"Midway upon the journey of our life": translating Dante into English
Dante Alighieri’s poem The Divine Comedy , since its appearance between 1304 and 1321, has been an enormous success.This happened both in Italy, where it contributed to establish the Tuscan dialect, in which it is written, as the standard Italian language, and abroad, where it influenced the works of famous poets and artists, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton and William Blake. In England, the work knew a great success in the years immediately following its publication, but proper and complete translations of the poem did not appear until the 18th century. Many writers, though, inserted quotations of Dante’s poem into their own poetic production, as well as in essays, as an example of high poetry. In doing so, they often provided translations of the passages they needed: as a result, earliest attempts of translation of the Divine Comedy are in the form of small fragments. What follows is a brief history of the most famous and important authors who, in a way or another, helped to bring the allegoric world of the Florentine poet into the imaginary of British and American people.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) has certainly much in common with Dante. As a matter of fact, he was the writer who established Middle English as the dominant language in England, in a period when only French and Latin were considered as having the status of literary languages. His most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, owes much to the Italian literature of medieval times. The most obvious parallel is that with Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, but also Dante’s Divine Comedy exerted a major influence on Chaucer’s verse stories. The Monk’s Tale, for example, draws quite explicitly from Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, while the Prologues to both The Prioress’ Tale and The Second Nun’s Tale are adaptations of a prayer in the Paradiso. It is clear, though, that, in associating Chaucer to Dante, we cannot speak about proper translation from the Italian, since a full translation was not Chaucer’s intention. However, there is an example, in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, of the translation of a tercet by Dante, which is clearly recognizable as a quotation, since it is put in inverted commas:
Well can the wise poet of Florence,
That highte Dant’, speken in this sentence –
Lo, in swich manner rym is Dante’s tale:
“Full selde up riseth by his braunches smalle
Prowess of man, for God of his prowesse
Wol that of him we claim our gentilesse”
These lines come directly from Dante’s Purgatorio:
Rade volte risurge per li rami
l’umana probitade; e questo vole
quei che la dà, perché da lui si chiami
In comparing the Italian version with the Middle English version, it is clear that this translation is far from literal. It is more of an adaptation, and the reason is quite clear: Chaucer did not want to literally repeat what Dante was saying, he wanted to make this quotation functional to his own poem. Chaucer had to fit Dante’s rhymes into the metrical scheme that he was using. The two poets adopted different poetic structures, as far as number of syllables and rhyme scheme are concerned.
Dante wrote tercets in which he employed the hendecasyllable (that is, eleven syllables in which the accent falls usually on the sixth and the tenth syllable). His rhyme scheme is the so-called terza rima, an interlocking three-rhyme scheme which appears as follows:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita A
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura B
ché la diritta via era smarrita A
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura B
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte C
che nel pensier rinova la paura! B
Tant’è amara che poco è più morte C
ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai D
dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte C
Chaucer, on the contrary, wrote rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is a meter which is composed by ten syllables. In each of the five iambs (that is, each group of two syllables) the first syllable is unstressed, while the second one is stressed. As far as the rhyme is concerned, in Chaucer’s verse every two lines rhyme with each other.
Let us now take a closer look at Chaucer’s translation of Dante’s verse, to have a clearer idea about how this change in the metrical scheme appears:
L’U / MA / NA / PRO / BI / TA / DE; E / QUE / STO / VO / LE
(Dante; hendecasyllable)
PRO / WESS // OF / MAN // FOR / GOD //OF / HIS // PRO / WESS
(Chaucer; iambic pentameter)
Furthermore, it is to be noticed how Chaucer added the adjective smalle, in reference to the noun braunches, where Dante only wrote rami , in order to make the quoted verse rhyme with the previous one, which is Chaucer’s own composition.
In addition to that, something worth noticing is the fact that Chaucer translated the verses openly mentioning God, wheras Dante only made a reference to the divinity. This was probably made in order to disambiguate Dante’s writing, which at times can be highly obscure and allusive.
Certainly, Chaucer was more interested in conveying the meaning of the verse for the sake of his own work than in exactly repeating the Italian poet’s style.
