Longfellow's Dante

America's beloved “Fireside Poet” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-92) was also a prodigious translator, from many languages, including German, French and Italian. His first collection of poetry Voices of the Night, was published in 1839 with translations of some stanzas from Dante's Purgatorio. His version in unrhymed tercets of the The Divine Comedy was published in 1867. It is among the most faithfully literal translations of Dante ever made (“The only merit my book has it that it is exactly what Dante says, and not what the translator imagines he might have said if he had been an Englishman.”). Nevertheless his version is replete with wonderfully musical passages as well as many which are marred by silly archaisms and unfortunate infelicities. Longfellow lectured on Dante and was a devoted member of the Nineteenth Century Dante Club at Harvard where he taught for 18 years. In one of his lectures he describes Dante's great work as reminding him of

“ . . . the Roman aqueducts, built solidly with those stanzas, like blocks of granite, piled one upon the other, and not cemented together, but held in their places by their own weight and the clamps of the rhyme. Magnificent and beautiful structure! As you stand beneath it, you can hear the living waters of song flowing on from century to century.”