The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Ave Dante
• Preface
• Inferno I
• Inferno Ii
• Inferno Iii
• Inferno Iv
• Inferno V
• Inferno Vi
• Inferno Vii
• Inferno Viii
• Inferno Ix
• Inferno X
• Inferno Xi
• Inferno Xii
• Inferno Xiii
• Inferno Xiv
• Inferno Xv
• Inferno Xvi
• Inferno Xvii
• Inferno Xviii
• Inferno Xix
• Inferno Xx
• Inferno Xxi
• Inferno Xxii
• Inferno Xxiii
• Inferno Xxiv
• Inferno Xxv
• Inferno Xxvi
• Inferno Xxvii
• Inferno Xxviii
• Inferno Xxix
• Inferno Xxx
• Inferno Xxxi
• Inferno Xxxii
• Inferno Xxxiii
• Inferno Xxxiv

PREFACE

EVERY new translation of the Divine Comedy, though in itself a fresh tribute, however humble, to the interlingual, as well as to the international claims of “the loftiest of poets,” calls for a word of justification. That justification involves the expression of some theory as to the translation of Dante’s world-poem, itself implying a criticism, whether expressed or not, of competitors already in the field.

The present translation, which is the result of over twenty years’ work with large classes in “Dante in English” at Brown University, was undertaken and continued with the object of meeting a need, which did not seem adequately met by the well known translations of Cary, Longfellow, Norton, or others more recent; it, therefore, frankly aimed at being in every possible way an improvement on its rivals old and new.

Since the advent of the feeling that minute loyalty to the actual words and thought of the original is a prerequisite to a translation of any poem of supreme human import, such a pioneer work as that of Cary, which so long held the field, came to be recognized as being, not only no longer abreast of the modern achievements of Dante scholars, but as inadequate in the above all-important respect.

Longfellow’s widely diffused version, which is an almost painfully accurate translation of the then accepted Italian text, at once attained great popularity not only in America but abroad, a popularity largely due to the poetical fame of its author, to its literal loyalty to every word of the original, for which it could so easily be made to serve as a ‘pony,’ and to the wealth and excellence of its accompanying notes. Longfellow, however, in his apparent eagerness to be true to every syllable of the Italian, was led to draw too much upon the tempting Latin element, which looks like Italian, and too little upon the stronger, homely Anglo-Saxon element, of his English medium, to bring due conviction to an English ear; he was also betrayed into infelicities of construction and rhythm peculiarly surprising in such a poet as the author of the incomparable Dante Sonnets, a betrayal which has found explanation in the state of his mind and heart during the prosecution of the work. This, consequently, remains as an instance of a great translation which, not intended to be prose, ought not to have been thought of as poetry. After using it for two or three years, I gave it up, in spite of its many happy lines, and valuable notes, because I found that I could not read it aloud with continuous pleasure either to myself or to my hearers.

Possibly as a reaction against these obvious defects, Charles Eliot Norton produced his well known and excellent prose version, against which the only thing that can be said is, that it is just what it purports to be, prose, a prose only slightly hampered by extreme verbal loyalty; and that it was composed under the strange conviction, expressed in his preface, that “to preserve in its integrity what” (of the thought and sentiment embodied in the verse) “may thus be transferred, prose is a better medium than verse.” Admitting, however, that for the harmonious blending of meaning and music in the original, a new harmony might, indeed, be substituted, Mr. Norton unfortunately added: “but the difference is fatal,” and in giving up the creation of a new harmony himself, he lent the great authority of his name to the suggestion that any such attempt by others would prove futile.

As to such efforts as that of Dean Plumptre and others to translate Dante in English terza rima, it ought to be sufficient to urge, in the first place, that rhymes are practically an insurmountable obstacle for one who, as a translator, is already limited by the demands of loyalty to another’s articulated thought and feeling; and, secondly, that terza rima is not an indigenous, or even a fully acclimated, form of verse in English, and can not be made to sound natural to an English ear, or, at any rate, produce the effect it does in Italian, where it is to the manner born. I, therefore, feel that neither terza rima, nor, indeed, any rhymed translation in metrical forms still more alien in poetical tone to that in which the Divine Comedy was written, can prove to be at best other than unnatural and unsympathetic, though at times brilliant, tours de force. Their readers will too often be met by forced constructions, and forced or weak rhymes, while students familiar with the Italian original will too often be grieved by omissions, weakenings, or additions, to feel that they have been brought into due spiritual, or even intellectual, proximity to it; for even in such interesting translations as those of Parsons and Shadwell, their rhymes and meters would seem to have been indulged in at too great a cost to the poem’s thought, flow and tone.

