19th Century Novel / Mexican American Translator
The Martyr of Golgotha: A Picture of Oriental Tradition
Notes: An English-language version of a novel of Cesar, Cleopatra, and Jesus by a popular Spanish author. The translator, Adéle Godoy, was a member of the most literary Mexican American family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her parents and siblings published novels, plays, translations, poetry, newspapers, travel guides, and magazines.
Adèle Godoy (Dutch libraries give her dates as 1863–1918) may have been born in California (an August 16, 1885, San Francisco Examiner story calls her "a San Francisco girl"). In the early 1880s, she went to Amsterdam to study. She came back to the US briefly, and then returned to the Netherlands. She worked as a translator (this novel), a writer of a column about the Netherlands in the New York periodical Las novedades, a Spanish teacher (she published two textbooks in Dutch, ¿Habla v. Español? and Spaansche Spraakkunst), and editor (of Revista Hispano-Neerlandesa, a short-lived periodical in 1913).
[blank leaf], 4] VIII, iii, [blank], 448, [blank leaf]; [2 blank leaves], [2], iii, [blank], 364, [12 ads] pages. The first ad page is devoted to War and Peace by Tolstoy, also published by Gottsberger. 4-3/4 by 6-1/2 inches.
Edition + Condition: First edition. A very good set of two volumes in a decorative publisher's binding stamped in black and gold, as issued (also published in paperback at the same time).
Publication: New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1887.
Item No: #362978
Price: $300