Journal of Italian Translation

36 Journal of Italian Translation
poses her own translations as a possible solution.
Should we happen to be suspicious of this teleological arrangement,
in which her own translations appear as the apex, Sayers
demonstrates to be fully aware of this risk, as she had done in a
previous essay titled ‘On Translating the Divina Commedia’, 47 originally
a paper given in 1954 at Girton College, Cambridge. Sayers
here humorously reflects on the position of each translator of Dante:
if a translator presumes to be able to be better than all his predecessors
he risks appearing a ‘presumptuous ass’, but if he humbly asserts
of not being able to be better than them, then he is a presumptuous
ass, as he is unable to give his readers a reasons for buying
his inferior translations. 48
Eliot claims, as we have seen, that the original is unknowable
insofar as it is matter an sich, always and only interpretable, and
thus translatable; Sayers instead thinks of the original as plenitude,
which the translation can never quite reproduce. For Sayers, something
is always lost in translation. Although her position seems rather
more conventional, Sayers surprisingly reaches conclusions similar
to Eliot’s, albeit going through a different route: she sees translation
as an interpretive act characteristic of its age, always linked to
its own historical moment, always part of an infinite series of attempts.
Unlike Pound, who foresees a cultural role for his translations,
Sayers refuses to theorise translation ‘a priory’ and claims
that any translator would be lucky to ‘live up to a quarter of his
own theory’. 49
But what are her objectives in translating Dante? She wants
to produce a ‘popular’ translation, a translation able to reach the
‘common reader’. This, of course, links translation with national
identity, since she uses Dante to make a diagnosis of her contemporary
England. Until the preceding generation Dante was well
known, but today, says Sayers, to be ‘literate’ does not mean to be
‘educated’ and Dante must be made understandable, readable, and
economically affordable. This new audience is described with a
vocabulary which brings us back to Virginia Woolf, since Sayers
refers to a ‘common reader’ 50 and underlines the connection between
art consumption and material conditions, just like Woolf does
in Three Guineas. 51 At one guinea a canticle, three well-commented
canticles, says Sayers, are not a sum which the common reader will
not be able to afford. The reader in Sayers also refers to a female
readership, as shown not only by the allusions to Woolf but also by