ABSTRACT
Ciaran Carson is the most polyglot of poets writing in, or in connection with, English, and the great merit of his translation is that it employs a language as multiple and fragmented as Dante Alighieri's Italian — perhaps more so. It sounds less like an epic and more like The Canterbury Tales. Dante's work of linguistic theory, De vulgari eloquentia, suggests that there may be more than a thousand 'kinds of speech' in Italy, and in his great poem several of these are recorded: as Carson notes in the introduction to his translation, the language 'moves from place to place'. As Virgil explains, 'this egomaniac / is Nimrod, who built Babel; he's the cause / of all our tribulations linguistic.' Apart from the last two words, this speech is straightforwardly idiomatic, an instance of the kind of translation that pretends to repair the effects of Babel by conjuring out of the foreign text a recognisable English voice.
