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12 July 2022

The Divine Comedy in other languages (second part)

Author:
Mirko Tavoni, University of Pisa

In the first sixty years of the twentieth century, translations in a variety of verse forms (alexandrine, deca-dodecasyllabic, free), variously rhymed and non-rhymed, were published by translators of different styles: philosophers and theologians (Amédée de Margerie, 1900; Joachim Berthier, 1921), Italianists (Henri Hauvette, 1921; Pierre Ronzy, 1960), musicologists and art historians (Adolphe Meliot, 1908; Joseph André Pératé, 1922-1924), archivists (Henri Longnon, 1931), poets and writers (Louise Espinasse-Mongenet, 1912; René-Albert Gutmann, 1928; Martin-Saint-René and Gustave Lucien René Martin, 1935; André Doderet, 1938; Alexandre Masseron, 1947-1950). However, the two most important translations (published on seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1965) are the works by the Italianist and Dante scholar at the Collège de France André Pézard, translator and commentator of the pleiad of Dante’s complete works, and by the poet, militant critic, and Italianist Jacqueline Risset (1985-1990). André Pézard’s translation, in unrhymed decasyllables, is characterised by a systematic use of archaisms and dialectal expressions intended to reproduce the multilingualism of Dante’s text. In tune with Gianfranco Contini’s “idea of Dante”, Pézard problematises, taking a critical-philological stance, the exact meaning and connotation of each expression he would translate, and aims at producing a text that gives the French reader an experience comparable to that of the Italian reader with respect to Dante’s language – that is to say, one that would make a French reader perceive the linguistic distance that separates us from it (although the distance between modern and old Italian is, as we know, much smaller than that which divides modern and old French). His solution has been accused of evoking more the French than the Italian Middle Ages, and of making Dante’s reading a scholarly pursuit, by alienating the general public. We can all agree, however, with Jacqueline Risset’s observation that Dante’s language certainly did not look to the past but to the future. An associate of the avant-garde magazine Tel Quel, Risset unequivocally aimed at a literal, clear and modern translation, even sacrificing the regularity of poetic metre for the immediacy of meaning, thereby enhancing not only readability – which undoubtedly opened the text to a wider audience in France – and the typically Dantean effect of quickly-paced diction. 

Almost reacting to what Risset herself described as Dante’s ‘absence’ from French literature – in the sense of some form of otherness embodied by Dante with respect to his enduring classicist imprint – the last thirty years have seen translations that continue to experiment with a variety of metrical solutions, including polymetric loose verse (Lucienne Portier, 1987; musician Marc Didier Garin, 2003), polymeter third rhyme (the Bosnian Serb Kolja Mićević, 1998), unrhymed decasyllables (Marc Scialom, 1996), alternating decasyllables and dodecasyllables (the poet Jean-Charles Vegliante, 1996-2007),  decasyllable tercets (Danièle Robert, 2016), and even -strangely enough – octosyllabic verses (René de Ceccatty, 2017).

The first nineteenth-century Spanish translation, written in hendecasyllable tercets (1868), was the work of the aristocrat, politician, soldier and man of letters Juan Manuel de la Pezuela y de Ceballos, followed by the prose translation by the engineer Manuel Aranda y Sanjuán (1871). Juan de la Pezuela, son of the Viceroy of Peru and himself born in Lima, held colonial government posts in Puerto Rico and Cuba, and his translation was the first to spread a knowledge of Dante in Latin America. For thirty years president of the Real Academia de la Lengua, his interest in Dante was purely literary. In contrast, Bartolomé Mitre, Argentine statesman, journalist and man of letters, and president of the Argentine Republic from 1862 to 1868, came from a completely different perspective when he produced his translation in tercets, published between 1893 and 1897, into the Spanish spoken in the Rio de la Plata. This project, building on the humanist tradition introduced by Andrés Bello – Simón Bolívar’s mentor -, on the reading of national poetry – a tradition inaugurated by Esteban Echeverría, poet and politician inspired by Mazzini’s Romanticism -, and on the national epic poem Martín Fierro, appeared to Mitre as a true ‘act of government’, by which to show the world the modernity and historical maturity of Argentina, gaining equal footing with the United States (and Longfellow’s translation of the Comedy in 1867), and at the same time pay homage to Italy, which had recently reached its political unity. The name and myth of Dante in Latin America, especially in Argentina, were in fact, and still are to this day, linked to the large-scale exodus from Italy, whereby Dante’s identity merged with the feeling of nostalgia and pride for the distant homeland, and was celebrated with the live reading of his canticas in theaters, with his statues erected in Argentinian and Italian cities, and with the impressive architectural feat of the Palacio Barolo in Buenos Aires, the 100-metre high structure (one metre per cantica) reproducing the cosmology of the Divine Comedy.

