For Victorian middleclass women ‘the ability to translate’ was an unique intellectual and material resource, which accorded them a ‘more or less unmediated access to foreign ideas’ and high culture (classical literature and poetry, philosophy), as well as a form of professional authority and social respectability . As they took 'on the role of the translator, the female writers engage[d] in a subversive act’ that granted them ‘a derivative form of authorship’ achieved by entering into ‘a cultural and ideological discourse with the author’ and his original texts (Scholl:2011).
Throughout the long nineteenth century, British and American women writers engaged in the translation of Dante’s entire oeuvre, often winning the critics' and the public's approval.
[Writing under pseudonym vs revealing their identity]
The practice of translation
Maria Francesca Rossetti (1871)
Not without regret, I sacrifice to faithful literality the pleasure of making readers ignorant of Italian acquainted with the exquisite ternary rhyme of the Commedia, so ably preserved in the translations by Mr. Cayley, the Rev. John Dayman, and the Rev. Prebendary Ford. The like faithful literality will be found to characterize my own rendering of passages from Dante’s prose works; the blemish, as it would now by many be considered, of frequent tautology being by no means avoided.
The principle of translation should, I think, be one thing, when an author and a style unique and immortal are to be set in living truth before living eyes; quite another thing when minds merely need to be enabled profitably and pleasurably to assimilate thoughts generated and originally expressed, it may even be with no distinctive force or grace, in a tongue not their own.
Margaret Fueller (1859)
Translating Dante is indeed a labor of love. It is one in which even a moderate degree of success is impossible. No great Poet can be well translated. The form of his thought is inseparable from his thought. The births of his genius are perfect beings : body and soul are in such perfect harmony that you cannot at all alter the one without veiling the other. The variation in cadence and modulation, even where the words are exactly rendered, takes not only from the form of the thought, but from the thought itself, its most delicate charm. Translations come to us as a message to the lover from the lady of his love through the lips of a confi dante or menial we are obliged to imagine what was most vital in the utterance.
Translation fragments from Dante's Comedy and Vita nuova published in poetic collections, anthologies and literary periodicals
Complete and partial translations of Dante's works published in volume.