ABSTRACT
This decidedly unfinished translation of the opening six lines of Dante's Purgatorio is drafted in ink on the lower half of page 33 of Nbk 14 beneath the draft of O thou, Immortal Deity (no. 304) which appears to date from late March/early April 1820. So the translation, written in a different ink, would probably have been composed later. Six pages further in the forward direction of the nbk, S. began his translation of Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 1–51 (no. 331). If this translation from Canto I was composed at about the same time or just before that of the later passage, then April to mid-August 1820 would be a likely range of dates for it. See headnote to no. 331. In a letter to Leigh Hunt of c. 20 August 1819, S. contests the judgement that Michelangelo is ‘the Dante of painting’, citing to the painter's disadvantage Dante's passage representing ‘the Spirit coming over the sea in a boat like Mars rising from the vapours of the horizon’ in Purgatorio Canto II, 13–51 (L ii 112) as well as the passage he translated from Canto XXVIII. Mary recalled S.’s preference for these passages in Mary L iii 160. Rather than an abandoned attempt to translate a substantial portion of the Purgatorio, these lines would appear to be S.’s impromptu effort to try his hand at rendering the opening of a favourite work in its difficult original rhyme-scheme, to which he has managed to make only ll. 1 and 3 conform. See headnote to no. 331.
