FIND RARE BOOKS
Rare books
WANT TO SELL YOUR COLLECTION?
We just returned to Reykjavík after a month travelling through Italy.
There were Tuscan hills and medieval towns, churches, museums and long Italian evenings (perhaps the fault of a few too many coffees during the day. ;-))And, as always when we travel, we followed our love of books, art and history, spending our days wandering through galleries, antiquarian bookshops and markets filled with old prints and paper treasures.
And somewhere along the way, we found ourselves following in the footsteps of Dante.
In Florence, Dante is never far away. He was born here, entered public life here, and then, in 1302, was forced into exile, never to return. It was during those years away from home that he wrote the work that would make him immortal: the Divina Commedia.
Perhaps fittingly, the poem is itself a journey. It begins with Dante lost in a dark wood and follows him through Hell, Purgatory and, finally, Paradise.
Behind the theology, medieval politics and wonderfully imaginative punishments lies a question that has aged remarkably well: How should a person live?
Dante’s own journey eventually took him north to Ravenna, where he spent his final years and died in 1321. For a man who left such an enormous literary legacy, we expected a rather grand resting place when we visited the city.
Instead, we nearly walked past it.
Tucked hidden beside the Basilica of San Francesco, Dante’s small mausoleum is remarkably modest ; and somehow that made it all the more moving.
Dante never returned to the Florence he loved. His words, however, never stopped travelling. They crossed centuries, borders and languages, including Icelandic.
Guðmundur Böðvarsson gave Icelandic readers twelve cantos in Tólf kviður úr Gleðileiknum guðdómlega in 1968. A complete Icelandic prose translation by Erlingur E. Halldórsson followed in 2010, and in 2018 Einar Thoroddsen published Víti, his verse translation of Inferno.
Translating Dante is no small undertaking. His famous terza rima links one stanza to the next through rhyme, constantly pulling the poem forward. Carrying not only Dante’s meaning but something of that music into another language is an extraordinary challenge.
When it was time to leave the Tuscan warmth behind, we flew north to Reykjavík and returned to Bókin - only to find, on our very first day back, a collection we could hardly believe was waiting for us.
We began unpacking the books, one by one. And there, among the worn bindings and yellowed pages, was a very familiar name.
Dante.
And it was not just one volume, again and again, Dante appeared: in Welsh, Danish, Swedish, German and French.
After spending weeks following him through Italy, it felt like more than a coincidence.
Only days earlier, we had stood beside Dante’s grave in Ravenna. We had walked through his Florence and followed traces of his life across Italy. And now, back at Bokin, Dante was already greeting us again :-)
Perhaps books are like that sometimes.
They spend decades, sometimes centuries, moving from one owner to another, surviving house moves and crossing borders and languages. And every now and then, a book seems to wait for exactly the right moment to appear and to be treasured again.
This little collection had certainly travelled through different languages and different lives. There was a rare 1903 Welsh Divine Comedy, a fragile nineteenth-century Swedish Gudomliga Komedi, and several beautifully illustrated German editions.
And then there was one special book that stood out most:
Le Banquet.
Published in Paris in 1852, its title page proudly announces Première traduction française - the first French translation of Dante’s Convivio, his philosophical “banquet” of knowledge.
Even more remarkable is its condition. After 174 years of travelling through unknown hands and across borders eventually finding its way to Reykjavík, it has arrived at Bókin beautifully preserved.
So, seven hundred years after Dante’s death, we went looking for him in Italy. By the time we came home, his books were already waiting for us at Bókin.
And now they’re waiting for you. (And so are we, after being away for quite a while! ;-)
Come in and see this wonderful little Dante collection for yourself. The books are currently on display at Bókin (and yes, they are available for sale too. ;-)
And if you’d like to discover Dante in Icelandic, you can find the wonderful 1968 Tólf kviður úr Gleðileiknum guðdómlega at Bókin’s online store.
