Longfellow's Italian Chops- or America's first translator of Dante- the whole Comedy!

    I have been waiting for someone to ask me about translations of Dante.  I have been reading Dante in the dual language edition by John D. Sinclair. Sinclair's PROSE translation is more of a scholarly crib, but there is a great poetic translation by an American Italian professor that is in the Public Domain:

H. W. Longfellow succeeded in capturing the original brilliance of Dante’s lines with a close, sometimes awkwardly literal translation that allows the Tuscan to shine through the English, as though this “foreign” veneer were merely a protective layer added over the still-visible source.

The critic Walter Benjamin wrote that a great translation calls our attention to a work’s original language even when we don’t speak that foreign tongue. Such extreme faithfulness can make the language of the translation feel unnatural—as though the source were shaping the translation into its own alien image. Longfellow’s English indeed comes across as Italianate: in surrendering to the letter and spirit of Dante’s Tuscan, he loses the quirks and perks of his mother tongue. For example, he translates Dante’s beautifully compact Paradiso 2.7

L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse;

with an equally concise and evocative

The sea I sail has never yet been passed:

Emulating Dante’s talent for internal rhymes laced with hypnotic sonic patterns, Longfellow expertly repeats the s’s to give his line a sinuous, propulsive feel, which is exactly what Dante aims for in his line, as he gestures toward the originality and joy of embarking on the final leg of a divinely sanctioned journey. Thus, Longfellow demonstrates the scholarly chops necessary to convey Dante’s encyclopedic learning, and the poetic talent needed to reproduce the sound and spirit—the respiro, breath—of the original Tuscan.

But Longfellow’s English can sound “flowery” to our contemporary ears. And it’s hard enough to read Dante without throwing in the additional challenge of 19th-century poetic diction.

But still, it remains one of the greatest feats of poetic translation in English.