Pinsky And Binyon's Translations In The Inferno By Dante Alighieri

The Inferno by Dante Alighieri was written in the 14th century. The epic was originally written in Italian, and over the course of time multiple translations were made, which led to multiple versions of the original text. This essay compares and contrasts the translations of Robert Pinsky(1994) and Lawrence Binyon(1933), and will focus on the opening. Although very similar, the two translations provide new perspectives through diction. The two translations provide an expansion on the original. The beginning of Pinsky’s translation as well as Binyon’s translation is very similar. They both begin with the sense of going through life halfway. In the Pinsky translation he says “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark woods” (Pinsky,1) and in the Binyon translation “Midway life’s journey I was made aware that I strayed into a dark forest”(Binyon,1); The very first phrase in both is similar if not exact. However, as Dante talks about the beginning of his journey he mentions what triggers him to begin it. In Pinsky’s he says …show more content…
Binyon’s Dante describes that the memory of the woods as “so bitter it is, death is scarce bitterer. But, for the good it was my hap to find,”(Binyon, 7-8), and in this excerpt Binyon describes how the feeling of sin that surrounds him is so bad that death is not that worse, which is very similar to Pinsky’s Dante when he describes death as “hardly more bitter and yet, to treat the good I found there as well I’ll tell what I saw”(Pinsky,5-6). In Binyon’s Dante Binyon uses the word “good” which although not bad, in comparison to “fortune” used in the Pinsky Dante shows that Binyon’s Dante does not express the despair that was going through Dante. However, the key similarity between the two translations is that they focus on the fact that despite the feeling and hard that the woods brought to Dante because he was lucky he wants to speak