Henry Francis Cary
The first translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to have a strong impact on English people was that made by Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844) in the 19th century.
Cary first wrote a translation of the Inferno in 1805, then a complete translation of the Comedy in 1814; he revised the latter twice during his lifetime, once in 1819 and then again in 1844. The first edition of the Inferno in 1805 featured the original Italian text, with the English translation on the facing page. For the 1814 edition of the entire Comedy, though, Cary decided to anglicize the text, by changing the title from Inferno to Hell, and by excluding the original Italian text. This was not the only change that he made in the title: in fact, he transformed it from The Divine Comedy, which was the name to which it was usually referred to, into The Vision, or the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri. What follows is what Cary himself explains in his preface about the decision to omit the original Italian text:
Since [1805 and 1806], two impressions of the whole of the Divina Commedia in Italian, have made their appearance in this country [England]. It is not necessary that I should add a third: and I am induced to hope that the Poem, even in the present version of it, may not be without interest for the mere English reader.
Cary’s translation can be seen as the first attempt to create a text that was suitable for English readers, even those who did not know Italian at all. This preface clearly shows his will to differentiate his book from all the others. This may easily account for his choice to substitute the Italian word Inferno with the English Hell.
The 1819 Vision was so successful that, for decades, Dante was strictly connected with Cary, both in England and in the United States. Critics and reviewers often referred to The Vision as “Cary’s Dante”.
This anglicization of Dante gave to the Comedy more cultural legitimacy than it would otherwise have had if it had been proposed as an Italian text. However, despite the enormous commercial success, there were also voices that raised against Cary’s operation. On the wave of the idea promoted by the group of American critics known as New England Transcendentalists, some critics began to claim that reading a translated Dante was not at all comparable to reading the original Italian, since Dante’s artistic genius was not easily reproducible. Critics like Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson developed a deep dislike towards Cary’s translation, explaining that, in order to appreciate Dante’s poem, an understanding of its historical and social context was needed. It is beyond any doubt that Cary’s translation was inspired by the classical tradition of English epic poetry: in fact, his work was often compared to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Such an attempt to render Dante’s Comedy more English was seen by the two American critics as a denaturalization of the original. Their recommendation for those who were interested in reading the Commedia was that of reading it in Italian. Of course, not many people, in Britain and America, were that skilled in Italian, therefore translations of Dante kept on flourishing.
Thomas William Parsons
Thomas William Parsons (1819-1892) was an American poet, even though his literary work has been mostly in translation. He visited Italy as a young man, and soon he became fascinated by Dante’s Divina Commedia.A few years later he tried to translate the Inferno by using the terza rima (third rhyme), but soon he discovered that the task was far beyond his reach. He therefore resorted to the quatrain, which he felt was more suitable for English-speaking readers. Here is how Parsons’ translation appears:
Halfway on our life’s journey, in a wood,
From the right path I found myself astray.
Ah! To describe how dark it was, - how rude
That savage forest! Chills me to this day
His translation of the first ten cantos of the Inferno was first published in 1843. Unfortunately, he did not live to complete the Purgatory and the Paradise, of which we only have fragments. It took him many years to complete the Inferno: as a matter of fact, the complete translation of it was published only in 1867, the very same year in which Longfellow came out with his translation of the whole Divine Comedy.
Parsons’ translation got all in all positive responses, his work was generally considered to be graceful and polished, but there were exceptions: some critics argued that his translation diverged a bit too much from Dante’s words and style.
Though Parsons did never explain his theories about translation, his work can be seen as an example of his principles: he believed that in the translation of poetry there should be a close bond between the idea and the form in which the idea is expressed. However, in pursuing this principle, he had to come to terms with the difficulty of Dante’s language, which made it hard to translate his poetry into an equally flowing English verse. Due to the type of metrical scheme that he had chosen, Parsons found himself frequently with the problem of having to compress three of Dante’s lines into two of his own, or, on the contrary, of having to stretch the three lines into an entire quatrain. Therefore, Parsons decided to sacrifice fidelity to the original for the sake of rhythm and beauty.