In view, then, of the above and other similar frank criticisms of the work of my predecessors in the fascinating field of Dante translation, I have been guided by the following considerations, which are modestly offered in justification of the aims, if not of the results, of a slowly matured effort, which has enjoyed the rare help of being progressively tested by being read aloud in public during many years.

The transference of a poem from one tongue to another is capable of success in direct proportion to the degree in which the human and spiritual element in the original predominates over the artistry, however excellent, of the verse-form in which that element is embodied; the Divine Comedy, for example, differing vitally in this respect from such a poem as Poe’s Raven, which owes relatively too much to the charm of its meter and syllables to lend itself to a successful translation. It is, therefore, possible for the indwelling spirit of a supremely great poem to reclothe itself fittingly, and yet retain its essential identity, because in such a case the spirit, and not the clothing, is paramountly the thing; being that which originally made itself a body, it can make itself another, whatever the former’s perfection; but this is true only on condition that the new clothing fit it, and hold something like the same relation to it, as that sustained by the old clothing to the original. Now the evolution and acquired associations of poetical forms having, as I believe, given the qualities of blank verse the nearest possible position in English to those sustained by terza rima in Italian, notwithstanding the rhymes of the latter, blank verse would seem to be the translator’s natural choice. Being rhythmical and also metrical, it can supply the translator with the emotional and fusing element fatally lacking in prose; and being free from the artificial bondage of rhymes, or stanza schemes, which can only rarely prove happy under the restraints of dictated thought, it will release him from all temptation to disloyalty to the integrity of the original’s intellectual and spiritual message, or to any interruption of that formal continuity, which is a quality that blank verse and terza rima possess in common, in spite of the latter’s divisibility into terzine. For these reasons I cannot but feel that blank verse would be the medium that Dante himself would use, were he writing the same poem in English now, to say nothing of what he would do, were he translating it into that language.

This blank verse must, however, be loyal to itself and to its own laws, and must not take any such liberties with them as too many manufacturers of “vers libres,” so-called, seem to think proof against the charge of license. In other words, a blank verse line cannot be made by applying scissors to indifferent prose. Again, in some such use of blank verse as that suggested, it will no longer be necessary to pad or truncate the words or thought of the original poem, since two lines and a fraction, or four lines, as the case may be, can be made to represent with due spiritual loyalty the poetical matter of the three lines of the Italian terzina.

Feeling, then, that blank verse is not merely the best, but the only organically satisfactory, medium afforded by the English language for a translation of the Divine Comedy, I have aimed, in using it, at being loyal, first to the spiritual tone and thought, next to the words, and last of all to the syllables and line dimensions of the Italian text, believing with the poet Spenser that the poem’s soul, if caught to any extent, will somehow make itself a body out of whatever natural material it be afforded; but that, contrariwise, the most perfect imitation of a former body, such as has been achieved in a Dante translation by using feminine rhymes having the same vowel as in the original, will not reproduce the spirit. Aiming ever at keeping the reader’s attention from being unnaturally diverted, I have tried to avoid the use of any word whose archaic nature would draw an attention to itself, not drawn to its Italian counterpart. I have furthermore striven to keep myself free from all organic omissions or additions, however sorely tempted by actual indolence, or fancied inspiration, in the hope that a faithful translation, expressed in the best English and in the best blank verse at my command, would ultimately enable me to render with some success the homely directness and familiarity, the strength and beauty, the satire, pathos, and even the sublimity, of the ever varying component parts of the Italian poem; and that the latter, if placed on guard, as it were, on the opposite page, as I am grateful for having it placed, would serve as an ever present criterion of its English portrait, and also prove a persuasive to the reader of the translation to render himself more and more familiar with the compelling harmonies of its model’s soul and form. Accurate and sympathetic reproduction of its author’s thoughts and moods, good English, and good verse have, therefore, been the triune aim of my long continued work on the poem’s every line and poetic unit, with what result the reader and student must be the ultimate judge, no one realizing more than I how far any achievement is likely to be from its inspiring ideal.

