The New Life
The thirty-one poems of the Vita Nuova, the sonnets, canzoni and ballata Dante wrote for Beatrice, in Rossetti's translation with the Italian beside each; the prose that frames them is not carried.
What this poem is
La Vita Nuova (pronounced [la ˈviːta ˈnwɔːva]; modern Italian for "The New Life") or Vita Nova (Latin and medieval Italian title ) is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. Focused on Dante's lifelong love for his beloved Beatrice, 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 or Ibn Hazm's The Ring of the Dove (1022 CE). 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 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.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article “La Vita Nuova” (revision 1374210723), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Laurel's own notes and measurements are not from Wikipedia.
Measured across the book
Across its 681 lines, 92% of stressed syllables fall on the beat (95% interval 91% to 93%). Alliteration runs at 0.90 times what shuffling the words would give (0.30 observed against 0.33 expected). 29% of the lines have a feminine ending.
Baselines and intervals are described in the methods.
Contents
About this text
Public domain. Text from The New Life, Project Gutenberg ebook #41085. Free to read, print, copy and reuse.