The Comedy Of Dante Alighieri
The Comedy Of Dante Alighieri / translated Into English Unrhymed. Hendecasyllabic Verse By Mary Prentice Lillie. San Francisco: Grabhorn Press, 1958
Mary Prentice Lille was a member of the Vassar class of 1927. She traced her interest in Dante to a trip to Europe she took in 1922, a year after the 600th anniversary of Dante’s death. She began to learn Italian, and then continued her studies of the poet while in college and after graduation. By the early 1950s she decided to translate the entire Divine Comedy using hendecasyllabic verse. In the translator’s note of this three-volume work she states, “my chief aim has been to produce a readable translation, in a type of English verse that would suggest the Italian…” The beautiful limited edition volumes were printed by the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco, one of the major fine presses operating in America at that time. The typeface is a special casting of Kennerley Italic, made by the famous type designer and publisher Frederic Goudy, who for many years lived in the Hudson Valley.