Translations from the 20th century and beyond include the ones produced in Spain by Arturo Cuyás de la Vega (1965, prose), Antonio J. Onieva (1965, loose verse), Ángel Crespo (1973-1977, loose verse), Nicolás González Ruiz (1973, terza rima verse), Luis Martinez de Merlo (1988, loose hendecasyllables); and the ones produced in Argentina by Enrique Martorelli Francia (1967, hendecasyllabic tercets), Ángel J. Battistessa (1968), Antonio Jorge Milano (2002), and Claudia Fernández Speier (2021). 

The first translations into Portuguese were produced in the same years in Portugal and Brazil: from Portugal, the prose translation by Joaquim Pinto de Campos (1886) and the terza rima translation by Domingo José Ennes (1887-18889); from Brazil, the loose hendecasyllable translation by Francisco Bonifácio de Abreu (1888) and the translation into tercets by José Pedro Pinheiro (1888-1907). Throughout the 20th century and beyond, the Brazilian translations of the Comedy – by João Ziller (1953), Haroldo de Campos (1976), Cristiano Martins (1976-1979), Hernani Donato (1981), Eugenio Mauro (1998), Jorge Wanderley (2004) – surpass the Portuguese translations by Marques Braga (1955-1958) and by Vasco Graça Moura (1995). 

The first modern Catalan translation, by Narcís Verdaguer i Callís, was published on the occasion of the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death in 1921, followed, in 1923, by the work of Llorenç de Balanzó. The best-known translation, by Josep Maria de Sagarra, in rhymed decasyllables, began to be serialized in 1935 on the newspaper Veu de Catalunya, but was discontinued at the start of the civil war and could only be completed and published in 1947-1951, when the authorisation of the Francoist government was, after much effort, finally obtained. This was followed in 2001 by Joan F. Mira’s translation in unrhymed decasyllables. 

The first translation into Romanian (1860), written in archaising prose, owes its origins to intellectual and politician Ion Heliade Rădulescu, promoter of a modernisation-standardisation of the Romanian language, open to the influence of Italian. The two cornerstone translations are by the poet and writer George Coșbuc, published posthumously in 1925, and by the poet and writer Eta Boeriu (1965), both in terza rima verse.

A translation into Occitan, in prose, was produced in 1967 by the Provençalist Jean Roche, and a translation into Galician, in tercets, was produced by the Galician writer and politician Darío Xohán Cabana in 1990. The first translation of the Comedy into Logudorese Sardinian was completed by the clergyman Pedru Casu and dates back to 1929, followed by the translation of the Inferno by yet another clergyman, Paolo Monni, in 2000, both in hendecasyllable tercets. The Comedy’s translations into Friulian are only recent, much like Friulian’s claim to language status: after the incomplete translation in loose verse by Domenico Zannier, a member of the clergy, completed in 1997, we have the translation of the Inferno in tercets by Ermes Culòs, a Friulian who migrated to Canada (published online, 2006), and by Pierluigi Visintin (2011), and a full translation, also in tercets, by Aurelio Venuti (2015). 

There are nearly forty translations into Italian dialects, equally distributed between northern, central and southern dialects, produced from the early 19th century to the present day. Honourable mention should go to the ‘disguised’ eight-line-stanza translation of the first canticas of the Inferno into the Milanese dialect Carlo Porta works on starting in 1804, in the wake of the translation of Jerusalem Delivered by the greatest Milanese dialect poet of the 18th century, Domenico Balestrieri.

