In my experience it's not that simple, Roger. Dante's stuff was published way before 1923 but because the official edition of his book that I translated was published in 1932 I had to get permission to publish the translations. Same with Ungaretti, who was contemporary with Cavafy; even his early poems from the First World War were under the umbrella of his collected works, which has a copyright from the 1950s or so.
Marcia is right of course no permissions are needed for translating only for publishing (who's going to check anyway?). But oddly enough, I've had publishers tell me I had to get permission to translate -- Ungaretti's publisher was a stickler on that. But really, it's for publishing that permissions matter.
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