“But after five years or more had elapsed, and the city was more rationally governed, it is said, than it was when Dante was sentenced, persons began to question their rights, on different grounds, to what had been the property of the exiles, and they were heard. Therefore Madonna Gemma was advised to demand back Dante’s property, on the ground that it was her dowry. She, to prepare this business, required certain writings and documents which were in one of the chests, which, in the violent plunder of effects, she had sent away, nor had she ever since removed them from the place where she had deposited them. For this purpose, this Andrea said, she had sent for him, and, as Dante’s nephew, had entrusted him with the keys of these chests, and had sent him with a lawyer to search for the required papers; while the lawyer searched for these, he, Andrea, among other of Dante’s writings, found many sonnets, canzoni, and such similar pieces. But among them what pleased him the most was a sheet in which, in Dante’s handwriting, the seven first cantos of the Commedia were written; and therefore he took it and carried it off with him, and read it over and over again; and although he understood but little of it, still it appeared to him a very fine thing; and therefore he determined, in order to know what it was, to carry it to an esteemed man of our city, who in those times was a much celebrated reciter of verses, whose name was Dino, the son of Messer Lambertuccio Frescobaldi.
“It pleased Dino marvellously; and having made copies of it for several of his friends, and knowing that the composition was merely begun, and not completed, he thought that it would be best to send it to Dante, and at the same time to beg him to follow up his design, and to finish it. And having inquired, and ascertained that Dante was at this time in the Lunigiana, with a noble man of the name of Malaspina, called the Marquis Moroello, who was a man of understanding, and who had a singular friendship for him, he thought of sending it, not to Dante himself, but to the Marquis, in order that he should show it to him : and so Dino did, begging him that, as far as it lay in his power, he would exert his good offices to induce Dante to continue and finish his work.
“The seven aforesaid cantos having reached the Marquis’s hands, and having marvellously pleased him, he showed them to Dante; and having heard from him that they were his composition, he entreated him to continue the work. To this it is said that Dante answered: ‘I really supposed that these, along with many of my other writings and effects, were lost when my house was plundered, and therefore I had given up all thoughts of them. But since it has pleased God that they should not be lost, and He has thus restored them to me, I shall endeavour, as far as I am able, to proceed with them according to my first design.’ And recalling his old thoughts, and resuming his interrupted work, he speaks thus in the beginning of the eighth canto: ‘My wondrous history I here renew’.” 15
The question as to why Dante, a man of great learning, chose to write the Commedia in Italian, instead of in Latin, exercised the minds of many wise men of his day, Boccaccio tells us. His own opinion on the subject he gives as follows:—
“In reply to this question,” he says, “two chief reasons, amongst many others, come to my mind. The first of which is, to be of more general use to his fellow-citizens and other Italians; for he knew that if he had written metrically in Latin as the other poets of past times had done, he would only have done service to men of letters, whereas, writing in the vernacular, he did a deed ne’er done before, and there was no bar in any incapacity of the men of letters to understand him; and by showing the beauty of our idiom and his own excelling art therein, he gave delight and understanding of himself to the unlearned who had hitherto been abandoned of every one. The second reason which moved him thereto was this. Seeing that liberal studies were utterly abandoned, and especially by princes and other great men, to whom poetic toils were wont to be dedicated, wherefore the divine works of Virgil and the other illustrious poets had not only sunk into small esteem, but were well-nigh despised by the most; having himself begun, according as the loftiness of the matter demanded, after this guise—
‘Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo,
Spiritibus quae lata patent, quae praemia solvunt
Pro meritis cuicumque suis,’ etc.,16
he left it there ; for he conceived it was a vain thing to put crusts of bread into the mouths of such as were still sucking milk ; wherefore he began his work again in style suited to modern senses, and followed it up in the vernacular.”17
The skill exhibited by Dante in the management of the rhymes in his poem, which consists of considerably over fourteen thousand lines, is very remarkable. According to the author of the commentary known as the Ottimo Comento, who was a contemporary of Dante, the poet boasted that he had never been trammelled in his composition by the exigencies of rhyme. “I, the writer,” says the commentator, “heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and oft he had made words say in his rhymes what they were not wont to express for other poets.”
Another commentator, Benvenuto da Imola, in connection with Dante’s extraordinary facility in the matter of rhymes, repeats a quaint conceit, which had been imagined, he says, by an ardent admirer of the poet:—”When Dante first set about the composition of his poem, all the rhymes in the Italian language presented themselves before him in the guise of so many lovely maidens, and each in turn humbly petitioned to be granted admittance into this great work of his genius. In answer to their prayers, Dante called first one and then another, and assigned to each its appropriate place in the poem ; so that, when at last the work was complete, it was found that not a single one had been left out.”
