Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15291/csi.4001
A New Translation of Dante’s Inferno or about Poetry in Prose
Iva Grgić Maroević
; University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia
Abstract
The paper starts with a brief survey of the history of the Croatian translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (already treated in more detail elsewhere, by the author and others), insisting, this time, on the judgement that this history was predominantly a search for adequate metrical solutions. The central part of the paper chooses several examples of a very different, recent translation of Inferno by Croatian translator Božidar Petrač in order to analyse his translation strategy. Published in 2021, the seventh centenary of Dante’s death, Petrač’s translation offers a prose translation juxtaposed (a fronte) to Dante’s poetry. While Petrač’s prose is somewhat explanatory in its solutions, his translation aims (and succeeds) in being readable to several types of audiences: those who will appreciate the confrontation with the original; those who will consult the introductions to every canto and the notes that accompany it; and those who will, eventually, be able to read it in Croatian without too many difficulties. Special attention is dedicated to Dante’s key words, conceptual words, or, as the paper prefers, ‘doctrinary’ words. These are treated by the translator with utmost care, as is adequate for Dante’s masterpiece which was for too long mistaken for only a work of poetry, while it was also a narration of the world of Dante’s time. The conclusion of the paper is that Petrač as translator has offered the contemporary Croatian readers a (meta)text which will function for them as a text, and has also ended the insistence on the rhyming (or, at least, metrical) scheme as the dominant of Croatian translations of the Comedy. This translation will be the first of the Croatian ones to enter and live in the twenty-first century.
Keywords
Dante; Divine Comedy; Božidar Petrač; translation strategies
Hrčak ID:
288221
URI
Publication date:
23.12.2022.
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