On Cary's Dante and Some Others

Extract

If the arduous and too often ungrateful task of translation be one of the sincerest tributes which can be paid to a great literary artist, the supreme poet of Catholic Christendom has no cause to complain of his treatment in this country, at any rate during the last century. With the exception of Homer, no poet has been so often and so painstakingly interpreted in English as Dante. Curiously enough, however, all the English versions of the Divina Commedia in its entirety, or of any one of the Canticles, have appeared in comparatively recent times. Until the close of the eighteenth century Dante was unduly neglected by most Englishmen, though Chaucer, Milton, and Gray were notable exceptions. However, his first translator worthy of the name, Henry Francis Cary, was, though virtually a pioneer, a very late one, born (in 1772) more than five centuries later than his “master and author.” Cary was the contemporary of Scott and Wordsworth and the friend of Charles Lamb and Coleridge; he was a quiet, scholarly clergyman, whom Lamb compared to Goldsmith’s Parson Primrose and honoured with his affection to the extent of getting harmlessly tipsy at his table.