The Italian text is that of the Vandelli edition of 1914, with such changes in individual words, spelling, and punctuation as, in my judgment, seemed warranted in themselves, and justified by having been adopted by one or more of such accredited Italian editors of the poem as Torraca, Casini, Passerini, or, in some instances, by our American Dantist, Dr. Grandgent. In very few cases only have I risked erring heretically on the side of radical boldness in adopting a rejected variant which seemed more Dante-like, or more consistent with its immediate or more remote context, than that of the textus receptus. On the other hand, several temptations to make Dante say in my translation something in a given place that was truer, stronger, more beautiful, or more refined, than what was strictly warranted by the words he there used and by their context, have been sternly, though at times regretfully, resisted. On the English page the reader will see that in the vast majority of cases I have found it possible to have three lines of blank verse match the three lines of each opposite terzina without disloyalty to the interests of either. Where this seemed impossible or undesirable, simple typographical devices have been adopted, to keep up the useful parallelism to the eye, without detriment to the flow or metrical integrity of the English verse. Again, in the translation the subject matter has been helped, I trust, by being divided into paragraphs, with the object of making the dialogue clearer, as well as of isolating and framing independent gems of thought, feeling or description. A temperate use of capitals has been made in printing both texts with a similar aim. In dealing with the title Maestro, as applied to Virgil by Dante, I have replaced the usual translation, Master, by that of Teacher, which more correctly and unambiguously distinguishes his function as an instructor from that of lord, leader, or guide. In the translation of individual words — idiomatic phrases having been rendered as far as possible by idiomatic equivalents — while careful to reproduce Dante’s quaint choices, when illuminating, I have not always thought it a part of loyalty to reproduce obscurities, when obviously due, in spite of his reported claim to the contrary, to the tyrannical exigencies of his rhymes; for though the latter may never have led him to say what he did not wish to say, they often forced him to say it less clearly. The grave accent has been used for all purposes in the Italian text, except that of marking a closed o or e, and in the English, to facilitate the pronunciation of proper nouns, or the rhythmic reading of the verse; while a free use has been made of the apostrophe, as one way of rendering the frequently colloquial style of the Italian, and in such embarrassing cases as that of see’st when pronounced as one syllable. In the hope of publishing before long a fourth volume containing a running commentary on the poem, all notes have been omitted from the pages of the translation, what seemed indispensable being inserted in the Interpretative Analysis, which will explain itself.

Coming now to the question of indebtedness, apart from what I personally owe to the happy accident of my Italian birth and early familiarity with both Italian and English, and from what every Dante scholar consciously or unconsciously owes to the high lights, old and new, of the vast and rich body of Dante literature; as well as apart from that deeper spiritual indebtedness which could only find adequate expression in the simple Italian words of my dedication; I wish here to express my special gratitude to Dr. Harry L. Koopman, Librarian of Brown University, for the uncounted hours of his valuable time, the long continued and ever increasing sympathy, the convincing praise and persuasive disapproval, without which I might have had to advance too often not only “silent, alone, and unaccompanied,” but unquickened and unchecked; as well as to one who was my pupil when I began this work, and has ever since been my friend, Mr. Henry D. Sharpe, of Providence, for the liberal generosity which enabled me to spend an unhampered year in Florence, in the atmosphere of Dante scholars, whose scientific zeal for the letter of Dante’s text never blurs their Latin vision of the poem’s spirit, or of its national and world significance. Among the latter, Dr. Guido Biagi of the Laurentian Library, and Count Giuseppe Lando Passerini, editor of the Giornale Dantesco, are here most gratefully remembered for courtesies, encouragement, and help extended to me during my stay in Florence.

Finally, before closing a preface to what I hope will prove to have, under the present circumstances of the world, something more than merely a scholarly import, I cannot forego the opportunity of recording the intense joy with which, as an American who, born in Rome and brought up in Florence, lived to become a lover not only of Dante the Poet, but also of Dante the Patriot, I appreciate the full significance of its date. Nineteen hundred and seventeen will be remembered as the year in which, under the inspiring moral leadership of a Veltro-like, democratic King, Italy, robed in the symbolic colors of Beatrice, was about to attain that complete national unification and redemption of her people, of which Dante was, as he still is, the creative Poet-prophet, and one of whose results will be that, in Dante’s oft quoted words, Quarnaro’s gulf will again “bound Italia, and her border bathe;” and also as the year in which, in virtual alliance with America, she made her marvelous Latin contribution toward the universal attainment and preservation of that Liberty, personal, national and international, “for whose sake death did not prove bitter” to her sons on land or sea, or in the air, or even upon the snow clad sister summits of those Alps, “which o’er the Tyrol lock out Germany” from what has ever been the imperial garden of a World Culture, which, like its fairest single flower, Dante’s Commedia, is not only scientific, but human and divine.

Courtney Langdon.

Providence, Rhode Island, October 28. 1917.