Dante in English (review)

After some shrewd preliminary comments on Dante’s Italian as revealed in his Commedia, Eric Griffiths, the co-editor of this volume, explains that his Introduction ‘is an introduction in English to Dante, not an introduction to Dante-in-English’. He is, unfortunately, quite correct: the Introduction, for all its great interest, does not really belong with the anthology of English translations. Detailed annotation of the translations attempts to link the two; but the annotation is of varying value. Sometimes it seems irrelevant, sometimes illuminating; but too often it is concerned more with the original Italian – not available here – than with what the translator has made of it. We are told, for instance, of Longfellow’s lines ‘Broke the deep lethargy within my head / A heavy thunder’(Inferno IV, 1–2) that ‘the abruptness and syntactic inversion of this opening match the original’. So they do; but are they good English? That question is not addressed. The editors seem throughout more sensitive to Italian than to English; but anthologists of translations, like the translators themselves, ought to be in tune with both. The Introduction is preceded by a short account of Dante’s life and times. Apart from a slick but utterly misleading comparison between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, on the one hand, and today’s United Nations, this is a fine piece of work. The public events in which Dante was involved are never easy for a modern reader to follow, but here they are outlined very cogently. Matthew Reynolds has managed not only to write a clear account, but also (apart from the comparison I have just mentioned) one which does not try to adjust Dante to our notions, but rather conveys much of the dissimilarity between his time and ours. Neither the Life nor the Introduction provides one thing which any reader of Dante needs – an outline of the structure of the Commedia. Hence the anthology is without its most basic requirement: a context for the passages chosen. Three diagrams, one for each of the stages of Dante’s journey, and a short explanation could easily have supplied this. If the Introduction is read simply as an essay on Dante, then it will be found to be packed with good things – so many that I shall draw attention to only a few. Mention is made of the unfortunate tendency of Dante’s English translators ‘to plump and flesh out what he so delicately etched’. The anthology exemplifies this many times, and also reveals some of the reasons for this elaboration. Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745) obviously did not think that Dante had quite brought out Translation and Literature 15 (2006)