Provide a 200-word translator’s statement where you explain the choices that you made in your contemporary English translation as well as the vision that you had as the translator. 

For this assignment, read Anne Carson’s essay on translation as well as the excerpt from Dante’s Inferno translated by Mary Jo Bang, all posted on BB under Course Documents in the Reading Assignment folder. Next, translate the passage from the Inferno into your own English–your own personal style.

Last, provide a 200-word translator’s statement where you explain the choices that you made in your contemporary English translation as well as the vision that you had as the translator. For full credit, be sure to cite and then closely analyze one direct quotation from Carson’s essay in relation to your experience creating your own translation.

What do you think your chosen passage means and how did you stay true to its meaning within the context of your own style? What unique spin does your translation put on the literature in terms of content (what the poems says) and form (how the literature articulates its main ideas)?

How might (or might not) the literature’s meaning change given your translation? What was it like to do translation work? What do you like most about your translation? What might you do differently?

Anne Carson ~ Variations on the right to remain silent

Opening Lines to Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno:

Canto I

Stopped mid-motion in the middle
Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no  sky—
Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.

It’s difficult to describe a forest:
Savage, arduous, extreme in its extremity. I think
And the facts come back, then the fear comes back.

Death, I believe, can only be slightly more bitter.
I can’t address the good I found there
Until I describe in detail what else I saw.

I don’t know for certain how I entered it—
I was so sleepy-faced
At the place where I took a wrong path.

Last Completed Projects