Abstract
[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian]
 This paper outlines a new research project that aims to catalogue and investigate all booklength translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy in 100 countries. This will be, in fact, the first project to map the circulation and translation of Dante’s Commedia across the globe using statistics and analysis. Despite 700 years of Dante Studies, there still exists no comprehensive bibliography of translations; and critical studies still focus primarily on major languages, neglecting less-translated languages. The theoretical background of this project draws on Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’, David Damrosch’s theories of world literature, and Johan Heilbron’s world system of translations. This project will include three strands, which it aims to carry out with a team of scholars. The first will examine the empirical data about the translations of the Commedia and their circulation abroad. The second strand will study the formal aspects of the translations, seeing where the Commedia was translated into terza rima, and discovering the predominant metrical forms of translations across the world. The third strand will investigate how the Commedia was translated under censorship, in fascist regimes, theocracies, military dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, the Eastern Bloc and Communist dictatorships. As the project is still in the early stages of research I will not be giving conclusions, but rather suggesting new pathways for future development.
Highlights
The objective of the project under discussion is to map the circulation and translation of Dante’s Commedia across the globe using statistics
By choosing to concentrate on poetry translation, within the framework of a sociological approach to world literature, I intend to affirm Lawrence Venuti’s claim that poetry should be ‘move[d] closer to the centre of translation studies’ (Venuti 2013, 173). This project, which I envision completing with a team of scholars, will compile a bibliography of all translations of the Commedia, published in about 100 countries across the world
We will draw on a sociological approach to literary translation, adopting a distant-reading, quantitative methodology, inspired by Franco Moretti, Abram de Swaan, Johan Heilbron, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch
Summary
The objective of the project under discussion is to map the circulation and translation of Dante’s Commedia across the globe using statistics. The translator is the ideal reader, because he or she must re-create the source text in another language in another era In this sense, translations of Dante can reflect back on the original, illuminating passages and emphasizing others in innovative ways. The innovation of my project is, I believe, in studying one of the greatest poets in history with the tools and techniques belonging to the disciplines of translation studies and world literature To see this more clearly, the section of this paper will focus on the theoretical background behind this project
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