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La Vita Nuova Dante Alighieri 9781374988545 Books

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La Vita Nuova Dante Alighieri 9781374988545 Books

... of the individual, of individual self-consciousness. That's the "sense" -- proprioception -- implied in Dante Alighieri's The New Life, written circa 1293 when the poet was about 25 years old. I know it's a brash assertion, but I take La Vita Nuova to be the founding document of 'modern' literature. Dante himself declared as much in asserting the novelty of writing in 'spoken' language, i.e. Italian, rather than 'written' language, Latin, and scholars have always credited him with initiating Italian as a poetic language. Trouveres and troubadours had been writing their intricate fixed-form lais and ballades, in Provençal and French, for decades previously, but Dante had something more in mind. La Vita Nuova included his youthful sonnets and canzone, replete with formulaic chivalry, in La Vita Nuova, and then he did something revolutionary: he reflected upon himself in the act of creation. Each of the poems is set in a double context of prose, one part analyzing the 'poetics' as such, the mechanics of versifying, and the other depicting the poet's state of mind when he wrote, in the context of the events of his mortal life. That alone was novel enough, I think, to justify regarding La Vita Nuova as 'the birth of the modern'.

Paradoxically, for most people in the 21st C, Dante would be the epitome of Medievalism, the last verbose shudder of the Dark Ages. Well, yes, there's plenty that's quaint in La Vita Nuova, especially in this 1861 translation with its deliberately archaic syntax and vocabulary. Dante's 'defensiveness' about personifying Love -- in the philosophical terms of his time, an 'essence' rather than a 'substance' -- will seem like a moot question to most modern readers, and his obsession with numerology, with the number 9, will perplex us gravely. It may help to know that Dante was far less venerated in the centuries from 1300 to 1600 than in ours, and far less read than Petrarch. It was a shock to his audience when the late 16th C madrigalist Luca Marenzio set sonnets by Dante to the most daringly expressive chromatic music. Dante was never totally forgotten, of course, but it was German and English 19th C Romanticism that elevated him to literary Godhead. This translation, by the appropriately named Dante Gabriel Rossetti, played a large role in the shift in cultural taste in Europe, from the classicism of the Enlightenment to the neo-Medievalism of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelites and of Richard Wagner. That historical 'hinge' is the only reason I could offer for choosing Rossetti's translation instead of the many more fluent versions that have followed. The Dover Thrift price is attractive, naturally, but Dover also publishes a bilingual "La Vita Nuova" for just a couple bucks more.

Product details Paperback 188 pages Publisher Pinnacle Press (May 26, 2017) Language English ISBN-10 1374988545

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La Vita Nuova Dante Alighieri 9781374988545 Books Reviews

Anyone who thinks that humans are rational creatures has probably never been in love or witnessed somebody else helplessly encased in its ineffable throes. Once in it, bizarre things happen and the mind acts in ways that acrobatically defy logic. The object of affection may even overtly possess hideously unflattering qualities, but nonetheless the obsession persists. Friends and family murmur about the often embarrassing or ridiculous behavioral changes in their once normal companion. Others may give suspicious sidelong glances towards the afflicted. Some have used the analogy of insanity to describe the feeling and, for those with direct experience, this probably seems perfectly reasonable. Whatever psychological and physiological needs underlie this condition, few will deny its debilitating power.

This wonderfully dreadful condition has apparently existed for centuries. One piece of evidence appears in Dante Alighieri's little book "La Vita Nuova" from 1295. Whether its story of passionate infatuation that turns into painful excruciating love counts as biographical, fictional or semi-fictional, or even semi-autobiographical, remains largely speculatory. The object of Dante's intense affection in the book, Beatrice Portinari, did actually exist and she did pass away in 1290 at age 24. Her tomb still stands at Santa Margherita de'Cerchi church in Florence. "La Vita Nuova" appeared five years later and so the possibility definitely exists that Dante really did feel the overwhelming and all consuming desire he relates so convincingly. That Beatrice later appears as a guide in Dante's magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, adds further credibility to the claim. Regardless, this earlier and far shorter work doesn't qualify as a comedy. In it, Dante almost figures as an anti-hero while Beatrice, described in terms of the purest divinity, comes to an early and tragically unexpected end. The result unrequited love and agonizing loss. Life can apparently throw a nasty curve ball at someone even of Dante's massive stature. In some ways, "La Vita Nuova" charts a journey through a different kind of Inferno. It also shows how Dante attempted to deal with the these seemingly cruel blows. He largely turns to poetry and the creative process for comfort and support.

