Please help me make sense of the grammar of this line

Question

I am reading The Divine Comedy (Longfellow Translation), and ran into a sentence:

[Not very far as yet our way had gone
 This side the summit], when I saw a fire
 That overcame a hemisphere of darkness.
         (Inferno, Canto IV, lines 67-69)

The bracketed part - I suppose it means something like "we have not gone very far...", but I can't make out how it works in terms of grammar.  One would think there needs to be some kind of preposition between the side and the summit.  Then again, this is older writing and I am aware that older writing is different.

So how could I make sense of this line?

Not sure if it helps, but another translation (Cary) of the same lines goes as follows:

...We were not far
 On this side from the summit, when I kenn'd
 A flame, that o'er the darken'd hemisphere
 Prevailing shin'd.

Thank you!

linguisticturn · Accepted Answer

In Ovid Unseens: Practice Passages for Latin Verse Translation and Comprehension we read that

As common as omitted verbs are omitted prepositions. Poets frequently miss these little words out altogether and rely on the reader to understand them.

That's a comment about Latin poetry. But it is easy to imagine that some 19th century translators would use that device in their work.
Discussion
The original text is

Non era lunga ancor la nostra via
di qua dal sonno, quand' io vidi un foco
ch'emisperio di tenebre vincia.

Google translate1 renders it as

Our way was not yet long
this way from sleep, when I saw a fire
that the hemisphere of darkness wins.

1Well, not quite google translate on its own. In the original, I replaced the archaic word emisperio by its contemporary variant emisfero (see here). A better way to phrase that line is probably that overcame a hemisphere of darkness, like here.
One commentary says this about that line:

The reading sonno (here 'sleep') has been much debated over the centuries. For a summarizing description of that debate see Mazzoni (“Saggio di un nuovo commento alla Divina Commedia: il Canto IV dell'Inferno,” Studi Danteschi 42 [1965]), pp. 119-20. Most modern editors accept sonno, and take the resulting expression to be a case of poetic compression: 'not far from sleep' = 'not far from the place where I had slept.'

So Longfellow has taken quite a bit of liberty with the translation of that line. He uses a similar construction in two other places:

And the Guide said to me: “He wakes no more
This side the sound of the angelic trumpet;
(Canto 6)

and

Down at the bottom were the sinners naked;
This side the middle came they facing us,
Beyond it, with us, but with greater steps;
(Canto 18)

The omission of preposition is not unheard of in 19th century English poetry. Here is a commentary on Robert Browning that makes a note of that.

Please help me make sense of the grammar of this line

One Answer

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question