Oh well I feel like typing anyways ---
Translator's Note
When the violin repeats what the piano has just palyed, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can only do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.
Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from language is better conceived as a "transposition" than as a "translation," for "translation" implies a series of word-for-word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries any more than piano sounds exist in the violin.
The notion of word-for-word equivalents also strikes me as false to the nature of poetry. Poetry is not made of words but of word-complexes, elaborate structures involving, among other things, denotations, connotations, rhythms, puns, juxtapositions, and echoes of the tradition in which the poet is writing. It is difficult in prose and impossible in poetry to juggle such a complex intact across the barrier of language. What must be saved, even at the expense of making four strings do for eighty-eight keys, is the total feeling of the complex, its gestalt.
The only way I could see of trying to preserve that gestalt was to try for a language as close as possible to Dante's which is in essence a sparse, direct, idiomatic language, distinguishable from prose only in that it transcends every known notion of prose. I do not imply that Dante's is the language of common speech. It is a much better thing than that: it is what common speech would be if it were made perfect.
One of the main sources of the tone of Dante's speech is his revolt from the Sicilian School of Elegance. Nothing would be more misleading than to say that Dante's language is simple. Overwhelmingly, however, it seeks to avoid elegance simply for the sake of elegance. And overwhelmingly it is a spoken tongue.