The statistics as to the editions, manuscript and printed, of the Divina Commedia are interesting. The known manuscripts number between five and six hundred,18 giving an average of about four a year for the 150 years between the date of Dante’s death (1321) and that of the first printed edition (1472). None of these dates earlier than fourteen or fifteen years after Dante’s death, of whose original manuscript not a trace has yet been discovered. Of printed editions there are between three and four hundred, giving an average of less than one a year for the 430 years between the date of the first edition (1472) and the latest.19 The earliest probably is that printed at Foligno in 1472, in which year editions appeared also at Mantua and at Jesi. Two editions were printed at Naples shortly after, one in 1474, the other in 1477. A Venetian edition appeared also in 1477; a Milanese in 1477-78; and a second Venetian in 1478. The first Florentine edition (with the commentary of Cristoforo Landino) did not appear until 1481. At least six other editions were printed in Italy in the fifteenth century. In the next century two editions were printed at the famous Venetian press of Aldus, one in 1502 (in which the well-known Aldine anchor began to be used for the first time), the other in 1515. The first edition printed outside Italy was the counterfeit of the first Aldine, which appeared at Lyons in 1502 or 1503. Three other editions were printed in the sixteenth century at Lyons, viz. in 1547, 1551, and 1571. No other edition appeared outside Italy for nearly two hundred years, till 1768, when an edition was published at Paris. An edition with the imprint London, but actually printed at Leghorn, appeared in 1778. The earliest specimen of any length of the Italian text of the Commedia printed in England was a passage of twenty-seven lines—a curiosity of misprinting—from the last canto of the Inferno (xxxiv. 28-54), inserted by Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, in the seventh book of his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, which was published in 1635.20 More than a hundred years later Giuseppe Baretti printed selections from the sixth canto of the Inferno, the eighth of the Purgatorio, and the thirty-third of the Paradiso, in his Italian Library (published in London in 1757). Not long afterwards (in 1782) William Hayley printed the first three cantos of the Inferno, with a translation in terza rima, in the notes to the third Epistle, in his Essay on Epic Poetry. This was followed by the complete text of the Inferno, which accompanied the first issue of Cary’s Hell, published in London in two volumes in 1805-6. Two comp
lete English editions of the Commedia (the first of the whole poem) were printed in London in 1808. The first (perhaps) of these, in three volumes 16mo, edited by G. B. Boschini, and dedicated to the Ladies Elizabeth and Emily Percy, daughters of the second Duke of Northumberland, contained the text only without notes. The other, in three volumes 12mo, dedicated respectively to the Countess of Lonsdale, the Countess of Dartmouth, and Mrs. Pilkington, was edited by Romualdo Zotti, who supplied notes in Italian, selected and abbreviated from various Italian commentaries. Two other editions were printed in London in 1819; one in three volumes 16mo, edited by S. E. Petronj; the other in three volumes 12mo, a reissue, with the notes recast, of Zotti’s edition of 1808. In 1822-23 was published the diminutive edition of the Commedia, in two volumes 32mo (dated respectively 1823 and 1822), dedicated to the second Earl Spencer, the great book collector, which forms part of the well-known series of “Diamond Classics” issued by William Pickering, and printed by Corrall, this being the first complete edition of the Commedia issued in England in which no foreigner’s name appears. In 1824 a French translation of the Inferno, dedicated to the Princess Augusta, second daughter of George III, by J. C. Tarver, accompanied by the Italian text, was printed at Windsor, of which a second impression, with a reconstructed title-page, was issued in 1826. In 1826-27 John Murray published the first instalment, in two volumes 8vo, of Gabriele Rossetti’s famous Comento Analitico on the Commedia, consisting of the text of the Inferno, with the commentary. The work, the first volume of which is dedicated to John Hookham Frere, and which numbers among its subscribers Brougham, Scott, Isaac D’Israeli, Henry Hallam, and Samuel Rogers, is announced on the title-page as being in six volumes, but no more than the first two ever saw the light. In 1827 appeared the first English printed edition of the Commedia complete in one volume. The text, beautifully printed by the Whittinghams at their Chiswick Press, was edited by Pietro Cicchetti. The editor claims that this volume, which is in 12mo, and consists of 610 pages, is the first single-volume of the Commedia in this small format—a claim which shows that his acquaintance with the bibliography of the subject was limited, since at least half a dozen single volume editions in small format were published in Italy and France during the sixteenth century. In 1839 and 1840 two single-volume editions were published in Edinburgh in 24mo, neither of which, singularly enough, is in the British Museum. In 1842-43 was published in London by Pietro Rolandi, in four volumes 8vo, under the editorship of Giuseppe Mazzini, Ugo Foscolo’s edition of the Commedia, containing the Italian text and various illustrative matter, the first instalment of which had been published by Pickering during Foscolo’s lifetime in 1825. In 1849 the well-known translation of the Inferno by John A. Carlyle, accompanied by the Italian text, was published by Chapman and Hall; and from this date onwards English editions of the Commedia or of one or other of the divisions of the poem, for the most part accompanied by translations, have followed each other fast, the grand total at the present date amounting to twenty-six, exclusive of reprints and reimpressions. The most important text of the Commedia published in England is that included in the volume, known as the Oxford Dante, issued at Oxford in 1894 (second edition, 1897; third edition, 1904), which contains the whole of the works of Dante.21 Two editions of the text alone were published in 1900 (one in London,22 the other at Oxford)23 in commemoration of the six hundredth anniversary of Dante’s journey through the three kingdoms of the other world. The latest of all are the beautiful edition, in three volumes (Inferno, 1902; Purgatorio, 1904; Paradiso, 1905), printed at the Ashendene Press by C. H. St. John Hornby; and the sumptuous reprint, in one large folio volume, of the text of the Oxford Dante (comprising the whole works) issued from the same press in 1909.24
The Commedia has been translated, in whole or in part, into almost every known literary language. Besides English, there are versions of the whole poem in Bohemian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Roumanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh. The Inferno has been rendered into Hebrew; and various selections into Armenian, Basque, Icelandic, Norwegian, Sanskrit, and even Volapiik. Versions in French, Spanish, and Catalan were already in existence in the fifteenth century, and a Latin translation was made as early as the fourteenth century, in 1381 as is supposed. The first German translation of the Commedia did not appear until the eighteenth century, in 1767-69, 2 several years after the completion of the earliest English version.
