A Note on Languages

Earlier I said that English was a bad language to translate Italian into. That’s not exactly true, both languages are beautiful in their own right. What I mean by my statement is that translating Italian to English with clarity is a difficult task to accomplish. There are simply too many clashing differences between West Germanic English and the Romantic Italian language for there to ever be a clean, unedited translation.

Some of the obstacles to an easy translation include (but are not limited to):

• Gender rules (Italian has gender rules, and English does not. Ex. the coffee = il caffè (masculine))

• One Italian word can have multiple equivalents in English. (A lot of Italian words have multiple definitions depending on the context of the sentence. English tends to avoid that.) (This is mentioned in the annotations on line 72.)

• English has more rigid sentence structure rules than Italian. (For example, run-on sentences (which are considered normal in Italian) are not acceptable in English because it is seen as messy. If something needs to be discussed in more than a few words, punctuation needs to be used to break up the sentences.)

All of this means that when someone wants to translate something from one language into another, they need to spend a lot of time reading the passage, picking apart its meaning, then reformatting and rewriting the passage so that it would make sense to its new reader. That takes time, patience, and a knowledge of each language that a novice speaker would not have. It’s something that even masters of both languages have trouble with. And that’s without taking into consideration the culture gap and language drift that has occurred over the last six centuries.

So yes, translating 14th-century Tuscan Italian into 21st-century English is awful. Henry Longfellow, John Ciardi, and Mary Jo Bang all have my respect for taking on that challenge.