Whenever possible, though, he tried to maintain the same concepts and ideas expressed by the original, with no intention whatsoever of “improving” it. Apparently, Parsons belonged to that tradition of English translators dating back to King Alfred, who praised translation “now word for word, now spirit for spirit”.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was the first American writer to publish a complete translation of the Divine Comedy. First published in 1867, this translation was nearly forty years in the making. During the 19th century, Longfellow’s translation gradually replaced Cary’s Vision: as a matter of fact, while Cary’s work has now been almost completely forgotten, Longfellow’s translation is even nowadays the most famous English version of the Divine Comedy.
Longfellow’s interest in translation began very early, along with his writing of poetry; but, while he was diffident in publishing his own poems, he felt surer of himself when he just had to translate someone else’s thoughts.
While he was still young, he had an approach to translation which belonged to the ideology of “sense for sense”: his thought was that the original idea was to be conveyed through a free handling of the material. This is quite clear from what he wrote in his youth, in speaking about the role of the translator:
As there are certain beauties of thought and expression in a good original which cannot be represented in the less flexible material of another language, he, too, at times may be permitted to transgress the rigid truth of language, and remedy the defect, as far as such defect can be remedied, by slight and judicious embellishment.
However, later in his life, his opinion about translation changed radically. He began to think that “word for word” was the preferrable working method, and it was in this perspective that he undertook the translation of the Divine Comedy. He fully accepted Dante’s claim, that is, the linguistic impossibility of transferring the melody of verse from one language to another. In one of his letters, Longfellow wrote:
A great many people think that a translation ought not to be too faithful; that the writer should put himself into it as well as his original; that it should be Homer & Co., or Dante & Co.; and that what the foreign author really says should be falsified or modified if thereby the smoothness of the verse can be improved. On the contrary, I maintain that a translator, like the witness on the stand, should hold up his right hand and swear ‘to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth’.
Longfellow, for this reason, came to the conclusion that it was not possible to maintain a strict fidelity to Dante’s text without sacrificing something in terms of poetry: however, that was a sacrifice that he was ready to make, in order to be as much faithful as possible to the original. He knew that even though he preserved the metrical scheme of the terza rima, he could not maintain the rhythm of the original, since the English words that corresponded to the Italian words had different numbers of syllables, leading to a completely different timing in pronunciation. He therefore not only gave up terza rima, but he discarded rhyme altogether. He explains his choice through a metaphor:
In translating Dante something must be relinquished. Shall it be the beautiful rhyme that blossoms all along the line like a honeysuckle on the hedge? It must be, in order to retain something more precious than rhyme, namely, fidelity, truth, - the life of the hedge itself.
For all these reasons, Longfellow chose to write his translation in blank verse, which is the typical verse of English epic and narrative poetry. After the translation was published, some critics said that the choice of blank verse deprived the English version of the ease and fluency of the original composition. Longfellow acknowledged it, but he thought to have fulfilled his task, when, shortly after the publishing, he wrote to one of his friends:
The only merit my book has is that it is exactly what Dante says, and not what the translator imagines he might have said if he had been an Englishman. In other words, while making it rhythmic, I have endeavored to make it literal as a prose translation.
Accordingly, Longfellow decided to maintain obscurities and ambiguities in Dante’s text, since he had no interest in producing a commentary on the Divine Comedy. As a matter of fact, there are notes on the translation, but they do not appear under the text: they are all collected in the appendix. Longfellow’s wish was to leave the interpretation to the readers. Thus, whenever Dante’s words allowed two interpretations, Longfellow did not think to be his task to disambiguate them. For example, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, when Francesca talks about her and her lover’s reading of Lancillotto’s tale, in the original Italian she says:
Per più fiate li occhi ci sospinse
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse
Longfellow did not consider it necessary to explain whether the word punto meant a point in time or a point in Lancillotto’s tale. The ambiguous saying of Francesca was chosen to remain equally ambiguous:
Full many a time our eyes together drew
That reading, and drove the colour from our faces;
But one point only was it that o’ercame us.
In order to understand to what extent Longfellow’s version retains all the obscurity of the original, we can compare this passage to the corresponding lines in Parsons’ Inferno:
Alone we were, without suspecting aught:
Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue,
And oft our eyes each other’s glances caught;
But one sole passage ‘twas which both o’erthrew
Here, Parsons clearly chose to disambiguate the sentence, by translating that punto with passage. He therefore kept the sense of ‘point in a tale’, but completely discarded any reference to time.
