Excerpt from Purgatory
The difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of adequately reproducing in any language the poetry of another, is one of the commonplaces of criticism, and it has by no one been more forcibly stated than by Dante himself. 'Nulla cosa," he says, "per legame musaico armonizzata si puo della sua loquela in altra trasmutare sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia" (Convito, i. 7). The sweetness and music of a poem depend upon the conditions of its language; they cannot be transferred by mere imitation of the form of the original; they can only be reproduced, if at all, by being conformed to the requirements of the new medium. The least literal of translations is that which follows closest to the order of the words, the structure of the sentence, the arrangement of the period. The least harmonious of verse translations is that which is set to a foreign and unfamiliar metre.
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