Hard as the palm of ploughboys."
Returning to those who have translated Dante's Comedy in good earnest, we must state, that Cary, being too careful to give the poem a uniformly dignified tone (which desire we anticipate from his rejection of the very title of "Comedy)," has adulterated all its franker style with the pomp and stiffness of our traditional epic poems, and so incurs the fault attributed to our old translators, of uttering one man's thoughts in the phraseology proper to another confraternity; hence he has not represented with spirit the horrible grotesque of Dante in the punishments of meaner sinners, nor has he followed him in his bolder and quainter ways of coining words and phrases, so that the line,
"Se il ciel gli addolera, o l'inferno gli attosca,"
If Heaven's sweet cup, or poisonous drug of hell,
Be to their taste applied,
in a tone less proper to the sudden emotion of the
speaker.
As to Wright's translation, he seems chiefly to
have rivalled his predecessor by persuading the
public that he had imitated the versification of
Dante's poem, which he has indeed counterfeited to
the eye, although the reading of a few triplets will
show, that he has adopted a much poorer and looser
metre, of which the peculiarity is easily analyzed.
Every rhyme in Dante is threefold; the middle line
of one triplet ending like the first and third of the
succeeding triplet; so that one consonance is never
abandoned, until another has commenced; accordingly
the measure cannot be broken into stanzas, but has
a woven continuity, that seems proper to a poem on
eternity, although it would seem heavy and mono-
tonous for a lighter and a mundane subject. But in
Wright the rhymes are but double, and fall upon
dissimilar points within the triplet; hence the
measure divides itself into stanzas, and that too at
irregular intervals, and in our general impression,
Beguiles us with a counterfeit,
Resembling Majesty, which, being touch'd and tried,
Proves valueless."
However, this false march of rhymes confines him
generally to the same number of lines as his original,
and preserves him from that vice of paraphrase
which is sometimes admitted even by Cary. Be-
sides, Wright's language is sometimes terribly weak-
ened by a boarding-school or family-Shakspeare
etiquette; as where he renders "la meretrice," by
"that wicked, meretricious dame," Canto xiii., and
similarly treats another verse, which I will not now
quote, lest the truly moral plainness of the Italian
should thus, without the context, have an effect of
grossness.
It will behove me, lastly, to say a few words on a
recent prose version of the Inferno, which attempts to
combine the virtues of a grammatical interpretation
for the Italian student, and a literary version for the
general English reader, and which achieves this two-
fold object, perhaps, to nearly the utmost extent at
which it is compatible with itself. I still think this
work will be more read with the original than with-
out; for besides the general disadvantage of its
prosaic form, there is something in its language or
style that reminds us more of the writer's celebrated
brother, the author of Sartor Resartus, than of the
style of Dante, so that many phrases of wonderful
precision and efficiency when we compare the Italian,
appear too uncouth and knotty for reading alone,
presuming we wish to conceive the smooth organic
development of thoughts in the Florentine intellect.
Furthermore many passages have required, under
Mr. J. Carlyle's treatment, to be doubly rendered,
that is literally in the text, and more perspicuously
in the notes, or vice versâ; which process hinders us
in reading the text continuously; whereas a decided
literary version should require no notes that are
merely exegetic, and its text should be "in seipso
totus, teres atque rotundus,”—in itself whole, round,
and handy. On the same principle all the alle-
gorical proper names in the poem, which are of
Italian formation, should be replaced by English, or,
if need be, by Greek or Latin equivalents intelligible
in a classical day-school; which substitution has
never, I think, been thoroughly made but in the pre-
sent version; see Canto xxii. I may note here that I
have in a few cases modified the orthography of other
proper names, in pronouncing which an Englishman
might make disagreeable mistakes: thus I have
Fûtchi for Fucci, &c. I have now discussed my
predecessors in this field, so far as is requisite to
illustrate the principles on which I have written, and
I must waive such a minute examination of them,
as would imply a relative criticism of my own exe-
cution. For on this subject who shall judge me
but the "ermine-robed great world," for whose ap-
proval I am but provisionally encouraged to hope by
the kind criticisms of our modern "Averrois che 'l
gran Comento feo," that is the well known "Comento
Analitico sopra Dante Alighieri" of Signor Rossetti,
and by other gentlemen of known literary attain-
ments and no shallow acquaintance with this
subject.
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