Poetry fills many pages of Dante's amorous confession. Not only does he use it to express his feelings, but he provides a perfunctory exegesis for each work. As such, the book works on surprising parallel levels. It includes the story itself, in prose, of Dante's emotional maelstrom while another thread traces Dante's literary development. The sonnets and canzoni arise from the story's anguish and, along the way, Dante self-analyzes his work to look for improvements in expression and form. He even doubts his powers on occasion. In the end, one learns not only a bittersweet melancholy tale, but also a reflection on artistic evolution.

Everything begins with Dante's first sighting of Beatrice at age 9. The number 9 peppers the entire narrative. He finds himself suddenly gripped in an almost pathologically irrational yet glorious feeling, which he identifies with love. Fast forward 9 more years, skipping the machinations of late childhood, and Dante encounters Beatrice dressed in a "lily-white gown." To his devastating pleasure, she greets him. This leads to the stunningly phantasmagorical - but yet one that many can probably identify with - vision of a demon cradling Beatrice while she devours Dante's heart. A sonnet results, addressed to "anyone whose heart and soul have been smitten." He soon wastes away, drained from love, but remains steadfast that no one will discover his precious secret. Shockingly, he even pretends to love other beautiful women, using them as "shields" and "beards" to protect his true intentions. This of course ends badly. The rumors surrounding his deceptive attraction for the second woman "exceeded the bounds of acceptability" and Beatrice snubs him the next time he encounters her. He makes no mention of whether the women he used were hurt or upset, but Beatrice's silent protest throws him into a chasm of despair. Disturbingly, he states that "I fell asleep in tears like a little boy who has been beaten."

With help from a muse-like figure who speaks both Latin and Italian, Dante decides to stop the deception. He reflects on love, on Beatrice's powerful effect and verse pours from him. This leads to a physical reaction, almost an amorous allergic reaction, when a friend takes Dante to a gathering and he spies Beatrice among the group. He loses all sense, stumbles, fumbles and becomes nearly comically drunk with proximity to his "glorious lady." After escaping, he weeps more in his room and more lines seep from his misery "you make mock of me and giggle at how I look and behave... but it is your beauty that brings on stupidity and speechlessness to possess me." Such a thing, he concludes, "is impossible to explain to anyone who has never been in love."

A perceptive gentlewoman asks him how he can love Beatrice when he can't stand being in her presence. He dodges the question somewhat by saying love's new object lies in "the words that praise my lady," but the gentlewoman counters that then those words obviously have ulterior motives. Steadfast, though a little shamed, he declares henceforth to dedicate his poetry to Beatrice, and only to Beatrice. This leads to his first notable work, which begins with "Ladies, you who understand love." Additional poems and explications follow. Then a series of misfortunes occur Beatrice's father dies and Dante falls gravely ill for 9 days. While sick, he experiences ominous visions of his own and Beatrice's death. After recovering, he sees Beatrice pass by accompanied by the gorgeous Giovanna. He apparently doesn't speak to her. Some philosophical and poetical reflections ruminate on love as an abstraction and expression in the vernacular versus Latin. Perhaps Italian works dealing with love represent attempts to impress a woman with meager Latin skills?

Then Beatrice passes away. A canzone claims that she experienced "an unusual decease - no chill, no fever." The number 9 surrounds this event and Dante sees a connection with the Trinity. Since Beatrice is a 9 (or a miracle), her root is in the Trinity, or 3, since 3 is the square root of 9. Theological mathematical pondering aside, he turns to sorrowful words for consolation. Overcome with grief and yearning for death himself, one particularly despairing line reads "the sighs at least keep me breathing." A year later Dante almost betrays Beatrice's memory when he becomes a little too attracted to a woman who looks upon him with pity. He writes guilty sonnets to her and to his "faithless eyes." A vision of Beatrice resplendent in red changes everything and he resolves to dedicate himself unswerving to her memory. He wonders if he could drive itinerant Pilgrims, ignorant of the happenings on the street they now stroll, to weeping if he told them his sad tale. At this point, he declares that he wants to gain new literary powers before writing more about Beatrice. He wants, "to say of her what has never been said of any woman." And he hopes that he will see her again someday in "a better place."

