ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by reading a passage from a single text that is indisputably a translation, Ciaran Carson's Inferno of Dante Alighieri. Ciaran Carson writes in the introduction to his Dante: 'some of us expect translations to sound like translations, and to produce an English which is sometimes strangely interesting. Especially translations of poetry'. In a translation of Dante, the strangeness of Carson's writing, its variety, and its manifest translatedness, are especially striking because Dante has long been thought of in Britain and America as the most consistent and also the clearest of writers. Carson's own poems are often stylistically restless, but the mode flourishes with especial vigour in the translation. Carson's book prints the English only, which discourages parallel-text comparison; and translations in general are aimed mainly at people with imperfect or no understanding of the source language.
