Which Translation of Dante's Divine Comedy Should You Read?

In brief: for a first reading, take Longfellow, who follows Dante line by line. To study the poem with the Italian at hand, use Norton's prose or Carlyle's. If you want a rhymed English poem, read Plumptre or Sibbald, who keep Dante's interlocking rhyme. If you love English verse for its own sake, read Cary, whose translation the Romantics read.

Why the choice matters

Dante wrote the Commedia in terza rima, a chain of three-line stanzas rhymed aba, bcb, cdc, in which each stanza hands a rhyme on to the next. The form keeps the poem moving forward, and it is very hard to reproduce in English, which has far fewer rhymes than Italian. Every translator must choose what to give up: the rhyme, the line, the exact sense, or the plainness of Dante's speech. The seven translations on this site make seven different choices, and each can be read in full, canto by canto.

The best way to compare them is to read the same passage in each. Here is the poem's first line, in Dante's Italian:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

The verse translations

Henry Francis Cary (1814). Cary's Inferno came out in 1805, and the complete poem in 1814. It is in Miltonic blank verse:

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray

Cary does not rhyme and does not keep Dante's tercets; he turns the poem into something like Paradise Lost. Coleridge praised the translation, and it was the Dante of Keats and of most English readers for half a century. It reads beautifully as English poetry, but it is the furthest of the seven from the sound of the original.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867). Longfellow gives up rhyme to keep everything else: the three-line stanza, and very nearly a line of English for each line of Italian.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

The word order is sometimes Italian ("a forest dark"), but the translation is faithful and clear, and you can always find your place in a commentary, because the line numbers match. For most first-time readers it is the one to choose.

E. H. Plumptre (1886–87). Plumptre, Dean of Wells, translated the whole poem in terza rima:

When our life's course with me had halfway sped,
I found myself in gloomy forest dell,
Where the straight path beyond all search had fled.

Here you can hear the chain of rhymes that drives Dante's verse. The cost is visible too: the rhyme brings in words Dante did not write (the "dell", the path that "fled"). Read Plumptre for the music, with a literal version open beside him.

Ichabod Charles Wright (1833) and James Romanes Sibbald (1884). Two rhymed versions of the Inferno alone, both in tercets that keep Dante's chain of rhymes. Sibbald's is the livelier:

In middle of the journey of our days
I found that I was in a darksome wood—
The right road lost and vanished in the maze.

The prose translations

Charles Eliot Norton (1891–92). Norton, Longfellow's friend and Harvard's professor of the history of art, translated the whole poem into plain, exact prose, with a short summary at the head of each canto:

Midway upon the road of our life I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been missed.

Prose cannot give Dante's music, but it gives his sense with the fewest additions. It is the best version for study, and a good companion to any of the verse translations.

John Aitken Carlyle (1849). The Inferno only, by Thomas Carlyle's brother, in the revised Temple Classics text of 1900. It is even more literal than Norton, and it puts square brackets round the words it has to add:

In the middle of the journey of our life I [came to] myself in a dark wood [where] the straight way was lost.

Which should you read?

• Reading Dante for the first time: Longfellow, with the study guide for each canto.
• Studying the poem closely, or reading the Italian: Norton for the whole poem, Carlyle for the Inferno.
• To hear the rhyme: Plumptre for the whole poem, Sibbald for the Inferno.
• For the history of English poetry: Cary, the Dante the Romantics knew.

A good plan is to read one verse and one prose translation side by side, a canto at a time.

All seven texts are in the public domain. Each work page gives the edition it was taken from.