Naturally enough this was a long poem in the
terza rima of the "Divina Commedia," and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion so remote that no editor would print it.
A fan of Dante's
terza rima rhyme schemes, Berman's early book, Strange Borderlands, won the Peace Corps Award for Best Book of Poetry.
The section of the preface in which translators really unleash their persuasive skills and engage in a valiant battle to defend their choices is where they illustrate how they have rendered Dante's unforgiving
terza rima. Those who opted for prose typically construct their self-defense around the duty to be faithful to the content, which cannot yield to the demands of a rhyme that could not be reproduced anyway.
The heart of the Collected Poems is Gizzi's informal "Italian-American" trilogy: Just Like a Real Italian Kid (1990), No Both (1997), and My
Terza Rima (2001).
In translating Dante, Sayers had followed his
terza rima scheme, in which the sound of the last word of the middle line of each tercet provides the rhyme for the first and last lines of the next.
Responses ranged from the poetic--complete with
terza rima rhyming verse stanzas--to the more straightforward.
Among the poetic forms included are rondeau,
terza rima, limerick, tetractys, cinquain, sonnet, pantoum, haiku, double dactyl, and epigram.
In one representative sentence, he describes how a motivic fragment in Daphnis mirrors not only the passage's large-scale structure, but also the
terza rima of the Divine Comedy and the pantun-derived rhyme scheme found in poems by Baudelaire (74-75).
"Quartering Time" also deviates from the original idea for the form, this time a
terza rima. This is a beautiful, searing, and quiet poem that is, perhaps, a response to the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774.