I’ve been doing research on translation practices and techniques in early American print culture for the past few weeks. My focus has been on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of “The Divina Commedia” by Dante Alighieri. This is what I consider fun, and it sure is! Nestled up with a good book on Longfellow, who was a native Maine poet who had quite the reputation in the mid-19th century, I’ve discovered that he was one of the pioneers behind translation practices that was devoted to not simply bringing the translated author to the reader, nor vice versa. Instead he was determined to provide a translation that best captured the essence of the foreign language author in hopes of conveying those works most effectively to English readers. This isn’t to say that he lost the spirit of the author in translation. Nay, he actually gave readers unfamiliar with a particular foreign language a better sense of the author’s verse (he primarily did poetry translations) rather than a literal or interpretive translation. To call it interpretive means that it has the translator’s voice taking the place of the translated author’s voice. Which in the Michel Foucaultian sense of the term would go against the true “voice of the author” as noted in his essay “What is an author?” A major point that he states relates to translated voices, “it is not enough to declare we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself.”1 Foucault can be a toughie to truly grasp and his works really captivate some early critical responses to reader-author relations. That essay in particular points out Barthes claim that author’s are “dead” is too rash and that while readers are essential to the transmission of knowledge in a work, it’s the author who creates new discourses (or units of knowledge) for the reader to decode. French theorists aside, the translator’s major function should be to best convey the foreign language to match the reader’s looking to decode the original author’s ideas. Isn’t that the whole purpose of translating a work? Function over precisely translated language?
Take a look at these lines from the 1867 Longfellow translation:
“These words in sombre colour I beheld
Written upon the summit of a gate;
Whence I: “Their sense is, Master, hard to me!”
-Canto III, “The Inferno”
Compared to the same lines in the Charles Eliot Norton version from the 1880’s:
“These words of color obscure I saw written at the top of a gate;
whereat I, “Master, their meaning is dire to me.”
-Canto III, “The Inferno” 2
Eliot had a more literal approach to his translation published after Longfellow’s death. It’s also interesting to notes that they both actually worked on Longfellow’s edition in what was called “The Dante Club” at Harvard. These are two language scholars are very familiar with the same work, but utilize different translation techniques. Longfellow sticks with the more contextual use of words common in his era, “sombre” being one of many examples. Dante wrote the work in the early 1300’s and the term “sombre” etymologically comes from the mid-18th century in usage, the spelling Longfellow uses is phonetically British. Why stick with the modernized spelling? Reader’s connected better! Staying true to his goal, Longfellow wanted to make Dante accessible to those who didn’t know the original Italian. He also sold editions of his translation at a decent price, which was roughly three dollars a volume in his three volume set of the “Divine Comedy.” In the late 1800’s that wasn’t a terrible price. These “octavo” (folded over eight times in the binding process) were portable too, beautifully crafted, and compared to the steeper prices of Norton’s edition had sold better long after Longfellow’s death. In fact, after Matthew Pearlman’s recent release of The Dante Club, a fictional mystery novel based around the literati circle, Modern Library Classics released a re-print of Longfellow’s translation. Norton’s hasn’t had a re-print since the 1920’s, just to put the legacy of Longfellow’s translation into perspective.
I’m uncovering many new and interesting things regarding translations of “The Divina Commedia” and reading three different translations alongside each other has been quite the undertaking. I’ll be diving into some archives over the next few weeks to uncover more data on publishing practices, maybe I’ll even post some pictures from the digging. Dante’s epic certainly has outlived his expectations, written 1300 and still going strong! I’m thankful for the bearded bards like Longfellow for continuing the legacy of great poets far before our time.
1 Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Book History Reader, 282
2 Danteinferno.info
