My own English translation of Dante's "Inferno":
a foreword
by Michele Fanelli
"Nec mi animi fallit, Graiorum obscura reperta
Difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse,
Propter aegestatem linguae et rerum novitatem."
Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura
Pushing aside my keyboard, after writing the last verse of my English translation of Dante's "Inferno", I feel that I'm leaving behind me an immensely entertaining occupation, and at the same time that a very heavy burden has been taken off my shoulders...
Why, one is bound to ask, should anyone undertake the near-impossible (and anyway dubious) task of attempting -now, on the eve of the XXIst Century- another English version of the famous XIVth Century Italian poem?
Why, moreover, such a farfetched idea should come to a civil engineer (with only a fair working knowledge of modern, "international" English)?
I can give only some partial, lame explanations.
On reading Dante's masterpiece I was always overwhelmed by the impression of being transported by a "vehicle" of incredible power; I know that this impression is shared by other people.
The mechanics and structure of the tool he used (and largely invented), namely early Italian, are very interesting to analize. His use of verbal imagery is masterful; his power of synthesis is matchless, so that with a very sparing use and choice of words he gets the maximum of vivid representation (as attested by the numerous illustrators who were drawn to attempt visual representations of Dante's creation: Doré, Dalì, to name just two).
A man of mixed culture (in my case a "classical" high-school education and technical University courses) very easily can get an itch to mimic, or "reverse-engineer", this use of the linguistic structure. I felt, at several points in my life, that the next best thing ...
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