Page:The Commedia and Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri vol i.djvu/17



history of the work which is now published may be briefly told. It is about thirty years since I was first led, chiefly by the profoundly interesting and as yet unsurpassed essay on Dante by the present Dean of St. Paul's, to a careful study of the Divina Commedia. As Sainte-Beuve has truly said, such a study leads, almost inevitably, to the feeling that the great poem has not hitherto been adequately translated—to the wish, if it be possible, to meet the deficiency by yet another translation, which, whatever may be its defects, may at least be more adequate than its predecessors. My own case did not prove an exception to the law thus formulated. The only versions which could then be said to be in possession of the field were Gary's, Pollock's, and Longfellow's; and these, though distinguished each of them by special merits of its own, were alike in this, that they made no attempt to reproduce the form of the original, and were content to accept blank verse—in Longfellow's case an eleven-syllabled blank verse—as the nearest equivalent to Dante's terza rima, I was impressed with the belief that, if absolute identity of form is impossible—and in this case the diifferent genius of Italian and English as regards their word-endings seemed decisive against such an identity—it was, at least, the duty and the wisdom of a translator to aim at the nearest possible