Henry Francis Cary and John Taaffe Junior : the translator of Dante and a comment on the Divine Comedy

Abstract

Else that 9th book is the finest in the volume, an exquisite combination of the ludicrous & the terrible, - I have never read either even in translation, but such I conceive to be the manner of Dante & Ariosto. Charles Lamb's letter to Coleridge on Joan of Ark, Book IX expresses so well the English approach to Dante in 1796. When Lamb was writing to Coleridge no complete translation of the poem existed in English. Contrary to what has often been claimed,. the Divine Comedy had already received considerable attention in the English literary world by the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1792 Samuel Rogers published the first English translation of the Inferno, followed in 1795 by Henry Boyd's Inferno and in 1802 by his complete translation of the Divine Comedy. Lamb's letter expresses a need of the times: the desire to understand the foreign poet by way of known categories, and, eventually to "anglicise" him. Henry Francis Cary's blank verse translation best fulfilled these expectations by creating an "English" Dante, soon dutifully compared and studied together with the English Milton and the English Homer, the latter translated by Chapman, Pope and, more recently, Cowper.