Does anyone have a favorite translation of Dante’s Inferno? Thanks.
I’m partial to Robert Pinsky’s translation. We used this in the class I took on the Inferno, and I found it to be a clear and faithful translation. IMO, you should avoid Longfellow’s and any othe rhymed translations, because the translator necessarily has to sacrifice faithfulness to the original in order to cram the words into their rhyme scheme. And unlike Italian, English is a rhyme-poor language.
Err…I took a class on all of Dante, not just the Inferno. AND, after reading the Amazon reviews, it looks like Pinsky’s translation is rhymed. SIGH
Seriously, though, whatever Robert Pinsky did, I liked it. John Ciardi’s translation is also supposed to be pretty good, with thorough notes.
Whatever translation you get, make sure it has detailed notes, otherwise at least 3/4 of the allusions and references will be lost to you (and I mean that with no disrespect intended…the Divine Comedy is incredibly dense).
(Delurking to post my opinion, finally…)
Over the past two months, I read both Robert Pinsky’s and John Ciardi’s translations of the Inferno. I decided to read two translations at once because I’m interested in the subtleties of language that different people employ when they interpret a work in one tongue for another tongue. It’s illuminating to compare the differences in opinion between the two poets. (For example, Pinsky thinks Ugolino succumbed to cannibalism and Ciardi thinks that he didn’t.)
Overall, I prefer Ciardi’s translation to Pinsky’s by a little bit–I think Ciardi’s language is more robust. However, if I were a literature professor and had to choose which translation to give to my class, I would pick Pinsky’s: it’s more literal, it’s published with the Italian text alongside of it so that anyone who wants to compare the two can do so, and I like the notes in the Pinsky version better. But both are worthwhile reads. There are lines I like better in Pinsky’s, and lines I like better in Ciardi’s. The word that comes to mind when I think about Pinsky’s verse rendering is “graceful.”
Here’s a link to a student’s paper comparing various English translations of the Inferno. It could just be me, but I get the impression that the author is partial to the Ciardi and Pinsky translations herself. No wonder. Of the excerpts that she included, the Ciardi and Pinsky renderings are clearly the most eloquent.
Because of this paper I decided that the Pinsky and Ciardi translations would be my introduction to the Inferno. I feel that since the Inferno is a poem, any English translation of it that I read should be a poem as well. In addition, even before I read this paper, I already knew that both Pinsky and Ciardi were well-regarded poets, so the paper clinched it for me. Pinsky and Ciardi it would be.
Caveat: I tend to prefer more liberal translations. (You know the old saw “Translation is like a mistress: beautiful and unfaithful, or faithful and ugly”? Sexist, but in my opinion, true (with respect to translation, I mean).) Those with a different translation philosophy may take offense at what Ciardi did in Canto 26.
(Returns to lurking)