Other translations into Germanic languages appear in the second half of the 19th century. In Dutch, the Inferno is translated in terza rima by the poet Jan Jakob Lodewijk ten Kate in 1876; the full poem was translated by the poet Jacques Charles Rensburg in 1906-1908, by the poet Albert Verwey in 1923, by the clergyman Christinus Kops in 1930, by the otherwise unknown Betsy van Oyen-Zeeman in 1932 (Kops’s translation is in loose hendecasyllables, while the others translated in terza rima). In Danish, we have the translations of the Comedy by the poet and critic Christian Knud Frederik Molbech, in terza rima (1851-1863) and by the scholar Ole Meyer, in loose hendecasyllables (2000); in Swedish, translations of the Comedy come from Nils Lovén, a member of the clergy (1856-1857),  and from poet Aline Pipping (1915), scientist Arnold Norlind (1921), and poet Ingvar Björkeson (1983) – the latter in loose hendecasyllables, the former in terza rima. The first translation into Norwegian, in terza rima, doesn’t appear until 1965, by the poets Henryk Rytter and Sigmund Skard, whereas the loose hendecasyllable translation by the philologist Magnus Ulleland is as recent as 1993. The  first Icelandic translation of 12 canticas of the Comedy, in terza rima, is completed in 1965 by the poet Guðmundur Böðvarsson, whereas the full prose translation of the Comedy is as recent as 2010, by Erlingur E. Halldórsson.

In 1963, the Irish mathematician and priest Pádraig de Brún (also known as Patrick Joseph Browne) published a Gaelic translation of the Inferno in loose verse.

Moving eastwards, the first Greek translation is limited to the Inferno, by the Cephalonia-born Panaghiotis Vergotìs; the second, and full translation of the Comedy in the katharèvousa version of Greek (the high, literary variety of Greek diglossia), in “plain” dodecasyllables (with the accent on the penultimate syllable of the verse), by Konstantinos Mousouros Pasha (1882-1883), who, as his name implies, was a subject, as well as a diplomat, of the Ottoman Empire. This was followed by Geōrgios Kalosgouros’ translation of the Inferno (1905), but the most valuable translation was that of the full Comedy, in dimotikì (the low, popular variety of Greek diglossia), in loose hendecasyllables, by the poet Nikos Kazantzakis, a European-trained intellectual. Published in 1934, then profoundly modified in tune with the writing of his own poem Odyssey, and published in a final edition in 1954-1955, it exhibits great expressionistic force in its rendering of Dante’s language.

Turning to Slavic languages, stretching from the Adriatic Sea to the Urals, and bearing in mind the fundamental, cultural-historical division between Latin Slavic languages (i.e. Catholic, where Latin as the language of scholars, and spelling uses Latin characters (Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Polish), and Orthodox Slavic languages, where Greek/ecclesiastical Slavonic is the language of scholars, and spelling uses Cyrillic characters (Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian), there is a prevalence of translations of the Comedy in Latin Slavia, predictably, given the different affinity/compatibility between Dante’s world, and the two different Slavias. In particular, there are translations into Slovene and Croatian – the languages of Dalmatia tightly connected to Venice for centuries; after all, the Croatian humanist Marko Marulić, a.k.a. Marcus Marulus Spalatensis, had translated the first cantica of the Inferno into Latin in 1480, as had his Italian colleagues Giovanni Bertoldi da Serravalle and Matteo Ronto. There is also a strong presence of Polish, a sign of a particularly Italophile culture. But over the 19th and 20th centuries, starting with Romanticism, Dante’s work spreads more widely across Europe, and, less intensely, penetrates into Serbia, Macedonia, and above all Russia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria.

Indeed, the oldest translation of the Comedy is Russian: the physician Dmitry Egorovič Min translated the Inferno in 1855, in tercets; it then took another thirty years – until his death in 1885 -, to translate the other two canticles. The complete edition came out posthumously, after overcoming Tsarist censorship issues, only in 1907, and was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Slightly later came the first Polish translation, in alternating couplets and rhymes, by the Romantic poet Julian Korsak, published posthumously in 1860; this was followed in 1864-1865 by the unpublished translation by the writer, and notable novelist, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, and in 1870 by the loose hendecasyllable translation by the jurist and poet Antoni Robert Stanisławski. In 1878-1882, the translation by the Bohemian poet Jaroslav Vrchlický appeared, and was intended to demonstrate the range of the Czech language – an aim that can be assumed to be present in many translation attempts into languages without great literary traditions, and always lurking in the foreground under a militant guise in the case of translation attempts in minor languages. Thus, in the entire domain of Slavic languages, in the 19th century there are only five translations of the Comedy, and three of them are in Polish. 

