Dante’s The Divine Comedy is one of Italian Literature’s most frequently translated texts, it has literally been being translated for over hundreds of years. Taking a look at two translations that are 120 years apart can shed light on some of the differences that translators have used when interpreting this famously complex and intricate text. The first translation was written by Charles Rogers in 1782. This particular translation is characterized by a rather faithful adherence to the the original source text’s physical structure. While Rogers does not maintain a rhyme scheme, nor Dante’s famous hendecasyllable structure per se, he does opt for using a classical English poetic meter, the iambic pentameter. Such an adoption would have given a “modern” reader a similar feel Dante’s meter gives Italian readers. Charles Eliot Norton on the other hand wrote his translation in 1902 and decided on a completely different style opting for an almost prose-like version of the text. It is technically prose; however he decides to invoke quite a lot of poetic structure throughout the translation, such as, “I understood that to such torment are condemned the carnal sinners…” Postponing the subject (as is done in the original’s) is not normally allowed in English prose, thus lending to the fusion-like feeling of this translation.
While it is true that Rogers’s translation is more faithful from a structural standpoint there are some instances in which such an adherence forces other content-related translation loss which is not present in Norton’s. Take, for example, the last few lines of the the fifth Canto, the famous:
Dante
Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,
l’altro piangëa; sì che di pietade
io venni men così com’ io morisse.
E caddi come corpo morto cade.
Rogers
During one Spirit was relating this,
So deeply did the other mourn, that I
With pity swooned, and fell like a dead corpse
Norton
While the one spirit said this, the other was so weeping that through pity I swooned as if I had been dying, and fell as a dead body falls.
Noticeably missing in Rogers’s version is Dante’s “com’io morisse” which had to be dropped to stay within the meter however was able to be kept Norton’s prose-style translation along with the repetition of falling in the final line.
Another example would be in line 7 – 8, “Dico che quando l’anima mal nata — li vien dinanzi, tutta si confessa”, which it s quite fully translated in Norton’s, “I mean, that when the ill born soul comes there before him, it confesses itself wholly” whereas in Rogers’s, “Whene’er a guilty soul before him comes — It all confesses :: (He the proper place)”. Missing is Dante’s “dico” or “I mean” which is crucial to the meaning of him clarifying what he has already said.
In conclusion, Norton’s translation may have radically dropped the poetic format of The Divine Comedy, however writing in prose allowed him to stay more faithful with the content in the work whereas Rogers’s translation is better suited if the reader would like to experience reading Dante’s work as a poem, that being said even the structure used by Norton alludes many times to poetic verse.