Abstract
The article analyzes the role of rhyme in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri and in its Russian translations, mainly from the point of view of its phonological characteristics through the example of Canto iii of the Inferno. Translations by Lozinskij (1950) and Iljušin (1995) were selected for comparison as pertaining to different traditions of rendering Italian hendecasyllabic in Russian and the most representative of these traditions at all levels of poetic structure. Lozinskij’s iambic pentameter belongs to the trend of Puškin and Brjusov, while Iljušin’s translation is the first attempt to revive Russian syllabics since the time of Ševyrev, who had translated an extract from Canto iii of the Inferno in 1833. In her paper the author compares differing methods of rendering the metric, rhythmical, semantic and phonetic characteristics of rhyme of the original by the Russian transla- tors, paying special attention to the problems of the interrelation of rhyme and alliteration.
