The Power of Rewriting. The Cultural and Political Functionality of Fernández de Villegas’s Translation and Commentary of Dante’s Infierno (1515)

Abstract

Villegas’s ´Traducción del Dante´ is a version of the Inferno in “coplas de arte mayor” that not only had numerous verses added by the translator, but was also accompanied by an extensive commentary written by Villegas himself. Its main avowed source was Landino’s ´Comento sopra la Comedia´, from which he translated numerous passages. My purpose here is to demonstrate the extent to which Villegas’s text is paradigmatic to illustrate the complex notion of medieval and early modern translation: a hermeneutical practice in which inter-lingual transference, gloss, paraphrasis and re-creation are constantly overlapping and tend to displace the original force of the source text. Indeed, the numerous additions, omissions and changes that Villegas introduces in his rewriting of both Dante and Landino were meant to refashion the political, historical and cultural connotations of the source text, so as to make it significantly powerful in the new context.