Dante in English Author:Dante Alighieri Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INFERNO:I Upon the journey of our life midway I roused and found me in a gloomy wood, Where all bewildered was the forthright way.. Ah, what a task it ... more »were to tell how rude And harsh that savage, shaggy wilderness, s By thought whereof my terror is renewed! Death hath but little more of bitterness. But, of the good there found to make display, What I saw there beside I will express. How 'twas I entered I cannot rightly say, 10 So heavy were my senses then with sleep When from the path of truth I went astray. 1-3. midwav, way. Such rime is not uncommon in the Inferno: cp. ribelli, belli, iii:38-40; parte, diparte, iv:71-75; tuttavia, via, iv:65-7; pulcro, appulcro, vii :58-60; buffa, rabbuffa, vii :61-63; giunte, disgiunte, xiii:139-141. Cp. sdegna, indegna, iii :50-54. The present translation opens, therefore, with a "cheap" rime, has another such in 5-7, and employs the rime-sound of 1-3 again in 8-10-12, 17-19-21, 35-37-39. The rime-inadequacies are thus obvious at the outset. 2. mi ritrovai. Most of the earlier translators rendered this "found myself," so also Longfellow and Norton, I Kit Vernon cites Giuliani.s comment on the word (1861) that ritrovarsi means "to recover one.s senses, come to one.s self;"—far more than mi trovai, "found myself." Johnson renders "roused to find myself within a forest in darkness," thus lengthening Dante.s phrase over into line 3. 3. smarrita. Ford, Ilaselfoot, Longfellow, Norton, Johnson, render this as "lost." The epithet was discussed by John Fiske in his review of Longfellow.s Dante; Fiske there says that "about the word smarrita there is thrown a wide penumbra of meaning which does not belong to the word lost. By its diffuse connotation the word smarrita calls up in our minds an adequate picture ...« less