TRANSLATION        WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?
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The most popular section of The Divine Comedy and the one that has been the most often translated, is the first section, the "Inferno." Therefore, on this page and on the following pages of this website, I'll be using examples from this section to illustrate the main problems and issues involved in translating the Divine Comedy.

ACCURACY To begin, it's important to consider the first requirement of any translation -- accuracy. This means that the translation must convey the meaning of the original writing as closely as possible. To illustrate how this can be done, in the left-hand box below you'll see the opening lines of the "Inferno" as Dante originally wrote them; in the right-hand box is my own literal (word-for-word) translation.

Of course, even a word-for-word translation involves making choices since it's extremely difficult to find  synonyms (words with exactly the same meaning) for words being translated from one language to another. So, in the example above, I chose to use the word hard to represent the Italian word forte, a word which can also mean (according to Italian dictionaries) strong, harsh, sharp, severe.  Since it's difficult to know exactly what the word meant in Dante's time, and equally difficult to find an exact English equivalent, I've had to choose the word which I feel -- though others may disagree -- most closely follows the original meaning.

With this in mind, let's look at two other translations of the same lines, the first by Robert and Jean Hollander, the second by Robert Pinsky.