DACIER, Anne Lefèvre (trans.); HOMER.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

L'Iliade [and] L'Odyséé, traduite en françois, avec des remarques. First Dacier editions, extra-illustrated, in beautifully preserved early 18th-century morocco bindings. This exceptional set features the full suite of Picart plates, not issued in all copies of the Iliad, two folding plates depicting the Shield of Achilles from Boivin's Apologie d'Homère (1715), and the plates issued in the Amsterdam 1731 edition of Dacier's Odyssey.Dacier's celebrated translation into French of the Homeric epics, the first by a woman, cemented her place among the foremost classical scholars of her day. The only daughter of the noted Hellenist Tanneguy Lefèvre, Dacier (c.1654-1720) began translating classical works from an early age, beginning with Callimachus and progressing to versions of the poems of Anacreon and Sappho. In 1683 she married her father's protégé André Dacier, who was a member of the French Academy and who also produced a number of translations, though acknowledged to be of inferior quality to his wife's works. She was a staunch champion of Homer in the Ancients and Moderns debate, in which she defended his works against what she saw as the contemporary decline in standards of taste. Despite her literary feuds with fellow figures such as Antoine Houdar de la Motte and Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, and her differences with Alexander Pope, with whom she fundamentally disagreed on how best to approach translating Homer, she was held in extremely high regard by her contemporarie

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