The Vision of Dante: Cary's Translation of 'The Divine Comedy' by Edoardo Crisafulli (review)

Abstract

838 Reviews While the case for France's global dominance may remain not proven, Ferguson offershere a fascinatingly differentslant on France's perennial love affairwith food. University of Glasgow Elizabeth Moles The Vision ofDante: Cary's Translation of 'The Divine Comedy'. By Edoardo Crisafulli . Market Harborough: Troubador. 2003. xii + 348 pp. ?25; ?13.99. ISBN 1-899293-09-4. H. F. Cary's translation of Dante into Miltonic blank verse was one of the most culturally significant productions of nineteenth-century Britain. Writers as different as John Keats and John Ruskin carried it about their person and, illustrated by Gustave Dore, it would grace many a Victorian parlour table. Through its cunning allusiveness to a broad range of English poetry, it enabled a foreign medieval Catholic poet to be assimilated to British culture to such an extent that the Commedia came to supplant even Paradise Lost as the epic by which the nineteenth century sought to understand itself. Edoardo Crisafulli's study, therefore, is most timely in being the firstbook to con? centrate solely on Cary's translation, although Valeria Tinkler-Villani has included extensive discussion of Cary's project in her Visions ofDante in English Poetry (Ams? terdam: Rodopi, 1989) and Ralph Pite has traced the influence of Cary's translation on the Romantic movement in poetry (The Circle of our Vision: Dante's Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)). One of the most impressive features of Crisafulli's book is his close attention to the religious setting of Cary's work, and he situates it carefully in relation to the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles and infers a broadly 'Ghibelline' reading of the poem, appropriate to a national Church that can read Dante's sympathies with a universal Emperor as prefiguring its own establishment, and which shares a Ghibelline antipathy to papal powers. Crisafulli notes specific instances when Cary's translation strengthens the antipapal language in a manner significant in the context of growing calls for Catholic emancipation in the early nineteenth century. In contrast, this study emphasizes the interpretative nature of Cary's understanding of textual criticism, which leads him to present the reader with a range of possible manuscript readings of debated passages and which prevents a totalizing reading of the source text. While offeringconsiderable insight into the cultural production of Cary's transla? tion, this study has a second focus in offeringa new model of translation study, and about half the book is taken up with this topic. In this context, Crisafulli argues for an eclectic approach that seeks to take account both of poststructuralist valorization of difference rather than equivalence in translation and empirical systemization to argue for an eclectic 'historical empiricism' (p. 78). This reviewer is not a scholar of translation studies but did note that there seemed to be a tension between the broadly synchronic nature of translation theory and the diachronic nature of Cary's project, which, indeed, seeks to dramatize historical distance itself as part of its own translation theory. Crisafulli himself seemed most alert to the problem and one had a sense of him struggling with the limits of his methodology. In his conclusion, for example, he states that Cary was a 'conservative' translator 'only from a stylistic point of view' (p. 331) in an attempt to use and also question translation-theory categories, but even Cary's deliberate use of archaisms, Anglo-Saxon-style alliteration, and King James Bible sublimity can all be attributed to a historicist project to subsume Dante within English culture and, importantly, to give the nascent English literary canon Dante's own cultural prestige. While this book agrees with my historicist reading, it still seems to conclude that Cary's translation seeks to render Dante historically MLR, 100.3, 2005 839 'ancient' by means of its archaizing strategy,rather than seeing him 'fill in' the histor? ical gap between source and target text. There are, indeed, not just Renaissance but eighteenth-century and even contemporary poetic allusions throughout the Vision, including references to poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. This is a new and implicitly ' Whiggish' historicism which sits uneasily with translation-theory formalism. Despite these caveats about translation studies, Crisafulli's chapter...