Today the New York Times ran an obituary for Professor Allen Mandelbaum, who died at age 85: “one of the world’s premier translators of Italian and classical poetry,” who graduated from Yeshiva University at the end of World War II, earned a master’s and a doctorate from Columbia and then spent 15 years in Italy.
On his return to the U.S., he taught at the City University of New York, where he chaired the doctoral program in English, until he was named W.R. Kenan professor of humanities at Wake Forest University. On his retirement four years ago, Wake Forest University posted this note:
Few if any faculty members in Wake Forest's history have achieved the kind of worldwide status that Mandelbaum has in his field. His verse translations of Dante's Divine Comedy are widely regarded as the finest ever, and they are nearly equaled by his powerful, poetic translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, which won the National Book Award. The recipient of numerous honorary degrees and other awards, Mandelbaum is especially revered in Italy, which has bestowed upon him its highest award, the Presidential Cross of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity, along with several other citations, including, as the only American ever to receive it, the Gold Medal of Honor of Florence, Italy. A gifted poet in his own right, he has published five volumes of verse, with another in preparation.
"Allen has about him the aura of an Old World scholar that one would have to go back to before World War II to find," says Edwin G. Wilson ('43), professor of English and Provost Emeritus who was instrumental in luring Mandelbaum from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York to Wake Forest to succeed Brée as Kenan Professor in 1989. "He reminds me of [thinkers like] Isaiah Berlin, deeply conversant in history, literature, languages, culture and religion; a person who has embraced everything worth knowing."
A devout and learned Jew, Mandelbaum is also highly knowledgeable of and drawn to Christianity, bridging the two faith traditions in his life and writing. …
At the dinner in May, Wake Forest Professor of English James Hans spoke of [him]: "In his translation of the Aeneid, Allen powerfully renders a fundamental human question when a character named Nisus asks his friend before they engage in a battle they will lose: 'Euryalus, is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each man's relentless longing becomes a god to him,'" Hans told the dinner assembly. "The one thing we know for certain is that Allen's fire burns more brightly than anyone else's …
In the current issue of the New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn has an essay discussing four rival translations of The Iliad that provides some insights into the issues involved in translation. The concluding paragraph is a nice companion to Allen Mandelbaum’s remarkable rendition of Virgil’s sentence about the gods who put this fire in our minds and our relentless longing for a meaningful life:
The Iliad doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern – indeed existentialist – one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22 issue of Time featured … a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan this past summer. What she said about him might shock some people, but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad:
“He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a choice to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.”
Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on.
The Times obituary noted that Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of “The Divine Comedy” was published in three volumes by the University of California Press in the early 1980s and “was later brought out by Bantam in an inexpensive paperback edition that is still used widely in college courses.” Because of Mandelbaum, that song still sings on.