Translations

Abstract

This chapter deals with versions of Dante’s Commedia in English, confining itself to translations of either the whole poem or of at least one cantica. It notes that English translations of the Commedia appear later than those of other European languages, and that it is only after 1900 that English versions start to outnumber those in French. It charts the history of these translations over two centuries from Henry Boyd’s version in 1802 to Clive James’s translation in 2013 and to Alasdair Gray’s Inferno of 2018. The chapter also offers an analysis of a number of excerpts across all three cantiche, illustrating the adequacy or otherwise of the translations, and commenting on metrical solutions. The statistics are striking: since 1850 there have been an average of thirty-three English versions of the poem or of one cantica every half century, and even in the nineteen years since the millennium there have been twenty-seven such versions, so the enthusiasm of anglophone writers and readers for Dante even seems to be increasing.