Opinions on older translations of The Divine Comedy?

I'm kind of in analysis paralysis. For what it's worth, I'm mainly interested in older (say anywhere between 1782-1960) translations - and anything with a rich vocabulary (I love words) and poetic flavour, even if it's very free-form.

When directly comparing Paradiso Canto translations from Sydney Fowler Wright, Henry Francis Cary, Ichabod Charles Wright, Henry Boyd, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I'm strongly divided - and I know there are plenty more. Any recommendations or opinions on these?

I find some of Longfellow's passages very noble and powerful, but his line-for-line translation can become quite arduous and confusing for me after a while.

I know Henry Boyd's translation is highly inaccurate and more of a curiosity, but I'm still attracted to his poetic interpretation (if nothing else) of the journey and occasionally beautiful passages.

I find Fowler Wright's Paradiso 'descriptive' and 'colourful' - but I read a comment from someone who hated it, so I am curious to see what the community thinks.

I like the elegant vocabulary of Charles Wright's Paradiso, but I know (like some of the older translations) it takes liberties with the source material.

I've given links to the different translations, even though I know many more exist:

Longfellow's Paradiso: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1003/1003-h/1003-h.htm

Cary's Paradiso: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1007/pg1007.html

Charles Wright's Paradiso: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101067195873&view=1up&seq=2...

Fowler Wright's Paradiso: http://www.sfw.org.uk/paradiso.shtml

Henry Boyd's Paradiso: https://archive.org/details/divinacommediaof03dantuoft/page/186

I've been struggling to find an old translation I like for weeks - I even browsed through Cunningham's critical bibliography of Dante translations:

https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/27849/CunninghamGF_1954_v3redux.pdf?s...

I'd appreciate any recommendations or opinions on the translations I've already listed.

Thanks.

I enjoyLongfellow's, too; try Dorothy L Sayers. I haven't finished, it yet. ( not her fault)

You might take a look at https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/ Among other things there is a side-by-side translation of Longfellow and Mandelbaum (as well as the original). An article that champions the Longfellow translation can be found at https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-read-dante-in-the-21st-century/

>3 Pharmacdon: Apologies for the delayed response. Fantastic website! Thank you. ^^