List of English translations of the Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is an epic poem in Italian written between 1308 and 1321 that describes its author's journey through the Christian afterlife.^[1] The three cantiche^[i] of the poem, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, describe Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, respectively. The poem is considered one of the greatest works of world literature^[2] and helped establish Dante's Tuscan dialect as the standard form of the Italian language.^[3] It has been translated over 400 times into at least 52 different languages.^[4]

Though English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton referenced and partially translated Dante's works in the 14th and 17th centuries, respectively,^[5][6] it took until the early 19th century for the first full English translation of the Divine Comedy to be published.^[7] This was over 300 years after the first Latin (1416),^[8] Spanish (1515),^[4] and French (1500s)^[9] translations had been completed. By 1906, Dante scholar Paget Toynbee calculated that the Divine Comedy had been touched upon by over 250 translators^[10] and sixty years later bibliographer Gilbert F. Cunningham observed that the frequency of English Dante translations was increasing with time.^[11] As of 2023^[update], the Divine Comedy has been translated into English more times than it has been translated into any other language.^[4]

A complete listing and criticism of all English translations of at least one of the three cantiche (parts) was made by Cunningham in 1966.^[12] The table below summarises Cunningham's data with additions between 1966 and the present, many of which are taken from the Dante Society of America's yearly North American bibliography^[13] and Società Dantesca Italiana [it]'s international bibliography.^[14] Many more translations of individual lines or cantos^[ii] exist,^[15] but these are too numerous for the scope of this list.

• Divine Comedy in popular culture

• Acocella, Joan (27 May 2013). "What the Hell". The New Yorker. Retrieved 12 November 2022.
• Barbarese, J. T. (2009). "Four Translations of Dante's "Inferno"". The Sewanee Review. 117 (4): 647–655. ISSN 0037-3052. JSTOR 40542670.
• Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon: the Books and School of the Ages (1st ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace. ISBN 0-15-195747-9. OCLC 29637737.
• Chaucer, Geoffrey (2008). Benson, Larry D. (ed.). The Riverside Chaucer (in Middle English). Houghton-Mifflin Company. ISBN 9-78-019955209-2.
• Cooper, Roslyn Pesman (1989-10-01). "Sir Samuel Griffith, Dante and the Italian Presence in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literary Culture". Australian Literary Studies. 14 (2): 199–215.
• Cunningham, Gilbert F. (1966). The 'Divine Comedy' in English: a Critical Bibliography. Edinburgh; London: Oliver and Boyd. OCLC 278692745.
  • Cunningham, G. F. (1954). "Divine Comedy in English: a critical bibliography of Dante['s] translation, 1782–1954". Edinburgh Research Archive. Freely available manuscript of the above text
• Delmolino, Grace (2017). "Dante Alighieri: A Chronology". Digital Dante.
• Grimes, William (5 November 2011). "Allen Mandelbaum, Translator of 'Divine Comedy,' Dies at 85". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2022-01-30. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
• Hainsworth, Peter (11 May 2018). "Coming to our senses in a corpse-hued wood". TLS.
• Harrison, Fred C. (1966). "G. W. Greene and Dante". Italica. 43 (1): 38–42. doi:10.2307/477019. ISSN 0021-3020. JSTOR 477019.
• Holekamp, Elizabeth Lambert (May 1985). Dante into French: The Earliest Complete Translation of the Divine Comedy (Italy) (PhD thesis). Indiana University. ISBN 979-8-205-68776-8. ProQuest 303347414.
• Jacoff, Rachel (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41748-1. OCLC 25964332.
• Johnson, Emily (11 November 2021). ""This Is About Living": Translating Dante with Mary Jo Bang". Columbia University School of the Arts. Retrieved 12 November 2022.
• Lepschy, Anna Laura (1977). The Italian Language Today. Giulio C. Lepschy. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-128020-6. OCLC 3995259.
• Milton, John (1641). Of Reformation. London (?): Thomas Underhill.
• Tavoni, Mirko (7 June 2022). "The Divine Comedy in other languages (first part)". New Italian Books.
• Toynbee, Paget Jackson (1921). Dante Studies. Clarendon Press. OCLC 1989748.
• Zanobini, Michele (26 October 2016). "Per Un Dante Latino": The Latin Translations of the Divine Comedy in Nineteenth-Century Italy (PhD thesis). Johns Hopkins University.

• Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy. Ugolinomania - Early English Translations of the Ugolino Episode from Chaucer to Jennings containing translations from Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340s–1400), Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745), Thomas Gray (1716–1771), Giuseppe Marc'Antonio Baretti (1719–1789), Joseph Warton (1722–1800), Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825), Thomas Warton (1728–1790), Charles Rogers (1711–1784), Henry Boyd (c. 1750–1832) and Henry Constantine Jennings (1731–1819).
• "Dante in English" from The Cambridge Companion to Dante (1993)
• American Dante Bibliography from the Dante Society of America

Wikiquote has quotations related to List of English translations of the Divine Comedy.

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