As it has already been said, Longfellow worked on his version of the Comedy for many years, but the largest part of his work has been done since 1861. It was in that period that Longfellow devoted himself almost completely to Dante , by working at his version methodically, translating a full canto almost daily. Soon, the translation was roughly completed, but there came the labor of polishing and revising it, which occupied Longfellow for several years. This work became quite boring for Longfellow, who wrote:
How am I weary of correcting and weighing and criticising my translation! It takes more time than it did to make it.
That is why, from 1865 to 1867 he started inviting a group of friends to his house, in order to help him revising the translation. The group included James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton and, occasionally, George W. Greene, James T. Fields, William Dean Howells and others. Longfellow took great benefit from the gatherings of this circle, which was informally called ‘the Dante Club’: the friendly atmosphere lessened the bore of the revision; at the same time, changes were made in the translation on the basis of the suggestions offered. It is important, therefore, to keep in mind, that perhaps the enormous success that Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy is due, certainly, to his author’s skill, but partly also to the advices of the Dante Club, a true ‘workshop’ in which every single line of the translation was discussed and interpreted.
Many critics have wondered which were the reasons for Longfellow’s strong devotion to his task of translating Dante. Traditionally, his commitment has been explained as Longfellow’s own way to ease the pain for the loss of his beloved wife, Frances ‘Fanny’ Appleton. It was since her death, in 1861, that Longfellow began to work almost maniacally on the translation, and the two events have been considered to be connected. This is certainly true, but new theories are emerging nowadays. In his 2012 Ph.D. thesis, Joshua Steven Matthews claims that the reason at the basis of Longfellow’s fascination towards the Divine Comedy was a political one. In fact, the years that he devoted to the translation were those in which the United States were struck by the Civil War (1861-1865). Longfellow’s son, too, took part in the fighting, and, according to Matthews’ opinion, the poet’s aim was to carry forward a message for the citizens of the United States. Dante’s poem is certainly also a political work, and Longfellow used it in order to sensitize his contemporaries about their present situation: the message of unity proposed by Dante’s Comedy was seen by Longfellow as suitable to his times. As Matthews points out:
[…] Longfellow’s strategy was to create a transatlantic readership united by (in Longfellow’s reading) the Comedy’s theological vision of sociopolitical harmony and tolerance. […] Perhaps the most important aspect of the Divine Comedy’s relevance for the United States in the 1860s is that it welds Christian faith with political vision […].
Matthews continues his explanation by saying that Longfellow roughly identified the Guelphs with the Confederacy and the Ghibelline with the Union. Therefore, for him, the Divine Comedy was an interpretation key for the Civil War, and the choice to translate it was his own way to influence the public opinion about the war and its possible outcomes.
Charles Eliot Norton
Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) was one of the members of the Dante Club, who used to gather at Longfellow’s house in order to help him revising his translation. Norton himself was a Dantist: his earliest contribution to the field of Dante studies appeared in 1859, in the Atlantic Monthly, and consisted in an essay about the Vita Nuova, accompanied by a translation of the original Italian text. Between 1891 and 1892, Norton published a prose translation of the Divine Comedy. In that period, prose translations of poetic texts were regarded suspiciously, mainly because a prose version was considered to be a lack of effort of the translator. However, Norton’s reason for choosing a prose rendering of a poetic text was well-grounded: he believed that a translation which respected both the rhythm and meaning of the original text was by no means possible. He therefore decided to resort to prose, with the idea that getting rid of the care about rhythm and rhyme made it possible for both a literal translation and a much easier comprehension and assimilation for first-time readers. Norton believed that, even though his work lacked the poetic structure, the beauty of the original would remain untouched, since even in the original poetic text, an effort of imagination by the reader was required in order to fully appreciate the underlying meaning. As he himself said:
Imagination may mould the prose as it moulded the verse
One feature that can be noticed in Norton’s translation is the fact that he inserts, before each canto, a short summary of the content, in the form of brief sentences that describe the episodes that happen in that specific canto. For example, in the Third Canto, we find:
The Gate of Hell. – Virgil lends Dante in. – The
punishment of the neither good nor bad. – Aeheron, and the
sinners on its bank. – Charon. – Earthquake. – Dante swoons.
