Translation and introduction of Divine Comedy in China

The year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, known as the "Father of Italian".

Among many Chinese translations of the Divine Comedy, the expert committee organized by the Cultural Office of the Italian Embassy in China chose the Yilin Classics Series edition by Huang Wenjie to record an audiobook. It was produced by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Albert Theater/Ravenna Theater, and the Società Dante Alighieri.

Only when excellent translators, professional editors, and responsible printers cooperate with each other can translated editions of classics be appealing. It is an excellent publishing organization that is able to cultivate a good team and mobilize resources.

Therefore, we turned to reliable publishing teams and organizations when selecting translations of classics.

The Yilin Classics Series has a professional body of work, authoritative translations, and excellent editors and proofreaders. It is a calling card for Yilin Press, a leading publishing organization of world-famous literary works.

In China, Qian Daosun was the first person to translate the Divine Comedy. Qian studied Italian literature at the University of Rome in Italy when traveling to the country with his parents.

After returning to China, Qian devoted himself to translating the first three poems in Inferno of Divine Comedy and published his translation Part of the Divine Comedy (Shen Qu Yi Luan) in Fiction Monthly in 1921, marking the 600th anniversary of the death of Dante. It is the first officially published translation of the Divine Comedy in China.

In December 1924, the Shanghai Commercial Press published a pamphlet for Part of the Divine Comedy. Qian later translated two more poems, which were published in Critical Review together with the first three.

Although Qian only worked on five poems of the Divine Comedy, his works have always been regarded as the most artistic. Qian followed the language style of the Songs of Chu in his translation and partially retained the rhymes and rhythm of the original poems, making his works sound more catchy than other translations.

The first full Chinese translation of the Divine Comedy was written by a mathematician.

Wang Weike, a mathematician and physicist, spent 10 years on the translation, from October 1934, as he had a great love and admiration for Dante and the Divine Comedy.

Wang finished translation work on the Inferno of Divine Comedy in mid-March of 1935. However, the work was not published by the Shanghai Commercial Press until February 1939 due to the full-scale outbreak of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1937.

After a break of eight years, Wang resumed work on his translation in May 1943. It took him more than one year to complete the translation of Purgatorio and Paradiso.

In August 1948, the Commercial Press divided the three parts of the Divine Comedy into three volumes and published them. It was the first full Chinese translation of the Divine Comedy.

Unlike Part of the Divine Comedy, which translated the work in a rhyme-like poetic style, Wang's translation faithfully narrated the content of the original work in the form of prose rather than using flowery language.

Zhu Weiji started translating Divine Comedy at around the same time as Wang Weike. Zhu was a poet from Shanghai, but he was not very successful in poetry. His most important work is the Chinese edition of the Divine Comedy, which became a commercial success after it was published multiple times by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House and the Shanghai Translation Publishing House. The work is still being reprinted to this day.

Zhu began working on the translation in 1935, finished the first draft in 1942, and finally had it published in the 1950s.

His work is translated from the English edition and is different from Wang's style - Zhu used free verse instead of a prosy style to translate the long poem, which makes his edition a more natural read. However, there are also some sentences that are difficult to pronounce and understand as they lack annotations.

In addition, although Zhu's edition has basically the same lines as the original edition, he did not bother with rhymes.

In 1935, Yu Gengyu, a renowned poet of the Crescent Moon School, also used free verse to translate the Inferno of Divine Comedy.

Yu went to the University of London to study the history of European literature that same year. During his stay in the United Kingdom, he started doing translations, which were published in the supplemental Central Plains of the Minguo Daily News in Henan province the next year. They were also published in installments in a periodical dedicated to translating and introducing foreign literary works in Chongqing in 1944.

Yu's translations retained the rhyme of the original edition: Each line has 11 syllables and a triplet rhyme and every three lines is a section. Although Yu's edition did not rhyme like the original, he succeeded in translating the second and third lines of each section into 11 syllables (equal to 11 Chinese characters) while the first line usually has one more Chinese character.

Given his insight into poetry and his well-developed rhetorical skills, the form of Yu's edition is the most similar to the original. It also reads like poetry. Compared with the Songs of Chu genre by Qian, Yu's free verse edition better reflects Dante's principle of writing in colloquial language. Unfortunately, Yu did not translate the Purgatorio and Paradiso.

After the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), the translation and introduction of Dante's works and research on Dante in China was resumed. In 1983, Professor Tian Dewang of Peking University started translating the original Italian Divine Comedy, which took him 18 years. Tian not only translated the text, but also trans-edited large amounts of annotations. The annotations contain three times the number of words as the main text.

Tian's edition is prosy in nature. In his opinion, it is irresponsible for a non-poet translator to force himself or herself to translate a work into poetry, especially if such a work has difficult rhymes like the Divine Comedy.

In 2000, the year Professor Tian passed away, Huang Wenjie completed his Chinese translation of the Divine Comedy. Huang also adopted the style of free verse and retained the same number of lines as Dante. His lines have uneven lengths but have the same rhyming and poetic quality. Huang's edition has over 4,000 annotations, as the Italian editions he selected boast the most authentic annotations.

Not long after, two translators and poets, Huang Guobin and Zhang Shuguang, published their own translations of the Divine Comedy.

Huang's edition was published in 2003. As a poet, Huang understands the aesthetics of rhythm well and spent a long time replicating Dante's rhymes. As a scholar, Huang looked into various Italian, English, and French annotated editions in order to provide comprehensive and elaborate annotations. His annotations not only make the Divine Comedy accessible to beginners but also offer rich and detailed references to researchers.

Zhang's edition was published in 2005. The edition was translated from English into Chinese free verses, with a successful handle of rhythm. Zhang said in an article, "I am not a Dante scholar but a poet. Therefore, I cared more about the aesthetic language in my translation." He tried to keep the sentence patterns in his translation the same as those in the English edition – "as simple and as powerful as Dante's". The translator also acknowledged that Dante's flexible syntax can be retained in English but not in Chinese.

This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, and the Commercial Press published Xiao Tianyou's new edition of the Divine Comedy. Xiao's edition is innovative and experimental as it was literally translated from Italian into traditional Chinese five-character-verse. Italian language professor Wang Jun will also publish his edition in the second half of this year. The translation and publication of Dante's works, as well as "Danteology", are currently flourishing in China.