Over the course of the 20th century, starting from the Adriatic coast, we find translations into Slovene, of the full Comedy and in tercets, by the theologian Jože Debevec (1910-1914), the literary critic and poet Tine Debeljak (1960), and the writer and politician Andrej Capuder (1972); and the translation of the Inferno and Purgatorio by the poet Alojz Gradnik (1959-1965). In Croatian, translations by the painter and politician Isidor Kršnjavi (full translation, 1909-1915), the poet and politician Vlamidir Nazor (Inferno, 1943), and the scholar Mihovil Kombol (translation of the full Comedy in tercets, 1948-1960, with the last part of the Paradiso completed by Olinko Delorko). In Czech, we have the terza rima translation of the Comedy by the polyglot Otto František Babler (1952), assisted by the poet Jan Zahradníček, whose work was not credited because he was persecuted by the Communist regime; and of the Inferno only by the scholar of ancient philosophy Vladimir Mikeš (1978). In Slovak, the translation of the Comedy by the scholar Jozef Felix and by the poet Viliam Turčány (1958-1982), and of the Inferno only by the scholar Karol Strmen (1965). The track record of the Polish language is remarkable. In addition to the three nineteenth-century translations mentioned above, there are four twentieth-century translations, all of them in full: the unpublished translation by S. R. Dembiński (1902); the “canonical” translation, in terza rima, by the Romanist and poet Edward Porębowicz (1925); and the translations by J. Michał Kowalski (1932) and Alina Świderska (1947). As evidence of continued interest in the Comedy, two more translations were produced in recent years: one by Agnieszka Kuciak (2006) and one by Jaroslaw Mikołajewski (2021). 

As to Orthodox Slavic languages we have, in Serbian, the Dragisa Stanojevic translation (unabridged, 1928); in Macedonian, the Georgi Stalev translation (unabridged, 1967); in Bulgarian, the translations by Konstantin Veličkov (Inferno, 1906), Kiril Christov (Inferno, 1935), and Ljuben Ljubenov (unabridged, 1975). In 1902, the full Russian translation by Nikolai Golovanov was published, and remained the reference edition until, in the Soviet era, it was replaced by the work of the Acmeist poet Michail Leonidovič Lozinskij (Stalin Prize 1946). Based on a groundwork of in-depth historical research, extensive and systematic contacts with scholars of various disciplines and thorough reflections on the potential of the Russian language, and produced for the most part in the heroic conditions of the siege of Leningrad, it is considered to have remarkable conceptual and stylistic quality. It was reprinted in 1968 as part of the complete edition of Dante’s works, and has remained the translation in use for decades. It is flanked in rapid succession, conceived during the Peretroika, by the loose hendecasyllable translation by the poet and scholar Aleksandr Anatol’evic Iljušin (1995), which adopts a variety of registers, a mixture of archaisms and neologisms, and inserts ecclesiastical Slavonic terms, far from the reach of the common reader; the translation by the sculptor, painter and actor Vladimir Lemport (1996-97), which comes accompanied by a figurative apparatus produced by himself, and is aimed at enhancing readability; and the translation by Vladimir Marancman (1999-2006), which aims at offering readers a translation that is comprehensible without losing a sense of historical distance. The first Ukrainian translation is by the Western Ukrainian poet, intellectual and politician, socialist and anti-Marxist-Anti-Russian nationalist, Ivan Nikolaevic Franko (Inferno, pre-1916). A second translation of the Inferno was produced in 1956 by the translator Petro Karmanskij together with Maxim Rilskij, the greatest Ukrainian poet of the 20th century; later, we have the full translation of the Comedy by the poet Evgen A. Drob’jazko (1968-1976), and again a translation of the Inferno, in terza rima, by the physicist and literary scholar Maxim Strikha (2013).

In the Baltic languages there are four translations of the Comedy: in Latvian, the translation by Jēkabs Māsens, in tercets (1921-1937) and by Valdis Bisenieks (1994); in Lithuanian the translations by Jurgis Narjauskas (1968-1971) and Aleksys Churginas (1968-1971).