Norton’s translation is neither one of the most famous nor one of the most read nowadays, nevertheless he is highly regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Dante studies in the United States. As a matter of fact, in 1881 he founded the Dante Society, also thanks to Longfellow’s cooperation. Their aim was to promote a wider knowledge of Dante’s work, and through the Society they supported further studies in that field. In his account of the founding, Norton attributed to Longfellow the reason for the success of the Society, but it was primarily thanks to Norton’s own enthusiasm and endeavor that the Society flourished. The Dante Society of America still exists nowadays, and its cultural engagement includes the organization of meetings, the publishing of essays and the donation of prizes for deserving students.
An attempt with the terza rima: Sidney Gunn
In 1912, Sidney Gunn, a scholar, decided to try and translate the Divine Comedy by using the “infamous” terza rima, a task which until that moment was considered to be unattainable. He began his work as a sort of exercise rather than a serious literary task, but then he went on and completed the whole Inferno. The reason for the failure of any attempt of translation by using the terza rima was explained by Gunn in the preface of his translation: according to him, it was due to the fact that the English language is by far poorer in rhymes than Italian is. Furthermore, in English, the eleven-syllable verse does not exist, except as a variant of the ten or the twelve-syllable verses. So, a rendering of Dante by using the very same poetic structure was a task of the utmost difficulty, difficulty which was hardened by the content of the Divine Comedy. In fact, Dante’s language, as explained earlier in this paper, was very complex and involved, at times deeply obscure. The translator who wished to try himself with the terza rima found himself to have to convey intricate thoughts in a form which was very unfamiliar in English. The difficulty, according to Gunn, lied in the fact that the translator had also to give an air of ease and naturalness to the whole text. For all these reasons, many translators gave up the terza rima after a brief try, or discarded that option in the first place. Sidney Gunn tried to demonstrate, on the contrary, that such a translation was by all means possible: his aim was to translate Dante as literally as possible in a language that remained in any case comprehensible even to the “unprepared” reader. He avoided the insertion of epiteths and additions for the mere sake of rhyme, and he chose to maintain famous passages in their most known form, that is, that which had already passed into current English, for example All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
What follows is a comparison of the first three tercets of the Inferno, the same that have been earlier used to convey an example of the terza rima, with Gunn’s rendering, in order to stress the kind of work that he has done to maintain this metrical scheme that had defeated so many translators before him:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita A
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura B
ché la diritta via era smarrita A
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura B
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte C
che nel pensier rinova la paura! B
Tant’è amara che poco è più morte C
ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai D
dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte C
(Dante)
When at the middle point upon life’s way A
I found myself within a forest drear, B
For I was from the rightful path astray. A
Ah, it to picture is a task severe, - B
That savage wood both rough and cruel sore, C
Which in the thought awakes again my fear! B
So bitter is it death is little more ; C
But of the good which there I found to treat, D
I shall what else I saw therein tell o’er C
(Gunn)
It is to be noticed, though, that even if Gunn managed to keep the rhyme scheme inviolated, the same thing cannot be said for the type of verse. Gunn did not maintain the hendecasyllable verse, probably for the reason that he expressed in the preface to his work, that is, that the English language does not have an eleven-syllable verse. Gunn, therefore, resorted once again to the iambic pentameter, which has always been used by translators in a successful way as a substitute to the Italian hendecasyllable.
