Matteo Ronto di fronte a un’impresa impossibile: tradurre in latino la Commedia di Dante

Abstract

This study examines the meaning and aims of the Latin translation of Dante’s Commedia produced by the Olivetan friar Metteo Ronto between 1427 and 1431. Unlike the prose translation completed a decade earlier by Friar Giovanni da Serravalle, Ronto’s work goes beyond a purely utilitarian function—that of making Dante’s poem intelligible to readers unfamiliar with Italian—and reveals distinct artistic ambitions. Although Ronto was well aware of Horace’s dictum that good translation does not consist in a strictly word-for-word transfer from the source to the target text, in his rendering of the Commedia he nevertheless pursued an extreme form of literalness, attempting to reproduce each of Dante’s hendecasyllables with a Latin hexameter. This approach resulted in passages so dense and convoluted that they are scarcely intelligible without the Italian original at hand. It is therefore hardly surprising that this late-Gothic experiment failed to win the approval of Ronto’s contemporary humanists, such as Niccolò Niccoli and Enea Silvio Piccolomini.