Vita Nuova
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A unique treatise by a poet, written for poets, on the art of poetry, LA VITA NUOVA is elaborately and symbolically patterned, consisting of a selection of Dante's early poems, interspersed with his own prose commentary.
The poems themselves tell the story of his love for Beatrice, from their first meeting at a May Day party in her father's house, through Dante's sufferings and his attempts to conceal the true object of his devotion by the use of 'screen-loves', to his overwhelming grief ather death, ending with the transformative vision of her in heaven. These are some of the richest love poems in literature and the movement from self-pitying lament to praise for the beloved's beauty and virtue, illustrate the elevating power of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Before he wrote the Inferno and the Paradiso, Dante Alighieri wrote some of the world's most famous sonnets, describing his love for the young, unattainable, and (eventually) deceased Beatrice. Dante then embedded these sonnets in fluent prose describing his "new life" of love, explaining how he wrote the poems and what they meant. The short book that resulted became a testament to his feelings, a monument to Beatrice's beautiful purity, and an influential proof that poetry written in Florentine Italian could hold its own in a literary world ruled by scholarly Latin. (A long, clear foreword, from Stanford professor Seth Lerer, explains as much, and more.) Though the verse may not quite hold up as poetry in English, Slavitt, a prolific translator best known for classical texts, has made a consistently readable, even colloquial version of Dante's poems and prose, without compromising his strange extremes of emotion. Beatrice is at once the object of Dante's yearnings and the chaste symbol of all good hopes: "A word, or even a smile" from her, one poem says, "the memory of which lasts only a while,/ makes for strange and miraculous changes, and these/ endure forever in heart and soul and mind."