A case of intersemiotic translation: William Blake
What is interesting about Blake’s work is the fact that his drawings are not mere illustrations of the Divine Comedy, but they can be considered as a proper commentary of Dante’s poem. A curious aspect to be noticed is the fact that Blake felt a sort of antipathy towards Dante, mainly because he did not share the same vision of religion and salvation. Blake considered the Divine Comedy more of a fable or allegory than a vision of the road to salvation. Since Blake’s vision was quite different from Dante’s, he put much of his own philosophy into his translation of the Divine Comedy: as a matter of fact, only one-third of the illustrations can be considered as close to the literal text, while the remaining are either an exposition of Blake’s own vision, or a combination of Dante’s ideas intermingled with Blake’s thought. Here are a few examples of Blake’s drawings, that clearly show that much of the English poet’s imaginary has been put in a work that has all the rights to be considered as a ‘sense-for-sense’ translation of Dante:
The Gates of Hell
Comparing different translations
What follows is a comparison between four different translations of two passages of Dante’s Inferno. The versions which will be analyzed here are the two most famous poetic translations by H.F. Cary (1814) and H.W. Longfellow (1867), along with C.E. Norton’s prose translation (1891-92) . Another version which has been chosen in order to be compared with the others is the one made by Allen Mandelbaum in the 1980s. The reason for this choice is to be found in the fact that Mandelbaum, in his translation, has chosen to use a language which is significantly more modern than the one chosen by his predecessors. It will be interesting, therefore, to note in what sense may an updating of the language render Dante’s poem in a different way.
The first verses that will be analyzed are from the third canto of the Inferno, that is, when Dante and Virgil find themselves in front of the gates of Hell. Here is what they find engraved above the door:
Per me si va ne la città dolente
per me si va ne l’etterno dolore
per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore:
fecemi la divina podestate ,
la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
Here is how the different English versions appear:
Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
(H.F. Cary)
Through me the way is to the city dolent;
Through me the way is to eternal dole;
Through me the way among the people lost.
Justice incited my sublime Creator,
Created me divine Omnipotence
The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.
Before me there were no created things,
Only eterne, and I eternal last.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here!
(H.W. Longfellow)
“Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is
the way into eternal woe; through me is the way among the
lost people. Justice moved my lofty maker: the divine Power,
the supreme Wisdom and the primal Love made me. Before
me were no things created, unless eternal, and I eternal last.
Leave every hope, ye who enter!”
(C.E. Norton)
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER ;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM , AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.
(A. Mandelbaum)
Let us now take into account the translations by Cary and Longfellow. Longfellow chooses to write all the words related to God with capital letters, whereas Cary is much closer to the original, in this case. It is to be noticed that in both translations the final verse is exactly the same (All hope abandon, ye who enter here), with just a slight difference in punctuation. It is very likely that Longfellow decided to keep Cary’s version of the sentence, maybe because it had already become famous, or maybe because he thought that it could be the best possible solution. It cannot be a case, though, that both translators decided to add the word here, which is not there in the original. As a matter of fact, Norton’s prose version has Leave every hope, ye who enter!, which is a word-for-word translation of the Italian verse. Always about Norton’s translation, it can be noticed that he, too, renders all the words related to the divine power with capital letters. In this, he was certainly influenced by Longfellow’s translation, which he had analyzed in detail while helping his friend with the revision.
What immediately catches the reader’s attention in Mandelbaum’s translation, is his choice to render all the three tercets in capital letters, so as to suggest that what it is written is an engraving above the Door of Hell. At a closer reading, what makes Mandelbaum’s translation different from the previous ones is the choice to use a much simpler and modern English. For example, in the verse THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST, he chooses the verb runs, in relation to a way, which is an expression that we could easily use nowadays, even in spoken language. Another example is the adjective related to the Creator: in Longfellows he was defined as sublime, in Norton he was lofty, whereas in Mandelbaum he is simply high. Mandelbaum decides to keep the final verse , maybe because it is so famous that changing it would create a sense of discomfort in the reader, but he removes the personal pronoun ye, which would sound too archaic.
The second fragment which will be analyzed is always from Inferno, and it is contained in the Thirteenth Canto. This canto describes the Wood of the Suicides, whose souls are trapped into trees. As one of the damned describes to Dante and Virgil, they will never get their bodies back, not even after the Judgement Day, because they took their own lives. Here is how Dante describes the fate of the Violent Against Themselves:
Come l’altre verrem per nostre spoglie,
ma non però ch’alcuna sen rivesta,
ché non è giusto aver ciò ch’om si toglie.
Qui le trascineremo, e per la mesta
selva saranno i nostri corpi appesi,
ciascuno al prun de l’ombra sua molesta.
