The New Life La Vita Nuova

"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.

The New Life (1294) is a work of verse and prose by Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Composed in the prosimetrum style, The New Life explores the popular medieval theme of courtly love. Made up of alternating commentaries, sonnets, and canzoni, the work is an essential expression of Dante’s poetic gift, and a foundational work for the dolce stil novo literary movement to which Dante was a central figure. Written in the Tuscan vernacular, the poem was influential in establishing a standardized Italian language. Compiled and published following the death of Beatrice Portinari, whom Dante loved from the age of nine when he saw her on the streets of Florence, The New Life translates his personal grief into a moving and universally recognizable work on the nature of love. Dante, who believed that romantic love could lead to a development of the soul, subsequently bringing one to the love of God—a concept central to The Divine Comedy—divided his work into prose commentaries and poems in verse, a popular style known as prosimetrum. Despite this debt to tradition, however, Dante wrote The New Life in the Tuscan vernacular as opposed to Latin, making his work more accessible to readers. Autobiographical in nature, The New Life portrays Dante coming to terms with his grief, praising the deceased Beatrice, and turning friends and acquaintances into figures populating his poems. From sorrow to salvation, Dante finds the light of God through the darkness of death, testifying to the transformative power of love while proving beyond any doubt the power of a transformative poetry. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Dante Alighieri’s The New Life is a classic of Italian literature reimagined for modern readers.

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. 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.

Fall in love with love in this gorgeous collection of poems from Italian master Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy. Although collections of lyric poems singing the praises of love are as old as the written word, La Vita Nuova is remarkably innovative. Combining works in verse and prose in a linked series of pieces exploring the complexities of courtly love, this enchanting anthology is a must-read for poetry fans.

La Vita Nuova or Vita Nova 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.

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