La Vita Nuova

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DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: PAUL NEGRI

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JOSLYN PINE

Copyright Note copyright © 2001 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2001, is an unabridged republication of Rossetti’s translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, which originally appeared in The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100—1200—1300): in the original metres, together with Dante’s Vita Nuova, translated by D. G. Rossetti, and published in 1861 by Smith & Elder, London. A new introductory Note has been specially prepared for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321.

[Vita nuova. English]

La vita nuova / Dante Alighieri; translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

p. cm.

Originally published: London: Smith & Elder, 1861.

9780486157146

1. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828–1882. II. Title.

PQ4315.58 .R713 2001

851’.1—dc21

2001028585

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

41915003

www.doverpublications.com

Table of Contents

Dover Thrift Editions Fiction

Title Page

Copyright Page

Note

LA VITA NUOVA - (The New Life)

DOVER • THRIFT • EDITIONS

Note

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321) is widely acknowledged as the greatest of Italian poets, occupying one of the three most honored places in Western literature, alongside Shakespeare and Goethe. He was born in Florence, Italy, at a propitious time in the city’s history when trade and industry were flourishing. Although his family was descended from the feudal nobility, like many others of their class they were impoverished and losing ground to the new bourgeoisie. These circumstances did not adversely affect young Dante’s education, however, since he completed primary school and continued with a course of study that included Latin, mathematics, and music—to which he formed a passionate attachment. And finally, like many Florentine intellectuals of his day, he learned to write verse. The diligent student grew into a learned scholar, an innovative political thinker, and the poet-visionary who would pen the epic poem La Divina Commedia—The Divine Comedy. As one critic described him, Dante is not, as Homer is, the father of poetry springing in the freshness and simplicity of childhood out of the arms of mother earth; he is rather, like Noah, the father of a second poetical world, to whom he pours forth his prophetic song fraught with the wisdom and the experience of the old world.

Since not much is known of Dante’s life—outside of what can be gleaned from his writings—it is illuminating to see him through the eyes of contemporaries who impart a sense of the man, and something of the depth and breadth of his accomplishments. A friend and neighbor, also a chronicler of the time, wrote of him:

This Dante was an honourable and ancient citizen of Florence . . . a great scholar in almost every branch of learning, although he was a layman: he was a great poet and philosopher, and a perfect rhetorician both in prose and verse, and in public debate he was a very noble speaker; in rime he was supreme, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever had been in our language, up to his time and since.

The distinguished Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of the Decameron, who for his Vita di Dante collected impressions of Dante from many of his surviving acquaintances, gave the following description of him:

Our poet was of middle height, and after he had reached mature years he walked with somewhat of a stoop; his gait was grave and sedate; and he was ever clothed in most seemly garments, his dress being suited to the ripeness of his years. His face was long, his nose aquiline, his eyes rather large than small, his jaws heavy, with the under lip projecting beyond the upper. His complexion was dark, and his hair and beard thick, black, and crisp; and his countenance always sad and thoughtful. Whence it happened one day in Verona (the fame of his writings having by that time been spread abroad everywhere, and especially of that part of his Commedia to which he gave the title of Hell, and he himself being known by sight to many men and women), that as he passed before a doorway where several women were sitting, one of them said to the others in a low voice, but not so low but that she was plainly heard by him and by those with him, ‘Do you see the man who goes down to Hell, and returns at his pleasure, and brings back news of those who are below?’ To which one of the others answered in all simplicity: ‘Indeed, what you say must be true; don’t you see how his beard is crisped and his colour darkened by the heat and smoke down below?’ Dante, hearing those words behind him, and perceiving that they were spoken by the women in perfect good faith, was not ill pleased that they should have such an opinion of him, and smiling a little passed on his way.

Dante’s first work, La Vita Nuova, was written c. 1293 when the poet was probably in his late twenties, and it is many things to many scholars: a book of collected lyrics written in the poet’s youth, a treatise for poets on the