We come now to that great task which Longfellow, after an early experiment, had dropped for years, and which he resumed after his wife’s death, largely for the sake of an absorbing occupation. Eighteen years before, November 24, 1843, he had written to Ferdinand Freiligrath that he had translated sixteen cantos of Dante, and there seems no reason to suppose that he had done aught farther in that direction until this new crisis. After resuming the work, he translated for a time a canto as each day’s task, and refers to this habit in his sonnet on the subject, where he says:— “I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate.”
The work was not fully completed until 1866, and was published in part during the following year.
The whole picture of the manner in which the work was done has long been familiar to the literary world, including the pleasing glimpse of 226 the little circle of cultivated friends, assembled evening after evening, to compare notes and suggest improvements. For many years this was regarded by students and critics as having been almost an ideal method for the production of a great work, and especially of a translation,—a task where there is always the original text at hand for reference. As time has gone on, however, the admiration for the completed work has gradually been mingled with a growing doubt whether this species of joint production was on the whole an ideal one, and whether, in fact, a less perfect work coming from a single mind might not surpass in freshness of quality, and therefore in successful effort, any joint product. Longfellow had written long before to Freiligrath that making a translation was “like running a ploughshare through the soil of one’s mind,”[92] and it would be plainly impossible to run ploughshares simultaneously through half a dozen different minds at precisely the same angle. The mind to decide on a phrase or an epithet, even in a translation, must, it would seem, be the mind from which the phrase or statement originally proceeded; a suggestion from a neighbor might sometimes be most felicitous, but quite as often more tame and guarded; and the influence of several neighbors collectively 227 might lie, as often happens in the outcome of an ordinary committee meeting, rather in the direction of caution than of vigor. Longfellow’s own temperament was of the gracious and conciliatory type, by no means of the domineering quality; and it is certainly a noticeable outcome of all this joint effort at constructing a version of this great world-poem, that one of the two original delegates, Professor Norton, should ultimately have published a prose translation of his own. It is also to be observed that Professor Norton, in the original preface to his version, while praising several other translators, does not so much as mention the name of Longfellow; and in his list of “Aids to the Study of the ‘Divine Comedy’” speaks only of Longfellow’s notes and illustrations, which he praises as “admirable.” Even Lowell, the other original member of the conference, while in his “Dante” essay he ranks Longfellow’s as “the best” of the complete translations, applies the word “admirable” only to those fragmentary early versions, made for Longfellow’s college classes twenty years before,—versions which the completed work was apparently intended to supersede.
Far be it from me to imply that any disloyalty was shown on the part of these gentlemen either towards their eminent associate or towards the work on which they had shared his labors; it is 228 only that they surprise us a little by what they do not say. It may be that they do not praise the Longfellow version because they confessedly had a share in it, yet this reason does not quite satisfy. Nothing has been more noticeable in the popular reception of the completed work than the general preference of unsophisticated readers for those earlier translations thus heartily praised by Lowell. There has been a general complaint that the later work does not possess for the English-speaking reader the charm exerted by the original over all who can read Italian, while those earlier and fragmentary specimens had certainly possessed something of that charm.
Those favorite versions, it must be remembered, were not the result of any co?perated labor, having been written by Professor Longfellow in an interleaved copy of Dante which he used in the class room. They were three in number, all from the “Purgatorio” and entitled by him respectively, “The Celestial Pilot,” “The Terrestrial Paradise,” and “Beatrice.” They were first published in “Voices of the Night” (1839), and twenty-eight years had passed before the later versions appeared. Those twenty-eight years had undoubtedly enhanced in width and depth Mr. Longfellow’s knowledge of the Italian language; their labors and sorrows had matured 229 the strength of his mind; but it is not so clear that they had not in some degree diminished its freshness and vivacity, nor is it clear that the council of friendly critics would be an influence tending to replace just those gifts.
If a comparison is to be made between the earlier and later renderings, the best way would doubtless be to place them side by side in parallel columns; and while it would be inappropriate to present such a comparison here on any large scale, it may be worth while to take a passage at random to see the effect of the two methods. Let us take, for instance, a passage from “Purgatorio,” canto xxx. lines 22 and 23. They are thus in the original:—
“Io vidi già nel cominciar del giorno
La parte oriental tutta rosata,
E l’altro ciel di bel sereno adorno.”
The following is Longfellow’s translation of 1839, made by the man of thirty-two:—
“Oft have I seen, at the approach of day,
The orient sky all stained with roseate hues,
And the other heaven with light serene adorned.”
The following is the later version, made by the man of sixty, after ample conference with friendly critics:—
“Ere now have I beheld, as day began,
The eastern hemisphere all tinged with rose,
And the other heaven with fair serene adorned;”
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I do not see how any English-speaking reader could hesitate for a moment in finding a charm far greater in the first version than in the second, or fail to recognize in it more of that quality which has made the name of Dante immortal. If this be true, the only question that can be raised is whether this advantage has been won by a sacrifice of that degree of literalness which may fairly be demanded of a translation in poetic form. Perfect and absolute literalness, it must be remembered, can only be expected of a prose version, and even after the most perfect metrical translation a prose version may be as needful as ever. Let us consider for a moment the two examples as given above. It may be conceded at the outset that the adverb già is more strictly and carefully rendered by “ere” than by “oft,” but the difference is not important, as any one old enough to describe a daybre............