Ever since I read Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club a couple years ago, I have been
looking for Longfellow's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which, I quickly
learned is never included in any allegedly complete book of Longfellow's poems,
though plenty of his other translations are.
Each month I attend a regular once a month barn book sale that a dealer in the
area holds. With time it has become more of a gathering of friends and
acquaintances, with coffee and donuts served. Our host has one bay of his barn
still taken up with most of the boxes of about 20,000 books he bought sight
unseen from the estate of a deceased NYC dealer in Ridgefield, Connecticut, who
died about 30 years ago. The books remained untouched until his widow died last
year.
So I mentioned to him last month that I was looking for the Longfellow Dante.
Today, as we began, he handed me three volumes - the Longfellow Dante, from
Houghton Mifflin, 1889. He said that when he went into the house that very day
a month ago, he sat down to go through the next box of books, and the first
thing he pulled out was this set. He said, "What are the odds of that? It is
not a common book at all."
So I finally have the Longfellow Dante.
Francis A. Miniter
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