Abstract
This chapter concentrates on the translations of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton. It illustrates how Emerson’s pioneering effort to translate the Vita nuova for the first time in 1843 (a translation published only in 1957) aimed to go beyond the appreciation of Dante’s early poetics in the Victorian age, which revolved around the distinction between Dante, the author of the libello and of the Inferno, respectively. Twenty years later, thanks to Charles Eliot Norton’s The New Life of Dante: An Essay, with Translation (1859), followed by his complete translation in 1867, Dante’s early work was finally canonized in the English-speaking world, among the masterpieces of European literature. Both Emerson’s and Norton’s translations are studied per se and in their cultural context. This chapter shows Emerson advanced a highly original view, where the Vita nuova was in fact a secular book written in a religious way, or indeed ‘the Bible of love’, whereas Norton, with his pioneering essay laid the foundations for the American tradition of Dante studies.
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