Rui Xu Reads Dante in Mandarin

April 17, 2021 by Communications

Rui Xu, a first-year PhD student at the Centre for Medieval Studies, is featured this week reading the Inferno, canto 6, in Mandarin:

Rui Xu notes that she encountered Dante as a child while reading a unique Mandarin translation of the Divine Comedy. The translator, Huang Guobin, not only provided detailed notes but tried to capture the rhyme and rhythm of Dante’s Italian while keeping the elegance of Mandarin poetry.

Rui notes how difficult it was for Guobin to preserve the “original flavor of the Divine Comedy in a very different language.”

The Guobin translation is the one Rui chose for the Toronto Salutes Dante project, and the Mandarin version of canto 6 can be downloaded from the Toronto Salutes Dante website.