Some people are allergic to footnotes, some love them, but I wonder whether this means that James's version will be recommended to those wishing to familiarise themselves with Dante's great work. Considering that anyone coming new to the poem isn't necessarily going to be au fait with 13th-century politics and religious struggle in Europe and the Italian peninsula, Italy not actually existing then, this means that he has to incorporate a certain amount of detail into the poem that would otherwise have nestled safely at the bottom of the page.
He hasn't made things much easier for himself by deciding not to have any notes. Only you're not going to know that unless you're reading it with the original by its side. I haven't, but then you don't have to be a translator, or even a poet, to wonder if the phrase "harden my heart's lake" earlier on in the first canto isn't somehow wrong, a mixing of metaphors: but there it is, in the Tuscan, " nel lago del cor m'era durata" (which also prefigures the revelation at the end of the Inferno that its deepest pit is frozen, not burning). Well, fair enough, it is his call, and as one reviewer of another translation of Dante once remarked, let he who has tried a canto cast the first stone. We don't need "not now" or "both born there", as we have in each case just been, or were about to have been, supplied that information, but in they go, to stuff the line. You see the first problem? Virgil, via James, starts off by sounding unable to say anything once.
Rispuosemi: " Non omo, omo già fui, e li parenti miei furon lombardi, mantovani per patrïa ambedui." Virgil, when Dante meets him, has been silent for centuries, so James lays on thick the notion that Virgil has to do some clearing of the tubes before he can achieve full eloquence. It's no wonder poets are so drawn to the work: the first part of the Comedy is itself an act of homage to a poet or, at the very least, its opening is as such, one poet speaking to another, honoured and delighted to be in his company.
The terza rima, which is Dante's basic unit for the poem, transfers naturally enough to English iambic pentameter, which is not strange to our ears, and the point is, as James says, to make the poem flow in English as it did in Italian. For, as Clive James notes in his excellent introduction to his translation, "for an Italian poet, it's not rhyming that's hard". I won't take up space by quoting it here, but it's remarkably good, and you can also see why he stopped after 50 lines. I have sacrificed all ornament to fidelity". He approached it the most difficult way, rendering "verse for verse the episode in the same metre. P oets can't help themselves from translating Dante, even if they are only going to do small chunks, as Byron did, having a stab at Francesca of Rimini's speech from the fifth canto of the Inferno.
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