Le donne più felici, come pure le nazioni più felici, non hanno una storia.

English Translation

The happiest women, like only the happiest nations, have no history.

I wonder about pure for “only”, is that poetic licence?

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Yes, I think “only” is unnecessary and/or wrong. WordReference suggests that “come pure” translates as “just like” or “just as”.

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I’ve checked the sentence history on Tatoeba, and it turns out that it’s a chain of translations from the original Japanese: German → French→ Italian. The English seems to be a direct translation from the Japanese and was subsequently linked to the Italian.

So come pure seems to be the translation of French à l’instar de: “just like (in the same way as)”, as you said.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/à_l'instar_de

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“pure” in this case means “also”, you can replace “come pure” with “come anche” without changing the meaning. But “also” or “even” don’t work in the English sentence, I think @morbrorper suggestion is the best you can do.

Edit: I meant @David755502 suggestion, obviously.

It would really be nice if there was a link back to the question, and to the tatoeba source, that would make research easier!

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