Virginia Jewiss is an American Italianist and Dantist. She received her PhD in Italian literature from Yale University and taught at Dartmouth College and Trinity College’s Rome campus before returning to Yale, where she is currently Lecturer in the Humanities and Director of the Yale Humanities program in Rome. She has translated the work of numerous Italian authors and film directors, including Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Melania Mazzucco’s Vita, and screenplays for Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriele Salvatores.
In 2008 she published in Italian, for the Mandragora publishing company in Florence, a reduction of Dante’s Inferno dedicated to elementary school children, with the title Il viaggio di Dante: un’avventura infernale. The book, illustrated by Aline Cantono di Ceva, was also published in English by the same publishing house in 2009 with the same title, literally translated as Dante’s journey: an infernal adventure.
In 2013 Virginia Jewiss wrote an interesting essay entitled “”Hell for kids: translating Dante’s Divine Comedy for children””, published in the volume of various authors Translation right or wrong. [1] In this essay Jewiss dwells on some other translations of Dante’s Comedy for children, and then she describes her own version in the following terms:
“”While John Agard’s transformative translation targets young teens, mine is aimed at what is probably the youngest Dante audience ever: four- to ten-year-olds. Dante’s journey, an infernal adventure is certainly the shortest version in print: it is comprised of eleven sets of three rhyming couplets plus one final couplet for a total of thirty-four, in homage both to Dante’s terza rima and the number of cantos of the Inferno. The verse form and metre are reminiscent of countless other children’s books. And just as nineteenth-century translators relied on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to lend narrative familiarity to Dante’s strange journey, I leaned on contemporary favourites to bring Dante into a child’s world: like Max in Maurice Sendak‘s Where the wild things are, little Dante is sent to his room for misbehaving and ends up in a mysterious forest. And thanks to Bill Watterson’s cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes, Dante’s favourite stuffed animal Virgil is actually alive and wiser than his human companion. ‘Junior’ versions of the poem have long existed, but rather than producing another such semischolastic rendition that is shaped by how the Comedy will be taught in school, I strove for something that conveys the adventure and immediacy of the poem. Thus there are no lustful here, no sodomists, simonists, or suicides, even though they are central to the `high’ version of the poem, and are among the moments I emphasize most when I teach Dante to university students. Rather than remind my young readers of what they are missing, I present topics they are all too familiar with: greediness, anger, violence, lying, and meanness.
“”I first wrote Dante’s journey in Italian, and then, at the request of the publisher, composed an English version. Translating myself presented a series of unexpected challenges, especially because the Italian version incorporated so many linguistic echoes of the original. The Italian version could not but open with a reference to Dante’s famous ‘Nel mezzo del cammin‘ (hence I begin with ‘Nel mezzo della notte‘) and end with the word stelle. Such a direct lexical relationship with the original can only be approximated in English, however. In both languages I strove for a poetic playfulness that highlights Dante’s system of contrapasso. Thus the angry souls go up in smoke and the violent stew in their own juice. The illustrations by Aline Cantono di Ceva visualize the linguistic puns, and many enact their own form of visual translation by playing off of Doré’s well-known images of the Inferno. With the help of Virgil, Dante comes to realize that home is ‘a real paradise’ and they return from Hell to the warmth of their bed on earth.””
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[1] Susana Bayó Belenguer, Eiléan Ni Chuilleanâin & Cormac Ó Cuilleanâin (Eds), assisted by Giulia Zuodar, Translation right or wrong, Four Courts Press Ltd, Dublin, Ireland, and Portland, OR, 2013, pp. 78-90.
