Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close
to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is
still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic
endings--and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven
syllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causing
Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the
chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would
sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are
relaxed.
Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume
where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of
the original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck with
the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the
comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the
strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring _and_, and the
often-repeated _is_, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter,
_e_. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines
of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to
fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have
about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one.
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