Ticknor and Fields and Bernhard Tauchnitzįirst complete translation by an American author. Dent and Sons and edited by Hermann Oelsner for their Temple Classics line in 1900

Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmanĭe Vries, Ibarra and Company Houghton, Mifflin and Company Became a bestseller and was required in schools Reprinted by Bohn's Library in 1850 and Chandos Classics in 1871ĭescribed by The Cambridge Companion to Dante as the first 'powerful, accurate, and poetically moving' translation. Volume 20 in the Harvard Classics series. Initially published anonymously įirst full translation of the Divine Comedy in English Many more translations of individual lines or cantos exist, but these are too numerous for the scope of this list.įirst translation of a full cantica into English. The table below summarises Cunningham's data with additions between 1966 and the present, many of which are taken from the Dante Society of America's yearly North American bibliography and Società Dantesca Italiana 's international bibliography. List of translations Ī complete listing and criticism of all English translations of at least one of the three cantiche (parts) was made by Cunningham in 1966. As of 2022, the Divine Comedy has been translated into English more times than it has been translated into any other language. Cunningham observed that the frequency of English Dante translations was only increasing with time. By 1906, Dante scholar Paget Toynbee calculated that the Divine Comedy had been touched upon by over 250 translators and sixty years later bibliographer Gilbert F.

This was over 300 years after the first Latin (1416), Spanish (1515), and French (1500s) translations had been written. Though English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton referenced and partially translated Dante's works in the 14th and 17th centuries respectively, it took until the early 19th century for the first full English translation of the Divine Comedy to be published. It has been translated over 400 times into at least 52 different languages. The poem is considered one of the greatest works of world literature and helped establish Dante's Tuscan dialect as the standard form of the Italian language. The three cantiche of the poem, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, describe hell, purgatory, and heaven respectively. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is an epic poem in Italian written between 13 that describes its author's journey through the Christian afterlife. A room in Dante's House Museum containing many translations of the Divine Comedy into different languages

Dante the divine comedy