I spent an entire weekend last fall comparing twelve different English translations of nine Italian lines. Nine lines! The Gate of Hell inscription from Dante’s Inferno, Canto III. Those nine lines broke my heart open in twelve different ways. What started as curiosity became obsession. Each translator made choices that fundamentally altered Hell’s entrance. Some … Read more
I own thirteen English translations of Dante’s Inferno. Thirteen. Some sit gathering dust on my shelf. Others I’ve marked up so heavily they barely close. But here’s the strange thing: if I hand you Longfellow’s version and then Ciardi’s, you’d think they translated different poems entirely. The opening canto reads like a funeral dirge in … Read more
I have read Dante’s Canto V perhaps forty times. Each time, I weep. Not because I don’t understand it—I do—but because understanding it feels impossible. This is the paradox of the Francesca da Rimini episode: it moves us most when we’re uncertain what we should feel. The text itself doesn’t change. But the translation does. … Read more
