Dante's Divine Comedy

Dante and I go way back to my sophomore year of high school when I was introduced to The Inferno in my high school Humanities class. For many students and readers, The Inferno is the only exposure one gets to Dante. This is a great shame. I was fortunate to attend Reed College where I read the entire Divine Comedy in their one year Humanities 1 class. This experience of reading two different translations of Dante was instructive for me too. I think like many readers, I assumed you could just do a single word for word (Babelfish) type of translation. I think it was Robert Frost who said something about poetry being what cannot be translated. This is often true, because when you can experience the mastery of someone like Shakespeare in his original English, you might wonder how this is going to be conveyed in another language.
My first reading of Dante was through John Ciardi's poetic rendering that attempted to partially preserve the terza rima of the original Italian. I think it is in his Purgatorio that he provides his method for translating Dante into English poetry. While I can appreciate the work he does, it shows how much of the original Italian is lost even with an American poet like John Ciardi, who freely admitted he was no Italianist.
At Reed, we read the full translation of Allen Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum is a poet too, but he is also a very accomplished translator of modern Italian poets like Quasimodo and Ungaretti, as well as being an award-winning translator of Virgil's Aeneid, which he translated prior to tackling the Divine Comedy. Mandelbaum does not attempt to keep the Italian form of terza rima, but I think he does a masterful job of translating the poetry of Dante into English. I did study Italian at KU and was, at one time, able to read Dante in the original Italian. Thus far, Mandelbaum is my preferred translator of Dante.
When I transferred back to KU, I took the class offered by KU's Dante scholar Richard Kay on the Divine Comedy. Professor Kay choose yet another translation: the Penguin version by Mark Musa. I asked him why he did Musa over Mandelbaum. He admitted that Mandelbaum is a more poetic and faithful translation, but that Musa's contained much better end notes for students. I would agree with this assessment and Musa's translation does have some good touches of the original poetry too.
Since I last read an entire complete translation of Dante, there have been several notable translations of parts or all of the Commedia. I have read Robert Pinsky's Inferno, which reminds me of Ciardi's, only updated. I think Pinsky does an admirable job, but it is not Dante.
I have, but have not read the translation by the Hollander's, though it is on my list of books to get too. I also want to read W.S. Merwin's Purgatorio, which is often not read like the final section of the Paradiso. Other translators like C.H. Sisson and Michael Palma have made translations too, so there is still plenty of work to be done in these areas. As I work through these various translations, I will be sure to post my thoughts here.
Happy Reading, pilgrims!
Czar