/lit/ - Literature

Here's a bit of translation: the passage at the end of Canto 17 from the Inferno in Dante's Divine Comedy, where they climb on Geryon's back and fly down to the next level in Hell.

The aim is to make it sound good without taking too many liberties. (Obviously quite a few compromises are necessary.)

Here's the Italian text and translations by Mandelbaum & Longfellow:

https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-17/

>>17260717
The trouble with Dante is that all the English translations published so far are very deficient. (I'm astounded anyone bothers to wade through most of them, to be honest.) The whole point is that he should be FUN to read. In Italian it flows smoothly so you can read it fast, and it sounds good. English translators almost never make any attempt to make it sound good.

Translating poetry is really hard, and the better the poet the harder it is, because he will use the language as intimately as he possibly can. Added to that, it's especially hard to translate Italian terza rima into English because in Italian, everything rhymes with everything else, but in English, nothing rhymes — we have more different word-endings than any other language by a factor of a hundred.

I've been working on an English Divine Comedy for a number of years now. I can't believe I'll persuade any normie organization to publish it when I finally finish it (I'm almost done) but if people are interested I'll probably post it on /lit/ or something.

Here's a little snippet from the Inferno. Dante and Virgil have come to the edge of a gigantic cliff. How to get down? Virgil whistles up this monster called Geryon (the personification of Fraud) to carry them down: