I would begin translating each canto by reading William Warren Vernon’s two-volume Readings on the Inferno of Dante: Based upon the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola and Other Authorities. That 1906 literal prose translation traces the commentary on the poem, line-by-line, all the way back to Benvenuto, a lecturer at the University of Bologna who was born shortly after Dante died and whose commentary on the Divine Comedy was one of the earliest. I would then read Charles S. Singleton’s prose translation done in 1970, and then John D. Sinclair’s from 1954, examining the small differences between the two. Then I’d often go back to the Vernon to see what choice he’d made at the same moment, and I would re-read the surrounding commentary.
At some point in the process, I’d begin my own translation and then eventually stop to compare my attempt to other translations, primarily (but not limited to) those done by: Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, Mark Musa, Allen Mandelbaum, Michael Palma, and Ciaran Carson. If I still had any questions, I’d do a word-by-word dictionary translation for that tercet and the surrounding ones using the Sansoni Italian/English English/Italian dictionary. Sometimes I would do entire pages of word-by-word dictionary translation.
I would also read Singleton’s separate volume of Commentary, and the notes in the other translations. Singleton replicated many of Vernon’s notes and added to them. The Hollander notes were especially helpful because they occasionally added to Singleton’s or contradicted Vernon’s in interesting ways. I would also read a number of critical texts and sometimes go to the online Dante Encyclopedia to read more about the various characters mentioned in the text.
Once I felt I had a solid understanding of the tercet, and had devised what I was fairly certain was an accurate translation, I would begin to play with the music of the lines, or I might see an opportunity to modernize the line without sacrificing accuracy, or I might see an place where I could weave in a line from a poem the way Dante had woven in lines by Virgil, and Ovid, and other poets he admired. I’d work to relax the language and make it better conform to spoken English. As I went forward, I’d read over what I’d just done; I wanted to keep the tone and the music consistent throughout. And as soon as I did another canto, I’d go back and read the previous ones. I would continually go back, and continually revise. Some of the revisions had to do with the fact that my attitude toward the translation changed over time. I became more and more committed to accuracy. And more and more concerned with blending in the contemporary references so the gesture toward modernity wouldn’t stand out so much that it undermined the poem’s pathos.*