Renderings of detached passages from the Commedia occur in English literature within sixty years or so of Dante’s death, in the works of Chaucer, who introduces a translation of St. Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin, from the thirty-third canto of the Paradiso, in the Prologue to the Second Nun’s Tale; and in the Monk’s Tale a rendering of the story of Ugolino, from the thirty-third canto of the Inferno; besides shorter passages in others of the Tales, and in Troilus and Cressida, the Legend of Good Women, and elsewhere.25 With the exception of a few lines by Sir John Harington and Milton, the first English translation from the Commedia, other than mere incidental renderings, was the version of the Ugolino episode, published by Jonathan Richardson, the artist, in 1719 in his Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur. The same piece was translated by the poet Gray some twenty years later; and five more versions of it appeared before the end of the eighteenth century. The earliest recorded English translation of the whole poem was one by William Huggins, the translator of Ariosto, who at his death in 1761 left the work in manuscript, with directions that it should be printed and published, which, however, was never done. About the same time Dr. Burney made a translation of the Inferno, which likewise never saw the light. In 1782 William Hayley published his terza rima translation of the first three cantos of the Inferno mentioned above.26 In the same year appeared the first complete English translation (that is, the first published translation) of the Inferno. This was by Charles Rogers, in blank verse. Rogers’ version was followed in 1785 by a rendering, in six-line stanzas, by Henry Boyd, who seventeen years later, in 1802, published a translation of the whole of the Commedia in the same metre—the first complete English version to see the light.27 In 1805 Cary published the first instalment of his famous blank verse translation, consisting of the first seventeen cantos of the Inferno, the other seventeen cantos being published in the following year. A fourth translation of the Inferno, in blank verse, by Nathaniel Howard, appeared in 1807; and a fifth, also in blank verse, by Joseph Hume, in 1812. In 1814 was published the first edition of Cary’s translation of the whole of the Commedia, of which a second edition was issued in 1819, and a third in 1831. In 1833 Ichabod Charles Wright published a translation of the Inferno, in bastard terza rima, which was followed by the Purgatorio in 1836, and the Paradiso in 1840, in the same metre. In 1844 appeared the fourth, and last edition corrected by himself, of Cary’s translation. Since that date twenty other English translations of the Commedia have been published. Of these, nine are in terza rima, four in blank verse, five in prose, one in heroic couplets, and one in nine-line stanzas. There have been, besides, eighteen independent translations of the Inferno alone, of which eight are in terza rima, five in blank verse, three in prose, one in rhymed quatrains, and one in Spenserian stanzas. Also there have been six independent translations of the Purgatorio, three in prose, one in Marvellian stanzas, one in octosyllabic terza rima, and one in blank verse; and one independent translation, in prose, of the Paradiso. Reckoning the totals for each cantica of the poem, this gives in all forty-four English translations of the Inferno, twenty-nine of the Purgatorio, and twenty-four of the Paradiso. A classification of these according to metre gives, for the Inferno, seventeen in terza rima, twelve in blank verse, eight in prose, and seven in what, for convenience, may be called experimental metres;28 for the Purgatorio, ten in terza rima, eight in prose, five in blank verse, and six in experimental metres ;29 for the Paradiso, nine in terza rima, six in prose, five in blank verse, and four in experimental
metres.30
From these figures it appears that during the last century and a quarter the Commedia has been translated into English on an average once in about every five years. If the independent translations of the several divisions of the poem be included in the reckoning, it will be found that an English translation of one or other of the three cantiche has been produced on an average once in about every sixteen months of the same period.
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