Journal of Italian Translation

Daniela Caselli
the quotation chosen by Sayers to describe it: ‘non solamente maschi
ma femmine, che sono molti in questa lingua, volgari e non letterati’
(not only male but also female, who are many in this language,
speaking in vernacular and not educated). 52
Sayers’s translation wants to face a new image of modernity,
on the one hand criticising the ‘misplaced reverence’ towards Dante
which transforms ‘hypertrophic decorum’ into the rule of translating,
53 and on the other vindicating Dante as great poet in order to
stimulate other translators to use the widest range of styles available
to them, not to be afraid of rhyme, 54 and not to italianise their
beats, estranging the English language in a series of endless special
effects. This essay invites its readers to appreciate the comic together
with the solemn aspects of Dante’s work and to look at how they
alternate and merge. For Sayers it is in practice and not in theory
that translation survives or dies. 55
Translating becomes in Sayers a way to rethink literary and
cultural history, which gradually becomes also a social history of
modern England, and a way to reconsider how highbrow literature
can be made available to the common reader without dumbing
it down. Such a dichotomy, of course, is resisted also in her own
practice, which alternates translating Dante to writing about the
adventures of her detective Lord Peter Whimsey.
Conclusions
The essays on translation by Eliot, Pound, Waley and Sayers
indicate how between the 1920s and the 1960s translation mediates
not only ideas of origin but also of change and modernity. Sayers
and Waley’s fame will probably always be linked to their work
as translators rather than as poets in their own right, unlike Eliot
and Pound. And yet, an analysis of the politics of translation upheld
by the four authors may be the beginning of an alternative
history of literature from the point of view of translation. Such a
history of literature may appear at fist less appealing, deprived as it
would be of solitary geniuses; it would have the advantage, however,
of being able to account for the complex historical texture
which makes mediation and negotiation the basis not only of translation,
but also of literary renewal.
A different version of the article appeared in Traduzione e poesia
nell’Europa del Novecento, ed.Anna Dolfi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004), 69-
90.
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