Inferno, by Dr. John Carlyle, a man well known to the reader of
his brother's Correspondence. It was published forty years ago,
but it is still contemporaneous enough in style to answer every
need, and had Dr. Carlyle made a version of the whole poem I
should hardly have cared to attempt a new one. In my translation
of the Inferno I am often Dr. Carlyle's debtor. His conception of
what a translation should be is very much the same as my own. Of
the Purgatorio there is a prose version which has excellent
qualities, by Mr. W. S. Dugdale. Another version of great merit,
of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J. Butler.
It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe
much to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me
occasional excess of literal fidelity his English is now and then
somewhat crabbed. "He overacts the office of an interpreter," I
cite again from Howell, "who doth enslave himself too strictly to
words or phrases. One may be so over-punctual in words that he
may mar the matter."

I have tried to be as literal in my translation as was consistent
with good English, and to render Dante's own words in words as
nearly correspondent to them as the difference in the languages
would permit. But it is to be remembered that the familiar uses
and subtle associations which give to words their full meaning
are never absolutely the same in two languages. Love in English
not only SOUNDS but IS different from amor in Latin, or amore in
Italian. Even the most felicitous prose translation must fail
therefore at times to afford the entire and precise meaning of
the original.

Moreover, there are difficulties in Dante's poem for Italians,