You see the first problem? Virgil, via James, starts off by sounding unable to say anything once. Rispuosemi: " Non omo, omo già fui, e li parenti miei furon lombardi, mantovani per patrïa ambedui." Virgil, when Dante meets him, has been silent for centuries, so James lays on thick the notion that Virgil has to do some clearing of the tubes before he can achieve full eloquence. It's no wonder poets are so drawn to the work: the first part of the Comedy is itself an act of homage to a poet or, at the very least, its opening is as such, one poet speaking to another, honoured and delighted to be in his company. The terza rima, which is Dante's basic unit for the poem, transfers naturally enough to English iambic pentameter, which is not strange to our ears, and the point is, as James says, to make the poem flow in English as it did in Italian. For, as Clive James notes in his excellent introduction to his translation, "for an Italian poet, it's not rhyming that's hard". I won't take up space by quoting it here, but it's remarkably good, and you can also see why he stopped after 50 lines. I have sacrificed all ornament to fidelity". He approached it the most difficult way, rendering "verse for verse the episode in the same metre. P oets can't help themselves from translating Dante, even if they are only going to do small chunks, as Byron did, having a stab at Francesca of Rimini's speech from the fifth canto of the Inferno.
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