Excerpt from La Divina Commedia: The Divine Comedy

As to the form and phrasing of this translation, a few explanations seem desirable. This is a line-for-line translation retaining the original rime-form, -terza rima, or triple rime. In using the expression line-for line translation, it is not meant to imply that every line will be found in the translation in the exact place where it is found in the original. The substance of every sentence or paragraph presents itself to the translator as material to be freely rehandled in accord ance with the exigencies of the rime and the require ments of English idiom. It will be found that the number of lines in every canto of the translation corresponds to that of the original. In conformity with the genius of our language and the practice of our poets, the Italian hendecasyllabic line is rendered by the normal English line of ten syllables. As almost every Italian word ends with a vowel sound, the feminine or double rime, involving a line of eleven syllables, is normal in that language. To what issue the attempt to transplant the Italian eleven-syllable line into English leads, has been shown by the experiment of lee-hamil ton with the Inferno. Like other poets of our tongue, I have introduced the eleven-syllable lines here and there, sometimes in considerable numbers, with a View to special expressiveness.

With respect to the choice of the English triple rime, I will frankly admit that the late Professor Charles Eliot Norton very strongly, although very kindly, advised me against it. Certainly there was little to encourage one in the results attained by those who had previously attempted to render the Poem in this form. To argue that because no one had succeeded with terza rima in English, failure was necessarily a foregone con elusion, seemed to me a plain begging of the question.

There was encouragement in the fact that Rossetti had succeeded beautifully in his translations of the minor poems in the original time-forms, and that he, as well as Byron, had nobly rendered in triple rime the story of Francesca. In fact, the arguments against the attempt to translate Dante m the corresponding Eng lish meter were much on a plane with those raised against the attempts at the conquest of the Poles and of the Air. Twenty-one years ago, when I began this delightful labor, those conquests were still to make.

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