Dante arabo: direzioni di indagine

Although studies on possible Islamic influences in Dante's work appeared, both in Arab and European journals, since late nineteenth century, it was the publication of La escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia by Miguel Asín Palacios, in 1919, that symbolically marked the start of an international historiographical debate on the relationships between Dante and the Arab World. Since then, this debate has mainly focused on the "presence" of the Arab-Muslim world in Dante and in his culture. Conversely, the theme of Dante's "presence" in the modern and contemporary Arab world has been less explored until now, at least on the European shores of the Mediterranean, in spite of some praiseworthy exceptions. The present paper aims precisely at contributing to better investigate attitudes towards Dante in the Arab-speaking world, by proposing some guidelines for a comparative analysis of the translation approaches adopted in the most famous Arabic versions of the Divine Comedy: those by ‘Abbūd Abī Rāshid Bey (Tripoli of Libya, 1930-1933), Ḥasan 'Uthmān (Cairo, 1959-1969) and Kāẓim Jihād (Paris, 2002). Beyond the specific reasons of translatological interest, this will hopefully pave the way to a broader work, aimed at reconstructing the main trajectories (ideological, cultural and aesthetic) of Dante's ‘journey' in the modern and contemporary Arab World