In Albanian, and specifically in northern Gheg Albanian, we have a masterful full translation in tercets published in 1960-1966 by the poet and prose writer Pashko Gjeçi. This translation, to which Pashko Gjeçi devoted 22 years of his life, in semi-clandestine conditions, partly spent in forced labour, after he had studied as a boy at the Italian high school in Shkodra and after graduating from the University of Rome during the years of the Italian occupation (1939-1943), summarising half a century of Italy’s relations with Albania.

In Hungarian, we have one translation of the Comedy per century: by the scholar and politician Károly Szász, in tercets (1885-1899); by the poet Mihály Babits, also in tercets (1913-1923); and by the poet Ferenc Baranyi (2012) in loose hendecasyllables. In Finnish, the Comedy  was translated by the poet Eino Leino (1980). In Estonian, a language of the Finno-Ugric group, we have the translation by the poet Harald Rajamets (2011). In Basque, there is a prose translation, by Aita Santi Onaindia (1985).

The first translation of the Comedy into Hebrew is by the Triestine writer and physician Saul Formiggini, who published the Inferno in Trieste in 1869. The first full translation is by the Polish folklorist Immanuel Olsvanger, a Zionist, who emigrated to Ereẓ Israel in 1933 and published the translation in Jerusalem in 1943. The third is by Yoav Rinon, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who published the Inferno in Tel Aviv in 2013. A free translation of the Inferno into Yiddish was completed in 1932 by the Lithuanian Shmuel Kokhav-Shtern.

Given Malta’s close relations with Italy, the Comedy has been translated several times into Maltese (a variety of Arabic with strong Sicilian and Italian lexical components): the Inferno by Giovanni Sapiano Lanzon in 1905, and by Erin Serracino Inglott in 1964, the full Comedy, in terza rima, by the leading Maltese translator Alfred Palma in 1991.

The first full Arabic translation of the Comedy was published in Tripoli, under Italian rule, in 1930-1933, by the Italian language teacher Abbūd Abī Rashid’. We then have a rather rough version, of the Inferno alone, also in prose, published in Jerusalem in 1938 by the Palestinian Amīn Abū Sha’ar, which relies heavily, rather than on the original text, on Henry Francis Cary’s English translation (see above). Today, the two reference translations are the prose translation by the Egyptian Italianist Ḥasan ʿUthmān (1955-1969) and the verse translation by the Iraqi Kāzim Jihād (2002), lecturer in Paris. The former translation, accompanied by extensive research, aims at putting the Arab reader in the position to understand the fundamentals of the text and the world from which it comes, removing them from the uncomfortable issue of the alleged Islamic sources of Dante’s journey into the underworld, raised by the Spanish philologist Miguel Asín Palacios in 1919, which had absorbed all of the Arab world’s attention on the Divine Comedy in the 1930s, and presenting a Dante with a political-didactic imprint in line with the Nasserian orientation. The latter translation, on the other hand, rather privileges the formal aspects of poetic language. It is understood that the verses on “Muhammad the sower of discord” are censored in both translations.

In Turkish, we have the translation of the Comedy in prose by the Dante scholar Feridun Timur (1955-1956), and in loose verse by the writer and jurist Rekin Teksoy (1998). In Western Armenian, we have the translations by Father Arsenio Ghazikian (1902) and Father Athanasius Tiroyan (1930), in Armenian, the tercets translation by the philologist Arpun Dayan (1947). In Georgian, dating back to Soviet times, the translation by the scholar and politician Konstantin Gamsachurdia, in collaboration with the poet Konstantin Čičinadze (1933-1941). In Persian, building on poems and essays of mystical interest for Dante’s journey to the underworld, we have the translation by the writer Shojaeddin Shafa (1957) and the translation in verse by the poet Farideh Mahdavi-Damghani (2000). In Kazakh there is one translation in tercets by the poet Mukagali Makatajev (1971). 

In India, when part of the British Empire, interest in Dante began to spread, in the wake of the flourishing English Danteism discussed above, among poets and scholars in the second half of the 19th century: for example, Dante and Milton influenced the works of the Bengali poet and playwright Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873). But it was precisely the abundance and quality of English translations, combined with the status of English as an official language, that excluded the need to translate Dante’s work into local languages, which only emerged long after the country gained its independence, in very recent years. The first translation into an Indian language is in a Dravidian language, Malayalam, the national language of the state of Kerala, spoken ‘only’ by 33 million people: the poet Kilimanoor Ramakantan published his translation in verse in 2001. The second is in Bengali, an Indo-European language, which is, with its 200 million speakers, the second most widely spoken national language in the country, after Hindi: the journalist and novelist Shyamalkumar Gangopadhyay published his translation in terza rima in 2011.

