With my last nomination I will fourth Keats.
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Originally Posted by issybird
Paola, I'm very interested in your assessment of the Divine Comedy translations. Every now and then I check and they all seem flawed in some respect. The most recent translation (that I've read about), by Clive James (!), was well-reviewed in the NYT. I read Ciardi in college and I think that one is still held in good repute.
ETA: I'm ashamed to say I've never heard of Montale or Ungaretti, which I shall have to remedy despite poor translations.
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Well, first of all I am biased: especially the Inferno is something that is drilled into each school kid, so even if the words are difficult to understand, it is very musical, so hard to render I guess (it does rhyme). I have had a look around, and for the moment the one that seems closer "music wise" is Dorothy Sayer's translation (I've found it in Penguin).
Montale and Ungaretti: they are roughly the same generation, both fought in the great war.
Montale is probably best described by the motivation for his Nobel Prize for literature 1975, which states
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"for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions"
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You could say he is somewhat negative, and when I say this I think mostly of Ossi di seppia/Cuttlefish bones - he is rather musical, and this is lost in translation.
Ungaretti is very different in style: he is one of our "ermetic" poets, his lines are distilled to the utmost, and so hard to render -
this review in the Guardian makes the point much more effectively than I could ever do.