The Blurred Face of a Distant Beloved: Translations of Homer in Italy from Dante to the Sixteenth Century.

This article investigates the reception and translation of Homer in Italy from Dante to the late sixteenth century, arguing that the enduring success of Homer in early modern Italy depended less on poetic translation than on what may be termed the “supplementary” prose model. Beginning with Dante’s reflections on the impossibility of translating Homeric poetry—mediated through Jerome’s influential critique of translation—the study traces how this skepticism shaped humanist attitudes toward Homeric translation. Particular attention is given to Petrarch’s ambivalent response to Leontius Pilatus’s Latin prose Homer, which crystallized a tension between reverence for Homer’s poetic supremacy and the pragmatic desire for access to the Greek text. The article shows how this tension generated a self-fulfilling prophecy: repeated failures of vernacular and Latin verse translations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, largely due to the unavoidable comparison with Virgil. In contrast, literal prose translations—from Leontius to Lorenzo Valla, Francesco Griffolini, and especially Andreas Divus—proved remarkably durable, circulating widely and serving as indispensable reading aids well into the modern period. Through analysis of paratexts, metaphors of translation (portrait, garment, beloved), readership evidence, and neglected southern Italian humanists, the paper demonstrates that Homer’s Renaissance afterlife in Italy was shaped not by aesthetic equivalence, but by accessibility, utility, and scholarly transparency. The Italian case thus offers a crucial corrective to teleological narratives of translation history that privilege poetic fidelity over functional mediation