Divine Comedy: Inferno | Page 5

and emotional substance more independent of
its metrical form. Its complex structure, its elaborate measure and
rhyme, highly artificial as they are, are so mastered by the genius of the
poet as to become the most natural expression of the spirit by which the
poem is inspired; while at the same time the thought and sentiment
embodied in the verse is of such import, and the narrative of such
interest, that they do not lose their worth when expressed in the prose
of another tongue; they still haye power to quicken imagination, and to
evoke sympathy.
In English there is an excellent prose translation of the
Inferno, by Dr.
John Carlyle, a man well known to the reader of his brother's
Correspondence. It was published forty years ago, but it is still
contemporaneous enough in style to answer every need, and had Dr.
Carlyle made a version of the whole poem I should hardly have cared
to attempt a new one. In my translation of the Inferno I am often Dr.
Carlyle's debtor. His conception of what a translation should be is very

much the same as my own. Of the Purgatorio there is a prose version
which has excellent qualities, by Mr. W. S. Dugdale. Another version
of great merit, of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J.
Butler. It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I
owe much to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me

occasional excess of literal fidelity his English is now and then
somewhat crabbed. "He overacts the office of an interpreter," I cite
again from Howell, "who doth enslave himself too strictly to words or
phrases. One may be so over-punctual in words that he may mar the
matter."
I have tried to be as literal in my translation as was consmstent with
good English, and to render Dante's own words in words as nearly
correspondent to them as the difference in the languages would permit.
But it is to be remembered that the familiar uses and subtle associations
which give to words their full meaning are never absohitely the same in
two languages. Love in English not only SOUNDS but IS different
from amor in Latin, or amore in Italian. Even the most felicitous prose
translation must fail therefore at times to afford the entire and precise
meaning of the original.
Moreover, there are difficulties in Dante's poem for Italians, and there
are difficulties in the translation for English
readers. These, where it
seemed needful, I have endeavored to explain in brief footnotes. But I
have desired to avoid
distracting the attention of the reader from the
narrative, and have mainly left the understanding of it to his good sense
and perspicacity. The clearness of Dante's imaginative vision is so
complete, and the character of his narration of it so direct and simple,
that the difficulties in understanding his intention are comparatively
few.
It is a noticeable fact that in by far the greater number of passages
where a doubt in regard to the interpretation exists, the obscurity lies in
the rhyme-word. For with all the abundant resources of the Italian
tongue in rhyme, and with all Dante's mastery of them, the truth still is
that his triple rhyme often compelled him to exact from words such
service as they did not naturally render and as no other poet had

required of them. The compiler of the Ottimo Commento records, in an
often-cited
passage, that "I, the writer, heard Dante say that never a
rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and
oft he had made words say for him what they were not wont to express
for other poets." The sentence has a double truth, for it indicates not
only Dante's incomparable power to compel words to give out their full
meaning, but also his invention of new uses for them, his employment
of them in unusual significations or in forms hardly elsewhere to be
found. These devices occasionally interfere with the limpid flow of his
diction, but the
difficulties of interpretation to which they give rise
serve rather to mark the prevailing clearness and simplicity of his
expression than seriously to impede its easy and unperplexed current.
There are few sentences in the Divina Commedia in which a difficulty
is occasioned by lack of definiteness of thought or distinctness of
image.
A far deeper-lying and more pervading source of imperfect

comprehension of the poem than any verbal difficulty exists in the
double or triple meaning that runs through it. The narrative of the poet's
spiritual journey is so vivid and consistent that it has all the reality of
an account of an actual experience; but within and beneath runs a
stream of allegory not less consistent and hardly less continuous than
the