ULTRA RARE, HIGHLY DESIRABLE, FIRST THUS ENGLISH PRINTING OF THE HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW TRANSLATION OF THE 3-VOL THE DIVINE COMEDY BY DANTE ALIGHIERI.  

Published by Ticknor & Fields in 1867.  This set has been professionally refurbished, with a few repairs to Vol 1 only, including a rebacking of the spine, and use of binding paper to secure the binding at the endpaper cracks.  Similar or other repairs were not required for the other two volumes.  The result is a VERY SOLID, CLEAN AND ATTRACTIVE 3-VOL SET INCLUDING VOL 1 INFERNO, VOL 2 PURGATORIO, AND VOL 3 PARADISO.

Bound in publisher's original textured green cloth with titles stamped in gilt on the spine and upper boards and in blind on the lower boards; top edges gilt and the other edges rough-cut.  This set belonged to Josephine and Wirt Dexter - more on them below.  Josephine signed and dated, August 1867, the first free endpaper of Vol 1, and there is another inked date, also August 1867, on the front endpaper of Volume 1.  Looking closely above this second date, it looks like there was an erasure of the husband's name here, Wirt Dexter.  There is a Josephine Dexter bookplate in Volumes 2 and 3 behind the front board, and there is Wirt Dexter's signature and date (August 1867) on the first free endpapers of Volumes 2 and 3.  Finally, there is what looks to be a penciled paragraph at the end of Volume 3, at the endpaper.  This is shown in the last listing photo.  No further marks, CLEAN AND SOLIDLY BOUND PAGES, NO ILLUSTRATIONS, 413 pages in Vol 1, 410 in Vol 2, and 452 in Vol 3.    

Here is an online discussion of Longfellow's Translation on Stanford University's The Book Haven, a blog:

"...This overlooked translation finds a new champion in Joseph Luzzi, in “How to Read Dante in the 21st Century” in the online edition of The American Scholar:

… one of the few truly successful English translations comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor of Italian at Harvard and an acclaimed poet. He produced one of the first complete, and in many respects still the best, English translations of The Divine Comedy in 1867. It did not hurt that Longfellow had also experienced the kind of traumatic loss—the death of his young wife after her dress caught fire—that brought him closer to the melancholy spirit of Dante’s writing, shaped by the lacerating exile from his beloved Florence in 1302. Longfellow succeeded in capturing the original brilliance of Dante’s lines with a close, sometimes awkwardly literal translation that allows the Tuscan to shine through the English, as though this “foreign” veneer were merely a protective layer added over the still-visible source. The critic Walter Benjamin wrote that a great translation calls our attention to a work’s original language even when we don’t speak that foreign tongue. Such extreme faithfulness can make the language of the translation feel unnatural—as though the source were shaping the translation into its own alien image."

Here is an online genealogy description of Josephine Moore (1846-1937) and her husband Wirt Dexter, whom she married in 1866, a year before publication of this book:

"She came from a well-to-do farming family and was a teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts, before her marriage. In 1866, she married Wirt Dexter, of Chicago. They had two children, including the pioneer of women's rights, Katharine. Six years after her husband's death in 1890, she bought a house in Boston's Back Bay and returned there with her two children. In 1900, she built 393 Commonwealth on land purchased from the estate of Abbott Lawrence Jr. and lived there with her daughter. She was a member of the exclusive Jekyll Island Club and in 1929 purchased the Chateau de Prangins outside of Geneva, Switzerland, primarily for her daughter's use. The chateau was the home of the ex-King of Spain etc., Joseph-Napoleon Bonaparte, who built Point Breeze in New Jersey. Mrs Josephine Dexter died at 393 Commonwealth, Boston."

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