ABSTRACT

The young Welsh members of parliament sympathetic to Cymru Fydd became powerful voices in the Liberal party at Westminster: Ellis, after being junior whip in Gladstone's administration, became chief government whip in Rosebery's government in 1894. For a period British Liberalism and Welsh Nationalism seemed to walk hand in hand. That was the period of the gestation of Daniel Rees's Welsh translation of the Divina Commedia, and the volume published in 1903 bears traces of it. Rees had a good knowledge of both Welsh and Italian and was capable of vigorous writing. The version occupied the leisure of its busy author-journalist for many years and before it appeared, Nationalism and Liberalism had already started to move in different directions. Daniel Rees's translation is a noble effort: preserving the terza rima of the original and in most parts faithful to its sense, by its terseness and sobriety it seems reproach to many of the long-winded awdlau of late nineteenth-century literature.