La Vita Nuova Vita Nova The New Life

La Vita Nuova - in English The New Life - is a poem by Dante Alighieri which expresses the virtues of Medieval courtship and love. First published in 1295 during the dawn of the Italian Renaissance period, this work discusses the praiseworthy aspects of courtship which first appeared during the Medieval era. Dante was a great admirer of this practice, feeling that the tradition elevated both love and courteous behaviour in a manner befitting an experience of such emotive depth. Dante first authored this book during his own association with Beatrice Portinari, a paramour who was to symbolise human love for the artist in both life and death. La Vita Nuova is distinct from other, later works by Dante in that it was authored in his native Italian, rather than the Latin he employed in The Divine Comedy and other works.

"A fresh, new version of a 1962 translation that has had enormous popularity in comparative literature classes. The Vita Nuova (the New Life) is a small book which relates in prose and often very beautiful verse the story of the youthful Dante's love for Beatrice. The esay which follows the translation provides new insights into this puzzling thirteenth-century work. Musa regards Dante's intention in this so-called "Book of Memory" as a cruel and comic commentary on the youthful lover. He argues that Dante, using the tradition of love poetry current in his time, points up the foolishness and shallowness of his protagonist, a self-centered and self-pitying youth who only occasionally in the progress of his suffering catches even a glimpse of the true nature of Love or his beloved. "The sensitive man who would realize a man's destiny must ruthlessly cut out of his heart the canker at its center [i.e. self-pity], the canker that the heart instinctively tends to cultivate." According to Musa, this is one of Dante's central ideas. Dante scholars, libraries, and students of the Italian classics will welcome this distinguished translation and its provocative commentary"--Back cover.

Excerpt from The New Life IN that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read is found a rubric which says: Incipit Vita Nova [the New Life begins]. Under which rubric I find the words written which it is my intention to copy into this little book, and if not all of them, at least their meaning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

La Vita Nuova (1292Ð94) has many aspects. DanteÕs libello, or Òlittle book,Ó is most obviously a book about love. In a sequence of thirty-one poems, the author recounts his love of Beatrice from his first sight of her (when he was nine and she eight), through unrequited love and chance encounters, to his profound grief sixteen years later at her sudden and unexpected death. Linked with DanteÕs verse are commentaries on the individual poemsÑtheir form and meaningÑas well as the events and feelings from which they originate. Through these commentaries the poet comes to see romantic love as the first step in a spiritual journey that leads to salvation and the capacity for divine love. He aims to reside with Beatrice among the stars. David Slavitt gives us a readable and appealing translation of one of the early, defining masterpieces of European literature, animating its verse and prose with a fluid, lively, and engaging idiom and rhythm. His translation makes this first major book of DanteÕs stand out as a powerful work of art in its own regard, independent of its ÒjuniorÓ status to La Commedia. In an Introduction, Seth Lerer considers Dante as a poet of civic life. ÒBeatrice,Ó he reminds us, Òlives as much on city streets and open congregations as she does in bedroom fantasies and dreams.Ó

La Vita Nuova - in English The New Life - is a poem by Dante Alighieri which expresses the virtues of Medieval courtship and love. First published in 1295 during the dawn of the Italian Renaissance period, this work discusses the praiseworthy aspects of courtship which first appeared during the Medieval era. Dante was a great admirer of this practice, feeling that the tradition elevated both love and courteous behaviour in a manner befitting an experience of such emotive depth. This translation of the original Italian into English by William Michael Rossetti has, since its original appearance in 1899, become well-regarded by scholars and general enthusiasts of Italian literature. Readable as well as accurate, this edition also contains the original insightful notes which Rossetti appended to his rendition.

La Vita Nuova (Italian for "The New Life") or Vita Nova (Latin title) is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse. Referred to by Dante as his libello, or "little book," La Vita Nuova is the first of two collections of verse written by Dante in his life. The collection is a prosimetrum, a piece containing both verse and prose, in the vein of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Dante used each prosimetrum as a means for combining poems written over periods of roughly ten years-La Vita Nuova contains his works from before 1283 to roughly 1293. The collection and its style fit in with the movement called dolce stil novo. The prose creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante's way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Dante and his poet-friends inherited from the Provençal poets, the Sicilian poets of the court of Frederick II, and the Tuscan poets before them). Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered on the self and more aimed at love itself. He intended to elevate courtly love poetry, many of its tropes and its language, into sacred love poetry. Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love-transparent to the Absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor. The first full translation into English was published by Joseph Garrow in 1846. Besides its content, La Vita Nuova is notable for being written in Tuscan vernacular, rather than Latin; Dante's work helped to establish Tuscan as the basis for the national Italian language. American poet Wallace Stevens called the text "one of the great documents of Christianity," noting that the text displays the influence of Christianity in promulgating "the distinctly feminine virtues in place of the sterner ideals of antiquity." The Henry Holiday painting Dante and Beatrice (1883) is inspired by La Vita Nuova, as was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Salutation of Beatrice (1859). Rossetti translated the work into English in 1848 and used the character name Monna Vanna from it as a title for his 1866 painting Monna Vanna. La vita nuova is a 1902 cantata based on the text by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. Vladimir Martynov's 2003 opera Vita Nuova premiered in the U.S. on February 28, 2009 at the Alice Tully Hall, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. A modified version of the opening line of the work's Introduction was used on the television show Star Trek: Voyager in the episode "Latent Image" (1999). The Doctor is concerned with a moral situation and Captain Janeway reads this book and leaves the Doctor to discover the poem. The author Allegra Goodman wrote a short story entitled "La Vita Nuova", published in the May 3, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, in which Dante's words (in English) are interspersed throughout the piece. (wikipedia.org)

divdivA towering figure in world literature, Dante wrote his great epic poem Commedia in the early fourteenth century. The work gained universal acclaim and came to be known as La Divina Commedia, or The Divine Comedy. Giuseppe Mazzotta brings Dante and his masterpiece to life in this exploration of the man, his cultural milieu, and his endlessly fascinating works.div /DIVdivBased on Mazzotta’s highly popular Yale course, this book offers a critical reading of The Divine Comedy and selected other works by Dante. Through an analysis of Dante’s autobiographical Vita nuova, Mazzotta establishes the poetic and political circumstances of The Divine Comedy. He situates the three sections of the poem—Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise—within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, and he explores the political, philosophical, and theological topics with which Dante was particularly concerned./DIV/DIV/DIV