Need a critique of my Pinsky's The Inferno Versus Mark Musa's The Inferno

1font00This essay is giving me00 01b01u00Hell02u02b00.02font00 I always seem to have poor organization but I never see it. Can anyone help? Also if there is anything that you know of to help this essay further please post it on here too please. Thank you. Oh yes... If you are wondering about the "Wren 1" and the choppyness, it is because it is in MLA format and I just copy and pasted from my Microsoft Word program.02br
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00Wren 102br
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00Joshua Wren02br
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00Mr. LaPalme02br
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00AP English 1202br
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0011 April 200702br
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00Classical Versus New and Improved02br
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00 Satan, lesser than God but master of all that is evil, is banished forever to his icy tomb, never to see the light of God’s heaven again. Dante Alighieri depicts this beast in the ninth level of hell in “Canto 34” of 01u00The Inferno02u00. Robert Pinsky, with a classical approach, and Mark Musa, with a modern approach, both translated Dante’s “Canto 34”. Pinsky tried to keep his translation as close as possible to the original text. However, Musa’s diction, although the same description as Pinsky produced, illustrated a story-like poem by playing on the reader’s senses; such as touch and hearing. Not only is the two writer’s diction different, but the structure and punctuation that each of the writers use gives a different tone to the poem.02br
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00 Although both Pinsky and Musa describe the same icy hell that Satan dwells in, neither of the two follow the same structure in developing their translations of the canto. Pinsky follows much of the same form that Dante used when developing the poem. He mimics Dante’s rhyme scheme as close as he could without changing the meaning of the stanza. The terza rima that Dante used depends heavily on available rhymes, making it very difficult for translation in the English language. Pinsky has to make moderate usage of half-rhymes in order to keep similar to Dante’s terza rima. An example of Pinsky’s mimicking of Dante’s terza rima is shown here in lines fifty-eight through sixty, “…the 02br
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00front mouth gripped/ …the claws, which sliced/ … his back was stripped” (pg. 395 Pinsky). You can see the “a b a” rhyme scheme in the three-line stanza is maintained. This is unlike Musa’s version, which ignores the terza rima but keeps the three-line stanzas. Even though Pinsky and Musa had differed in their choice in 02br
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00rhyme, both translators kept intact the iambic pentameter that Dante used when creating 01u00The Inferno02u00.02br
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00 Aside from the structure of the poems that the writers use, the choice of punctuation that Pinsky and Musa use differentiates the tone in each of translations. Pinsky never uses a single exclamation mark in any part of his translation of 01u00The Inferno02u00. Instead, Pinsky ends every sentence with a period. Musa, however, makes good use of exclamation marks where he felt they were needed in order to strengthen the voice in that section of the poem. For example, line twenty-five “I did not die—I was not living either!” in Musa’s version as compared to “I neither died, nor kept alive…” in line twenty-eight of Pinsky’s version is a stronger voice. The exclamation mark makes the voice of Dante is fretful at the truth of his own words.02br
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00When Pinsky translated 01u00The Inferno02u00, he tried to preserve the terza rima and descriptions that Dante used in his text. Musa disregarded the terza rima, but kept the same story and made it stronger with his diction. Musa wanted your body to sense exactly what Dante felt in the presence of Satan and the worst of his hell. For example, Pinsky’s “How chilled and faint I was” compared to Musa’s “How chilled and nerveless, Reader, I felt then” is much weaker in diction (pg. 394 Pinsky). Musa uses “nerveless” rather than 02br
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00“faint” to suggest that the fear he feels makes his body seem as if it has no nerves whatsoever rather than his body feels weak.02br
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00Besides appealing to the reader’s sense of touch in a stronger fashion than Pinsky, Musa’s translation appeals also to the sense of hearing much stronger. For example, line fifty-six of Pinsky’s version reads “The teeth of each mouth held a sinner” (pg. 395 Pinsky). In line fifty-five of Musa’s version reads “In each of his three mouths he crunched a sinner” (Musa). The word “held” sounds like Satan merely keeps them in his mouth. Musa’s “crunched” makes the reader hear the sinner’s bones crack and break under Satan’s gnashing teeth.02br
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00 Robert Pinsky translated Dante’s 01u00The Inferno02u00 with a classical style, trying to keep in touch with the terza rima that Dante used. Musa, however, dropped the terza rima from his translation and developed a blank verse poem. Mark Musa’s version in comparison to Robert Pinsky’s has more emotion developed into it. Musa utilized a stronger diction in order to set the tone of the poem as being less of a poem and more of a story. In all, Pinsky’s version of 01u00The Inferno02u00 is classically set, whereas Musa’s version is modernized.0-