Presentation

The DantEsCa project, ‘Dante in Translation: The Reception and Translations of the Commedia into Spanish and Catalan (15th-19th Centuries)’ (PID2021-123266NB-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER/UE and by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, the Agencia Estatal de Investigación and the European Regional Development Fund), aims to study the reception of Dante Alighieri’s magnum opus (written between 1307 and 1321) in the Hispanic context prior to the 20th century. It will be structured along three axes, which correspond to the main milestones of the Hispanic reception of the Commedia between the 15th and the 19th centuries: firstly, the first two translations in verse, i.e. the Catalan translation by Andreu Febrer (1429) and the Spanish translation by Pedro Fernández de Villegas (1515); secondly, the Dantean exegetical tradition, especially the Commento by Cristoforo Landino (1481); and, finally, the later translations of the Commedia published in Spain and Latin America, which are confined to the 19th century. 

The first translations into a Romance language of the Commedia took place in the Iberian Peninsula. In 1428 Enrique de Villena translated the Inferno into Spanish prose and in 1429 Febrer finished his complete translation into Catalan, in terza rima. In 1515, the Spanish translation of Fernández de Villegas was printed in Burgos, in coplas de arte mayor, with a commentary that is largely a translation of Landino’s Commento, also translated into Catalan at the end of the 15th century by an anonymous translator. This initial enthusiasm for translating Dante's works did not resurface until the mid-19th century, when Romanticism's renewed interest in the Middle Ages spread across Europe, including the Florentine poet's key work. At least thirteen translations belong to this second stage: from the fragments by Milà i Fontanals published in the press in 1856, through translations that were reprinted several times, such as those of the Count of Cheste (1879), Cayetano Rosell (1870-1872) or Mitre (1894), to the Catalan translations by Bulbena (1905), Espona (1915) and Verdaguer i Callís (1918), which, although published in the 20th century, are prior to 1921, the date of the sixth centenary of Dante’s death, which marks the beginning of a third stage. This project concerns only the first two stages.

The starting hypothesis is that the reception of the Commedia promoted by Spanish Romanticism is largely based on the recovery of the translations of the first stage of reception (15th and 16th centuries). Maybe Febrer’s and Fernández de Villegas’s translations were not, as has been considered until now, isolated phenomena without any repercussions, but may have left their mark not only in their time (Fernández de Villegas’s translation was read at least until the 17th century) but also in the first critical approaches in the 19th century and even in the translations in this second stage. It is no coincidence that the translations of the 18th century were preceded by the reprinting of Villegas’s translation (1868) and the edition of the medieval translation by Febrer (Cayetano Vidal i Valenciano, 1878).

The project does not seek to be comprehensive, but rather to cover in depth certain important areas that have been neglected or little studied, to complete bibliographical gaps and to carry out the critical edition of still unpublished essential texts. To this end, we have gathered a team of experts in translations of poetry and medieval literature, specialised in translations of Dante’s work and with a significant interdisciplinary character that covers the fields of Romance philology, comparative literature and translation studies. 

 

Objectives

The general objective of the project is to study the reception of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia in the Hispanic context before the 20th century, in particular the Spanish and Catalan translations. This general objective is broken down into three specific objectives:

  1. To study the Catalan translation by Andreu Febrer (1429) and Spanish translation by Pedro Fernández de Villegas (1515) of Dante’s Commedia. Responsible: Marta Marfany (PI).
  2. To study Dante’s exegetical tradition in the Hispanic sphere, in particular the Commento sopra la Commedia (1481) by Cristoforo Landino. Responsible: Marta Marfany (PI) and José María Micó.
  3. To describe and to study 19th-century Spanish and Catalan translations of Dante’s Commedia and the main Victorian bibliography on the Florentine author and his work in the Hispanic field. Responsible: José Francisco Ruiz Casanova.

 

Research team

 

Working team