LookAtVietnam – The first ever complete Vietnamese version of the Divine Comedy by world famous Italian writer Dante Alighieri has just been finished.

Visiting the underworld: Cover of the Vietnamese version of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

“I first got approached with the original Italian version of Divine Comedy in 1978 when I visited a school for foreign students studying Italian,” Hoan said.

“Then, when teaching students in Viet Nam, I used to compare the original version with the Vietnamese translation available at that time. The idea of translating the complete work came into my mind,” he said.

He then started to translate the work, part by part till it’s completion recently.

“This is a ‘journey of intellect’ in every aspect, which surpasses my capability,” he said, “I always keep in front of me the original Italian version and detailed explanations in French. I have tried my best to catch the original idea of the writer when translating into Vietnamese.”

Toan admitted that Divine Comedy was a fairly difficult work to translate because Italian and Vietnamese are too different in structures and language forms, let alone the writer used the Tuscan dialect.

In the early 1980s, a part of the work was translated into Vietnamese by Prof Le Tri Vien and poet Khuong Huu Dung from French. The translated part has been used as a reference for students specialising in literature.

In 2005, Hoan himself published the Vietnamese version of the first chapter titled Hell.

After finishing translating the first chapter, Hoan had a chance to read his translation in Italy.

“Around 200 people came to the event and they listened to me attentively though I know hardly any of them could speak Vietnamese,” Hoan recalled, “Through their seriousness, I understood how Italian people admire Alighieri.

“I could not complete the work using only my stock of Italian language,” he said, “I have looked up six versions including three in French and three in Italian. In other words, I have taken a risk when translating the work though this is a serious risk resulting from my passion for the master piece.”

The Vietnamese titled Than Khuc version of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy by Prof Hoan published by the Social Sciences Publishing House will soon be sent to the Italian President.

The Divine Comedy, which was written based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, with some elements of Latin and of various other regional dialects, describes Dante’s journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova. While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News