"La Vita Nuova" provides a poignant reminder not only of life's unexpected tragedies, but also of how people manage to cope with great loss and suffering. These have become universal themes and such works may provide comfort to those in mourning or those wrangling with the seeming absurdities that the universe insists on throwing our way. It helps at least in the sense that we are not alone and others have also faced and overcome such sobering and deflating trials. Dante's "other masterpiece" directly faces the chilling and perpetual themes of love and death while informing the present day that human beings have always struggled with uncertainty, pain and misfortune. Fundamentally, we have changed little over the centuries. Still, we somehow manage to muddle through. So perhaps the message of "La Vita Nuova," or at least a defensible interpretation, can be summed up simply as "keep going."
was a nice book about his love and fills in the blanks on why she was so important to him...and later referenced in The Comedy
It has a historical significance that makes it desirable. Yet the story gets a little tedious, which can be forgiven because it is Dante's work.
It's a photo copy...I immediately gave it away.
I needed this book for an adult ed course. Easy to read with a clear introduction
This is a fine book.
The hardcover edition I purchased from (12/09) does not contain Cervigni and Vasta's new English translation of the Vita Nuova. Instead, it contains a facsimile of Carlo Witte's 1876 _La Vita Nuova di Dante Allighieri. Ricorretta coll'ajuto di testi a penna ed illustrata_ (Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus). This edition includes an introductory note, a survey of extant MSS of the Vita Nuova, a survey of print editions of the Vita Nuova available circa 1876, tables of contents for the work as a whole and for the poetic compositions, and finally Witte's critical edition. Especially charming are the underlined passages and marginalia of some unknown reader of the particular text that got reprinted for this new edition.

I intended this book as a gift for a non-reader of Italian, who I thought would enjoy Dante's _libello_ on love, awakening, and transcendence. Clearly I'm going to have to find an alternative!

I can't imagine that this edition will be interesting to anybody but scholars of medieval Italian literature. Luckily, I happen to be one of those, so I'm keeping it.
... of the individual, of individual self-consciousness. That's the "sense" -- proprioception -- implied in Dante Alighieri's The New Life, written circa 1293 when the poet was about 25 years old. I know it's a brash assertion, but I take La Vita Nuova to be the founding document of 'modern' literature. Dante himself declared as much in asserting the novelty of writing in 'spoken' language, i.e. Italian, rather than 'written' language, Latin, and scholars have always credited him with initiating Italian as a poetic language. Trouveres and troubadours had been writing their intricate fixed-form lais and ballades, in Provençal and French, for decades previously, but Dante had something more in mind. La Vita Nuova included his youthful sonnets and canzone, replete with formulaic chivalry, in La Vita Nuova, and then he did something revolutionary he reflected upon himself in the act of creation. Each of the poems is set in a double context of prose, one part analyzing the 'poetics' as such, the mechanics of versifying, and the other depicting the poet's state of mind when he wrote, in the context of the events of his mortal life. That alone was novel enough, I think, to justify regarding La Vita Nuova as 'the birth of the modern'.

Paradoxically, for most people in the 21st C, Dante would be the epitome of Medievalism, the last verbose shudder of the Dark Ages. Well, yes, there's plenty that's quaint in La Vita Nuova, especially in this 1861 translation with its deliberately archaic syntax and vocabulary. Dante's 'defensiveness' about personifying Love -- in the philosophical terms of his time, an 'essence' rather than a 'substance' -- will seem like a moot question to most modern readers, and his obsession with numerology, with the number 9, will perplex us gravely. It may help to know that Dante was far less venerated in the centuries from 1300 to 1600 than in ours, and far less read than Petrarch. It was a shock to his audience when the late 16th C madrigalist Luca Marenzio set sonnets by Dante to the most daringly expressive chromatic music. Dante was never totally forgotten, of course, but it was German and English 19th C Romanticism that elevated him to literary Godhead. This translation, by the appropriately named Dante Gabriel Rossetti, played a large role in the shift in cultural taste in Europe, from the classicism of the Enlightenment to the neo-Medievalism of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelites and of Richard Wagner. That historical 'hinge' is the only reason I could offer for choosing Rossetti's translation instead of the many more fluent versions that have followed. The Dover Thrift price is attractive, naturally, but Dover also publishes a bilingual "La Vita Nuova" for just a couple bucks more.