And here is how our translators decided to render it:
[…] We,as the rest, shall come
For our own spoils, yet not so that with them
We may again be clad; for what a man
Takes from himself it is not just he have
Here we perforce shall drag them ; and throughout
The dismal glade our bodies shall be hung,
Each on the wild thorn of his wretched shade.
(H.F. Cary)
Like others for our spoils shall we return;
But not that any one may them revest,
For ‘tis not just to have what one casts off
Here we shall drag them , and along the dismal
Forest our bodies shall suspended be,
Each to the thorn of his molested shade
(H.W. Longfellow)
Like the rest we shall go for our spoils, but not, forsooth,that
anyone may revest himself with them, for it is not just to
have that of which one deprives himself. Hither shall we drag
them, and through the melacholy wood shall our bodies be
suspended, each on the thorn-tree of his molested shade
(C.E.Norton)
Like other souls, we shall seek out the flesh
that we have left, but none of us shall wear it;
it is not right for any man to have
what he himself has cast aside. We’ll drag
our bodies here; they’ll hang in this sad wood,
each on the stump of its vindictive shade
(A. Mandelbaum)
Here we can note that Cary does not respect the division of the original tercets, whereas both Logfellow and Mandelbaum maintain it. Cary adds the adverb perforce to the verse Here we perforce shall drag them, which enforces the idea of the doom that awaits the damned. Longfellow keeps the verse almost the same, Here we shall drag them, but, significantly, he removes the adverb perforce, so as to be closer to the original. Another interesting feature appears in the comparison between Longfellow’s and Norton’s translations: they both use the verb suspended to translate the Italian appesi. Both Cary and Mandelbaum, on the contrary, choose the verb hang, which conveys the same duplicity as the original Italian. In fact, the verb can be a reference to the act of suicide, as most suicides take their lives by hanging themselves, as well as to the doom that awaits the self-murderers, according to the Dantean contrappasso (the punishment of souls by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself).
About Mandelbaum’s choice of words, in this fragment too it is clear that Mandelbaum’s aim is that of simplification and, in a sense, of domestification, since he brings the original medieval Italian text towards the modern English-speaking reader, by using, for example, the adjective sad instead of the higher words dismal (Cary and Longfellow) or melancholy (Norton). He also uses the phrasal verb seek out, a choice that underlines the intention of using a very colloquial language. An interesting deviation from the original is made by Mandelbaum in the last verse: he translates [.. ] prun de l’ombra sua molesta with [..]stump of its vindictive shade. First of all, whereas Dante speaks about a particular tree (a thorn, that is how all the other translators have rendered it), Mandelbaum uses the word stump, which of course refers to a tree, but a tree that has been broken or cut down. This choice enhances the dramatic vision of the Wood of the Suicides as a really ‘infernal’ place. Then, he chooses to translate molesta with vindictive, which is a choice that finds no apparent explanation in the text: the idea that Dante wants to convey is rather of a tormented soul, idea which has been kept by all the other translations (Cary chooses wretched, whereas both Longfellow and Norton decide upon the more literal molested). The adjective vindictive is more related to an idea of revenge, which does not seem to fit into the original meaning of the verse.
Conclusion
From this analysis what emerges is the fact that the history of the translations of the Divine Comedy in English is long and complex: it dates back to the years immediately before its publication and it continues up to nowadays. Many different writers, scholars and poets have measured themselves with Dante’s cryptical poem, with many different aims and reasons: sometimes to achieve their philosophical or political goals, sometimes just to test their skills. They have used various approaches: from the word-for-word translation, which maintains the meaning at the expense of rhythm and rhyme, to the sense-for-sense translation, which sacrifices some nuances of the original meaning in order to maintain the beauty of language. They have preferred a domestifying approach, in order to make Dante more comprehensible, or a foreignizing approach, so as to drag the reader into the obscure and polysemic world of the Italian medieval poetry. None of these choices is better than another; what matters most is to understand the reasons why a translator operates some choices, and to be aware of the fact that, when we read a translation, we read the original text through the filter of its translator, who can be shaped and influenced by many features: his aim, in the first place, but also his field of study as well as his historical context.
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