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. The three cantiche 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 and helped establish Dante's Tuscan vernacular as the standard form of the Italian language. It has been translated over 400 times into at least 52 different languages.
Though English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton referenced and partially translated Dante's works in the 14th and 17th centuries, respectively, it took until the early 19th century for the first full English translation of the Divine Comedy to be published. This was over 300 years after the first Latin (1416), Spanish (1515), and French (1500s) translations had been completed. By 1906, Dante scholar Paget Toynbee calculated that the Divine Comedy had been touched upon by over 250 translators and sixty years later bibliographer Gilbert F. Cunningham observed that the frequency of English Dante translations was increasing with time. , the Divine Comedy has been translated into English more times than it has been translated into any other language.
List of translations A complete listing and criticism of all English translations of at least one of the three cantiche (parts) was made by Cunningham in 1966. 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 and 's international bibliography. For a multilingual list of translations, see Many more translations of individual lines or cantos exist, but these are too numerous for the scope of this list.
+ Published Translator(s) Nationality Publisher(s) Parts translated Form Notes 1782 Charles Rogers United Kingdom J. Nichols Inferno Blank verse First translation of a full cantica into English. Initially published anonymously 1785–1802 Henry Boyd United Kingdom C. Dilly Comedy Rhymed 6-line stanzas First full translation of the Divine Comedy in English 1805–1814 Henry Francis Cary United Kingdom James Carpenter (The Inferno, 1805–1806); Taylor and Hessey (The Vision, 1814) Comedy Blank verse Volume 20 in the Harvard Classics series. Reprinted by Bohn's Library in 1850 and Chandos Classics in 1871