Overview

A totally unique poetic treatise, La Vita Nuova is an elaborately and symbolically patterned selection of Dante's early poems, interspersed with his own incisive prose commentary. The poems themselves tell the story of his undying love for Beatrice, from their first meeting at a May Day party, through Dante's sufferings and his attempts to conceal the true object of his devotion, to his overwhelming grief at her death, and 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 his beloved's beauty and virtue illustrate the elevating power of love. This lucid new translation, based on the latest authoritative Italian edition and featuring the Italian on facing pages, captures the ineffable quality of a work that has inspired the likes of Charles Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges and Louise Glück.

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9780143106203

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This brilliant translation faithfully renders the complexity of Dante's autobiographical novel and, with rare expertise, wonderfully brings to light the deliberate ambiguities of his poetry. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University

Author Information

Dante Alighieri (Author) Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. He met Beatrice, who was to be his muse, in 1274, and when she died in 1290 he sought distraction in philosophy and theology, and wrote La Vita Nuova. He worked on the Divine Comedy from 1308 until near the time of his death in Ravenna in 1321. Virginia Jewiss (Translator) Virginia Jewiss is a Dante scholar and a translator who works as a lecturer at Yale University and is the director of the Yale Humanities in Rome program. She has translated works by Luigi Pirandello, Roberto Saviano, and Melania Mazzucco. She lives in Rome and Washington, D.C.

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