Translation and Cultural Appropriation : Dante, Paolo and Francesca in British Romanticism

Abstract

This contribution begins from a reconsideration of the concept of appropriation as a mechanism interlinking the consumption and production of cultural material.On this basis, the English translations of Dante's Divina Commedia produced in the Romantic period will be seen as part of a larger cultural project for the incorporation of major authors, texts and literary/artistic traditions in order to expand and aggrandize English or British national culture.Henry Cary's complete translation of 1814 is then placed in the context of the competing discourses and the different «synecdochic» reductions of the Italian poet created by Romantic appropriative exchanges.A particularly significant instance of this kind of appropriation is offered by versions of the «Paolo and Francesca» episode (Inferno V.73-143).Translations and rewritings of this episode by Leigh Hunt, John Keats and Lord Byron, together with Cary's canonical version, testify to a proliferation of meanings, ranging from the political and the public to the private and intimate sphere.Approached in terms of appropriation, Dante's text becomes visible as the producer of cultural intimations that turn it into an active and influential element in the target culture, one further agent in its multiple processes of production and re-production.

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