|
Coleridge on getting to grips with Dante: 'Canzone XIV fra le Rime di Dante is a poem of wild & interesting Images, intended as an Enigma, and to me an Enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts... A.D. 1806' '2 Sept. 1819. Ramsgate. I begin to understand the above poem: after an interval from 1805, during which no year passed in which I did not reperuse, I might say construe, parse, and spell it, 12 times at least, such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! A good instance, by the bye, of that soul of universal significance in a true poet's compositions in addition to the specific meaning. S.T.C.' |
See archived material at Wordsworth Trust
Dante Rediscovered: from Blake to Rodin,
(Exhibition 15 Aug - 18 Nov 2007 at The Wordsworth Trust)
Henry Cary (1772 – 1844)
The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri
London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819
Volume III only
The British Library
Literature: Coleridge Marginalia, ii. 131 – 8
Coleridge greatly admired Cary’s translation of the Commedia, but ever since his time in Malta and Italy in 1804–6 his ambition had been to read Dante in the original Italian. Before departing for the Mediterranean he had asked the Wordsworths to send him ‘Dante & a Dictionary’. His copy of volume three of the 1819 edition of Cary shows him both tackling the difficulties of the Paradiso, and questioning some of Cary’s translations.
At the end of a further comment at the top of the page Coleridge observes: ‘But those only who see the difficulty of the Original can do justice to Mr Carey’s Translation – which may now & then not be Dante’s Words, but always, always, Dante.’ ‘Admirably translated’, he wrote against another passage, ‘O how few will appreciate its value! Genius is not alone sufficient – it must be present, indeed, in the Translator, in order to supply a negative Test by its Sympathy; to feel that it has been well done. But it is Taste, Scholarship, Discipline, Tact, that must do it.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)
Notebook
Holograph manuscript: Notebook 24, Add MS 47522
The British Library
Literature: Coleridge notebooks, CN II 3014 &n
In this notebook entry he records his reaction to one of the best-known canzoni, ‘Tre donne intorno al cor me son venute’: ‘a poem of wild & interesting images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts’. After the first four lines of the transcription the handwriting changes to that of Coleridge’s Bristol friend Josiah Wade. Coleridge dates this 1806 but Kathleen Coburn thinks it is likely to have been written in 1807. The extract on the Friends of Coleridge home page also includes an 1819 addition made two leaves and 12 years later (Vol IV CN 4590).