An idea of Dante, in the absence of translated texts and the necessary skills to vaguely understand him – given the separateness of the respective cultural worlds – only reached China at the end of the 19th century. For example, the poet Liang Qichao paid him homage during his exile in Japan (1898-1912), by having him appear on stage, in his melodrama The New Rome, in Taoist guise, riding a crane, to recite a monologue on the new identity China should assume in such phase of profound transformation. For the seven-hundredth anniversary of his Death, in 1921, the young poet Qian Daosun, who had lived in Italy years earlier in the company of his father, offered a brave metrical version of the first three cantos of the Inferno, based on the work of his Japanese colleague Yamakawa Heizaburo, who in turn had relied on the German translation by Streckfuss and the English translations by Cary and Longfellow. Using the same method, based on 19th-century French and English translations, Wang Weike completed the first full prose translation of the Comedy in 1939. 

The impulse of those decades, albeit naive and ill-equipped, to get to know Dante was then brought to a halt by the cultural revolution: for the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth of 1965 there was absolute silence. The possibility of looking in that direction reopened at the end of the 1970s, and so Zhu Weiji was able to resume the translation of the Inferno which he had published in 1954, complete it, and publish the first full translation of the Comedy in verse in 1984: this was translated not from Italian but from the English translations by Cary, Carlyle and Longfellow. 

The first version translated from Italian was the one in prose by Tian Dewang, a professor at Beijing University, who began working on the translation in 1982, at the age of 73, after retiring, and completed it in 1997, for which he was awarded, by then Italian President Scalfaro, the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In 2000 it was the turn of Huang Wenjie’s verse translation, and in 2003 came the translation by Hongkong professor Huang Guobin (Western name Laurence K. P. Wong): a prosodic version deemed of exceptional rhythmic quality, with extraordinary translation solutions. Then came the version by the poet Zhang Shuguang (2005), who, however, regressed to relying on English translations. Most recently, we have a translation by Wang Jun (2021), Italianist with the Beijing University and award-winning translator of other Italian classics as well. As we can see, in the new century, China is making up for lost time.

Against this historical backdrop, a full translation in verse, unpublished, produced in the years 1910-1920 (!) by an Italian (!) appears of exceptional and surprising value. This is the translation by Father Agostino Biagi, O.F.M. (1882-1957). After being a missionary in China, returning to Italy and entering into a controversy with the Church of Rome, becoming an evangelical pastor and an early anti-fascist, being beaten up for his pro-communist political ideas, and being kept under the surveillance of fascist police headquarters across half of Italy, this man produced three different versions of the Comedy with three different Chinese metres, still to be stueid, but which the sinologists who gave them a first glance find impressive for their quality. These notebooks, donated to the Accademia della Crusca, are gradually being made available at https://accademiadellacrusca.it/it/contenuti/la-commedia-in-cinese-in-rete-il-primo-quaderno-del-fondo-biagi/24627

The Comedy reached Japan first. We already mentioned the verse translation of the entire poem by Yamakawa Heizaburo, professor of English at Sendai University, in 1914. The first translation from Italian was by the pastor and theologian Masaki Nakayama, in 1919; followed at a distance by the works of Soichi Nogami, an Italianist at the Universities of Kyoto and Tokyo, in 1962, and of Sukehiro Hirakawa, an expert in intercultural relations, in 1966.

The picture of the Far East is completed by five (!) Korean translations – I Sang-Ro (1959), Society of Thought and Cultural Studies (1960), Choi Mun-Seon (1960), Chung Noh-Young (1993), Kim Wi-Gyeong (2002) – and the Vietnamese translation by the Hanoi University Italianist Nguyen Van Hoan (2006).

And of course Esperanto makes its appearance, with three translations of the Comedy: by the Hungarian Kálmán Kalocsay (1933), and by the Italian Giovanni Peterlongo (1963) and Enrico Dondi (2006).

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