2025-26 Cycle - Update + Resources

Happy New Year!

Hello all,

I’m writing with an update since my inquiry into the next cycle that I posted a couple of weeks ago.

For starters, multiple people have expressed interest in doing it again regardless of translation, but have all expressed interest in an English translation - so that’s what we’ll do. (At least one person asked me about Shakespeare, and while deeply flattered, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere for that. I’m just the Dante guy, and I don’t think I have it in me to take more on right now.)

I previously expressed deep interest in doing my favorite translation, that of Ciardi, but it’s not in the public domain. (If you have interest in going “off the beaten path” and towards your own translation, this would be my first recommendation, and easily worth the investment into the physical copy.) I have, for the hell of it (pun very intended), submitted a request to its publishers asking if it could be reproduced here. My guess is an immediate “no” for many reasons, but at least I can say I tried…

In the meantime: I’ve been doing research on the other public domain translations out there that actually cover the whole Comedy. (While I previously mentioned Cary’s work, I’m now not convinced it’s a great choice for us.) I owe gracious thanks to both the Wikipedia listings and to Brother Michael F. Meister, FSC, PhD of Saint Mary’s College of California for maintaining this website, complete with a collection of many resources, collected translations, artwork, and his own striking prose translation.

The tl;dr: There is a reason Longfellow’s translation is that famous. I think it does a very good job with accessibility and clarity, and the notes accompanying it go a long way. I’ve also heard from at least a couple of people who have started and stopped partway through, for life reasons of one kind or another (I’m sure many others have as well!), so I’m very tempted to stick with the same text for round three, and will probably do that unless I get intense pushback. I’m inclined to argue that it’s better to finish one all the way through than to get bits and pieces of a few - though I suppose that depends on your goals.

Having said that, someone asked about terza rima translations, which do have a very good feel to them. I may individually point them and other interested parties to those translations by Melville Best Anderson, Charles Edwin Wheeler, and/or Edward Wilberforce. None of these are currently formatted in a great way for my purposes, and while I’d eventually like to get at least one of them transcribed and submitted for consideration to Project Gutenberg (in whatever channels that takes), I’m not convinced I can do that level of work and upkeep for this cycle. (Also, while I’m personally opposed to using a prose translation, I have found many that seem very interesting - Tozer’s stands out.)

I also don’t think I want to do this during the upcoming cycle, but with the Inferno being the most famous and the most translated, we could do a “cycle” where we go through three different translations of the Inferno in a year. (Eleanor Vinton Murray’s translation interests me, for example, but she falls into the category of authors who only translated the Inferno.)

Finally - amidst my research, I have also found an Internet Archive link to the so-called “Dante Dictionary” by Paget Toynbee. Toynbee has collected the terms/places/people/etc. that appear in the Comedy into a single place for reference. It’s true that most/many of these are easily searchable - but it still might be a very useful reference for us to have, especially if we ever do a translation without strong supporting notes.

I end with an image of “Dante Meditating on the Divine Comedy” by Jean Jacques Feuchere, sourced from here, which very well describes how this research has all left my (relatively) noviced self:

Thank you again for being here!

Flynn