Credit is nevertheless given to Henry Cary’s splendid blank-verse version of 1814 (Coleridge adored it), and to the heroic 13-year enterprise of Dorothy Sayers for Penguin Books. Dante, as he observes, was never so “mealy-mouthed”. They preferred “a sound obscene” to the candid blast of Dante’s farts. (His award-winning West Indian travel books are worth hunting down.) Quoting the Italian maxim traduttore traditore (the translator as traitor), Thomson shows how prim English clerics flinched at words like “cul”, meaning arse. Ingeniously, he compares Dante’s castigation of a Florence fattened by banking and the sale of luxury goods to the outraged expostulations of Sir Harold Acton, when “weekend Surrey” arrived in Florence with vulgar expectations of Marmite jars and Twinings tea.Ī beguilingly light tone masks but never mars Thomson’s impressive scholarship. Playfully, he spots a modern Beatrice in the yearning lyrics that track a young beauty’s careless impact upon Brazilian beach-watchers (“But when she passes. (Almost half of the inhabitants of his Inferno are Florentine.) The fun comes when Thomson unleashes his imaginative gifts. Succinct but admirably wide-ranging, Ian Thomson’s richly illustrated exploration of Dante’s masterpiece opens with a brief account of the poet’s life both in Florence and later in the bitter exile during which he took revenge upon his native city.
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