult. I have not yet managed to find a copy. The title poem, at least, is reproduced here:

All’alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata.
Ma narra, narra, narra al gran bassà
da Qamar az-Zaman ch’amar saprà,
dalla bramata lampada fatata,

da Lab la maga, dall’alfana alata,
da Shahzamàn ch’a Samarcanda sta
la vasta saga araba s’avrà,
alla parlata franca traslata

(tanta sarà la fama!) da Galland.
Tra casa, strada, casba, bab, bazar,
tra ramadan, baccan, banal tran tran,
rara cara ad Allàh, Bagdàd v’appar;
là s’affanna, s’ammalan, fan cancan
al-Kawz, Bàba-Abdallà, Shams an-Nahàr.

My own polyvocalic gloss (very rough) is:

Shahrazad shall hang at dawn,
But till that fall she’ll tell, tell, of—
Kamar Zaman who learned to love;
that coveted brass lamp, Fate’s pawn;

the witch-queen Lab; the horse that flew…
At Samarkand for Shah Zaman
that Arab saga carries on
which A. Galland massaged into

his (justly famed) version française.
In house, street, casbah, bab, bazaar —
At Ramadan and banal days —
Allah’s own Baghdad’s the star.
There labor, revelry, malaise;
there Kuz, Abdalla, Shams Nahar.

Chiti’s Il centunesimo canto

Varaldo was a member of the Oplepo, the Italian equivalent of the French Oulipo. The Oplepo published “plaquettes” of work by various members, the first twenty-four of which were collected into the first volume of La Biblioteca Oplepiana (Zanichelli, 2005). The second volume (covering 2005–2014) and the third volume (covering 2014–2020) were both released in 2022 and appear to be available for purchase on Amazon. The first volume, though, appears out of print. Thanks to Naomi Gold I managed to view a copy of the first volume from Stanford’s library… which proved only that Shahrazad’s fifty sonnets didn’t appear in it.

But one thing that does appear in the first volume of the Biblioteca Oplepiana is Luca Chiti’s masterful Il centunesimo canto (2001). This lengthy Borges-esque essay describes the (fictional) discovery by one Giovanni Ciancaglini of a 101st canto of the Divine Comedy, microscopically printed in the margin between the 29th and 30th cantos of the Inferno, whose unexpected contents upend the traditional understanding of Dante’s theology (thus explaining the Trystero-style six-and-a-half-century Dantist conspiracy to simultaneously preserve and conceal the Canto). Within this frame story we find the Canto itself. It’s what’s called a cento — a poem composed entirely from the lines of another poem — in this case the Divine Comedy. For example, the Canto’s opening line “E, come l’uom che di trottare è lasso,” also forms line 70 of canto XXIV of Purgatorio. So, Chiti writes, it is indisputably true that Dante wrote every line of the Canto. (And, he observes, between the competing hypotheses “Dante wrote the Canto and scattered its lines throughout the rest of the Comedy” and “Ciancaglini (or Chiti) managed to piece together a lucid 151-line poem in terza rima from lines already haphazardly scattered through the Comedy,” Occam’s Razor seems to favor the former, doesn’t it? And yet. As the magician Teller is said to have said (where?), “sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”)

Chiti also provides a thorough commentary on each line of the Canto, in most cases quoting the commentators of previous centuries; this is, naturally, possible, since those previous commentators have in fact published commentary on every one of the Canto’s lines! (Just not in that particular order.)

Luca Chiti died in 2003, just a couple years after publishing Il centunesimo canto. For more information on his life and work, see Paolo Albani’s Tèchne.

Figuring that the laziest way for this English-speaker to read the 66 dense pages of Il centunesimo canto was to transcribe it and let Chrome “Translate this page,” I have done so; and you too can read it here. I made an attempt to gloss the Canto itself into English, for which I relied heavily on Robert and Jean Hollander’s Divine Comedy (2000, 2003, 2007). The Hollander translation is great for this because it’s already almost entirely a line-for-line gloss. Just for giggles, here’s what you get if you take literally the indicated lines from the Hollander Comedy:

And, as one exhausted by his run
As we moved on by ourselves, a voice,
From arm to arm, and between the head
We knew those kindly spirits heard us moving off.
Among the rest I saw a shade that looked expectant,
just so, if I kept silent, urged in equal measure
saw me and knew me and called out,
before she spoke, shining with the rays of such a smile
Consider, reader, whether I was struck by wonder
as does a man who finds his path cut off
on that side of him where we have our hearts.
I turned and fixed my gaze on him
as lying far beyond all it can see.
And he: “O my son, let it not displease you
that memory now would still be painful
that is proportional to such a part
with the virtuous or even coming near them,”
then turned to face my master…

Many lines match up precisely; but there are at least two kinds of problems: First, sometimes Hollander rearranges a whole sentence so as to leave a phrase out of place compared to the Italian. For example, line 3 above cuts off before “and foot”; line 6 comes from a stanza where Hollander collapses the rhyme-words me non riprendo … né commendo into “I merit neither praise nor blame” on the middle line, leaving “urged in equal measure” to fill out our line instead. Second, I had to ensure that each of my English lines could fulfill its roles both in its original location and in the Gruccio canto. So for example on line 8 Hollander uses “she” to refer to Beatrice (Par. VII.17), but the Italian cominciò is genderless and in its new context needs to refer to Gruccio. So the correct line here can’t use either “he” or “she.”

I was mostly too lazy to rhyme — or rather, I made a brief attempt to force rigorous rhyme, decided that the lines were getting worse instead of better, and therefore stopped. My English version of the Canto begins:

And, like a man who wearies in a race,
we were made alone and lone went on
from horn to horn, from summit to the base.
Taciturn — though they heard that we had gone —
among the others a waiting shade I saw;
thus, if I was silent, I reproach me none.
He saw me and he knew me and he called
and began, illuminating me with a smile.
Think, reader, if I was filled with awe
as one who finds his path cut off
just where a person’s heart should be.
I turned to him and fixed my gaze
far beyond all that he could see.
And he: “Don’t be displeased, O son of mine,
though heavy right now be that memory,
that it’s proportioned well to such a one
to reason with the good, or to approach them.”
And to my guide he turned his face…

To read the whole thing (and Chiti’s untranslated essay and footnotes), go here and click the “English” button when you get to page 55.

A postscript on HTML footnotes

Incidentally, for heavily footnoted works like this, we have a very well-established and user-friendly idiom in print — you put the body text in the top half of each page and the footnotes in the bottom half, possibly varying the size of each “half” from page to page. But for HTML we lack any established idiom. The state of the art is hyperlinks (as described by Tobias Kolditz here) or minor variations on that theme (as described by Jake Archibald here).

Tobias Kolditz has a nice idea here: the top half of the browser screen is the body text, scrollable, and the bottom half is devoted to a single footnote which changes as you mouse over (or tap) different parts of the body text. I’d rather the bottom frame contained all the footnotes’ text, scrollable, for “browsability” and searchability; but that’s a minor nit. I should sit down and implement that for a text like Il centunesimo canto and see how I like it in practice.