A Note on the Translation
Dante himself tells us that poetry cannot be translated without destroying all its sweetness and harmony (sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia, Convivio I, vii, 14). The well-known Italian proverb cautions: Traduttore, traditore! (“Translator, traitor!”). We have been warned.
I have opted for a simple prose version, as close as I could make it to the sense of the original, matching Dante’s line breaks where possible. Many good verse translations of the Commedia exist, some showing notable sprighthness and syntactical dexterity. But the metrical constraints translators choose in working in the iambic pentameter (as they mostly do) impose their own forced moves, and these militate against one of the most striking features of Dante’s style: its simplicity, spareness, directness—one might almost say its plainness. Dante’s language is taut, muscular. There is no flab.
The translation by Dorothy Sayers, for example, much admired in its time, is guilty of shameless padding. Take Francesca’s famously reticent line describing how she came to sin with Paolo. In the Arthurian story, Galahad was a go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere. What brought Paolo and Francesca together was not a person, but the book they were reading. Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse (“The book was a Galahad, and [so was] the man who wrote it”). Sayers translates: “The book was Galleot, Galleot the complying / Ribald who wrote.” Of the words “complying ribald”—utterly alien to the spirit of Dante’s Francesca—there is no trace in the original. Padding of this sort annihilates any sense of Dante’s stylistic restraint and pitch-perfect use of words, two qualities that define his style.
The trouble with verse translations is that they tend to have too many words—too much verbiage. It has often been noted that the three lines of a tercet in Italian tend in English to take just two and a half lines. English is terser, more monosyllabic. Thus a weather forecast in Italian will talk of precipitazioni piovose (“rainy precipitations”) or precipitazioni nevose (“snowy precipitations”); in English the forecaster will warn of rain or snow. If we look back to the lines translated by Sayers, it is clear why she padded as she did. Her version continues: “we read no more that day,” a perfect rendering of Dante’s next line: Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avanti. Eleven syllables in Italian have become six in English.
Comparing the versions of these two lines in the three Penguin editions that have appeared over the years, we see this is a perennial problem. All are forced to make accommodations for the sake of the metre.
The book was Galleot, Galleot the complying
Ribald who wrote; we read no more that day.
(dorothy sayers)
Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.” And all the while . . .
(mark musa)
That book was Galehault—pander-penned, the pimp!
That day we read no further down those lines.
(robin kirkpatrick)
This last is both moralistic and wordy. Filling out an iambic pentameter almost guarantees verbosity. I hope bare prose translations give some sense of the linguistic spareness and simplicity that are indivisible from—indeed generate—the poetic power of the Commedia.