User:Cricketbug

Cricket's user page. Learning her way around...

Interested in things like paintings and natural gas. My favorite artist is Kiki Smith.

When at last the task of translating, revising and re-revision, weighin and re-weighting, criticising and re-criticising every phrase, every possible interpretation, and every allusion was done,--first in the seclusion of his own study, and then with the sympathetic aid of his friends, Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell and others, the work was sent tot he printer in 1864. Ten copies of "The Inferno" were privately printed in 1865 in time for one of them to be sent to Florence for the celebration of the six hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth. The seconds volume was printed in the following year in like manner and the third in the year after. In that year (1867), as we have already said, the whole work was given to the public as it is now presented in this edition and substantially as it appeared in the privately printed copies.

So thoroughly has Longfellow done the work of elucidating his version of the text of Dante, that there is absolutely nothing left for other commentators to do.--Every biblical and every classical allusion is annotated and referenced, every side light that can possibly be needed is thrown upon the work all through; and his "footlights of the great comedy" as he himself called his notes and illustrations are illuminating it for all time.