July/August 2015
Colin W. Sargent, Editor & Publisher
A few weeks ago, during a casual search of the Boston-based Skinner Auctioneers site, I bumped into a list of rare documents headed for the block. Many items were the usual ephemera–transactions, clipped autographs, but then I flicked to Lot 49 of Auction 2819T and recognized the words first, made more personal by the author’s scratches, cross-outs, and changes:
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
It was Longfellow’s haunting opening lines to his famous translation of Dante’s Inferno! More precisely, it was the first 27 lines of Canto I of Longfellow’s handwritten manuscript draft (with emendations). Stunned to eavesdrop on his choices as he searched for just the right word, I felt close to Longfellow’s shoulder just as he entered the “forest dark” of the underworld.
Then my next surprise. The pre-auction estimate was $800 to $1,200. How could a single sheet of paper this desirable still exist outside of a museum? “It’s still considered one of the better translations as I understand it,” says Nick Noyes, librarian at Maine Historical Society. “Longfellow went to Europe to polish up his language skills before he went to Bowdoin. Then he went back a couple of other times to prepare for teaching at Harvard.” Longfellow enthusiasts are aware he loved all things Italian (and The Inferno is the first major European work rendered in Italian instead of Latin), but this has to be The Bearded One’s supreme achievement as a Professor of Romance Languages.
Suspense is everything. So who had the highest bid at auction? Hammer price was $10,455, according to Skinner. The buyer was Harvard University’s Houghton Library, which prizes rare documents in its Longfellow collection. To a Longfellow fan (and his stock is rising—Donna Tartt’s novel title The Secret History is lifted from Longfellow), this is the Holy Grail. “We were excited to bid on it, because it’s a page that’s been missing from the manuscript we’ve had here for some time,” says Houghton Library’s Leslie Morris. “It was apparently given away as a souvenir by one of Longfellow’s sons. It was very exciting for us to reunite it with the manuscript.”
The following link magnifies the text for a closer look: http://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2819T/lots/49
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