Professor Norton's Translation of Dante.

Perhaps the most significant literary work done by a Harvard professor for a number of years is Professor Norton's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Hell, the first division of the poem, is as yet the only volume published, but the Purgatory and Paradise will probably be out before the winter is over.

The translation is in prose and any discussion upon its merit involves the question of metrical form versus prose as a medium of translation.

In the preface of the first volume Professor Norton sets forth briefly his reasons for choosing prose. The impossibility of adopting the "terza rima" which Dante used because of the paucity of rhyme words in English as compared with Italian throws out all chances of producing an English version of the Divine Comedy, which, even approximately, shall produce the effect of the original. Since the form of the translation must differ in the effect it produces from the original, is it better to use an English metre or English prose? Professor Norton has judged that the literal prose version which the clear and simple verse of Dante allows, gives a fuller sense of the poem than can blank verse; for in using blank verse the translator is often forced into awkward inversions and tempted to elaborate displays of rhetoric.

Cary, as is said, has Miltonized Dante and Mr. Longfellow's work while the best in metre is often misleading. In Professor Norton's translation the sense is rendered literally and almost word for word in prose, perfect in strength and elegance. The charm imparted by such flawless form in which each word chosen is felt to be the only word perfectly suited, is so great that one reads and forgets to miss the swing of a metre.

It is not to be supposed that all tastes will prefer a prose Dante to the Dantes of Longfellow or even Cary, but to the reader who is at all familiar with the music of the Italian Dante it is hardly to be doubted but that Professor Norton's will be the most generally satisfactory English rendering. Such a reader in the vividly reproduced sentences of the great poem will have suggested in his own mind the melody of the Italian.

A series of notes run through the book and explain such difficult passages as are necessary to a clear understanding of the poem's meaning.

It is interesting to know and to remember while reading the "Hell," that Mr. Lowell to whom the translation is dedicated, read the proofs of the first volume and of the first cantos of the second, the Purgatory.