La Vita Nuova (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry)

The New Life (La Vita Nuova) is a beautiful autobiographical love story by one of the world's great vernacular poets, but as is made clear by the ending, Dante's love for Beatrice is not a mere carnal love, but is meant to point as a signpost to "him who is blessed for all eternity". The last section, 42, reminded me of the words of Aslan from C.S. Lewis's "Voyage of the Dawn Treader", that the children in the story and the children reading the books were brought to Narnia that by knowing him a little there they may know him better in their own world. It is the same with Beatrice: Dante's soul sees Beatrice, but Beatrice in heaven is looking on the face of the Lord. Dante concludes by saying he will write no more about her "until I could do so in a more worthy manner", which he would in fact do in his magnum opus "The Divine Comedy".

... 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.

Unlike everything else, with literature, the better the quality, the cheaper the price. You might pay twenty dollars for a book by some third rate contemporary poet, but a couple of bucks will buy a classic!

I needed this book for an adult ed course. Easy to read with a clear introduction

The hardcover edition I purchased from Amazon (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.

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My dad just came back from Rome and visited Dante's burial site. He said this was the perfect gift to come home to on his birthday!I also bought a kindle copy for myself and it's a terrific read.

Read this and you'll begin to understand why "modern" poets fail. In "Purgatorio" Dante pioneered exploration of the "Australian Hemisphere" and in this book he did the same for poetry.

Libro acquistato per mia figlia (richiesto dalla scuola).E' arrivato in perfette condizioni e nei tempi previsti.Una delle opere più famose di Dante che, almeno una volta nella vita, vale la pena di leggere.