Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition
Title | Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition PDF eBook |
Author | Dante Alighieri |
Publisher | Indiana University Press |
Pages | 230 |
Release | 1973-04-22 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780253201621 |
"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
Title | The New Life PDF eBook |
Author | Dante Alighieri |
Publisher | |
Pages | 224 |
Release | 1903 |
Genre | Devotional literature, Italian |
ISBN |
Vita Nuova
Title | Vita Nuova PDF eBook |
Author | Dante Alighieri |
Publisher | Penguin |
Pages | 225 |
Release | 2022-03-22 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 0143106201 |
A sparkling translation that gives new life in English to Dante’s Vita Nuova, his transcendent love poems and influential statement on the art and power of poetry, and the most widely read of his works after the Inferno A Penguin Classic Dante was only nine years old when he first met young Beatrice in Florence. Loving her for the rest of his life with a devotion undiminished by even her untimely death, he would dedicate himself to transfiguring her, through poetry, into something far more than a muse—she would become the very proof of love as transcendent spiritual power, and the adoration of her a radiant path into a “new life.” Censored by the Church, written in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, exploding the courtly love tradition of the medieval troubadours, and employing an unprecedented hybrid form to link the thirty-one poems with prose commentary, Vita Nuova, first published in 1294, represents both an innovation in the literature of love and the work of Dante’s that brings this extraordinary poet into clearest view. This limpid 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 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Penn Warren, and Louise Glück, and sustains the long afterlife of a masterpiece that is itself a key to the ultimate poetic journey into the afterlife, The Divine Comedy. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
La Vita Nuova
Title | La Vita Nuova PDF eBook |
Author | Dante Dante Alighieri |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 159 |
Release | 2010-09-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0674050932 |
La Vita Nuova (1292–94) has many aspects. Dante’s libello, or “little book,” 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 Dante’s verse are commentaries on the individual poems—their form and meaning—as 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 Dante’s stand out as a powerful work of art in its own regard, independent of its “junior” status to La Commedia. In an Introduction, Seth Lerer considers Dante as a poet of civic life. “Beatrice,” he reminds us, “lives as much on city streets and open congregations as she does in bedroom fantasies and dreams.”
How Dante Can Save Your Life
Title | How Dante Can Save Your Life PDF eBook |
Author | Rod Dreher |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 343 |
Release | 2015-04-14 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1941393772 |
The opening lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri launched Rod Dreher on a journey that rescued him from exile and saved his life. Dreher found that the medieval poem offered him a surprisingly practical way of solving modern problems. Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease. Doctors told Dreher that if he didn’t find inner peace, he would destroy his health. Soon after, he came across The Divine Comedy in a bookstore and was enchanted by its first lines, which seemed to describe his own condition. In the months that followed, Dante helped Dreher understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that had torn him down and showed him that he had the power to change his life. Dreher knows firsthand the solace and strength that can be found in Dante’s great work, and distills its wisdom for those who are lost in the dark wood of depression, struggling with failure (or success), wrestling with a crisis of faith, alienated from their families or communities, or otherwise enduring the sense of exile that is the human condition. Inspiring, revelatory, and packed with penetrating spiritual, moral, and psychological insights, How Dante Can Save Your Life is a book for people, both religious and secular, who find themselves searching for meaning and healing. Dante told his patron that he wrote his poem to bring readers from misery to happiness. It worked for Rod Dreher. Dante saved Rod Dreher’s life—and in this book, Dreher shows you how Dante can save yours.
Love Poems
Title | Love Poems PDF eBook |
Author | Dante Alighieri |
Publisher | Alma Books |
Pages | 193 |
Release | 2018-01-01 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 0714547948 |
Dante is known to most readers outside Italy for his gritty descriptions of the Inferno, but there is another, gentler side to his poetry, which found expression throughout his career in verses that made him, together with his friend Guido Cavalcanti, the leading love poet of his generation.From the ballads and rime of his youth to the heart-rending lyrics written on the death of Beatrice and the more sober, philosophical canzoni of his later years, this volume provides the only English edition of the great Florentine's complete love poems, in brilliant verse translations by Dante specialists J.G. Nichols and Anthony Mortimer.
Dante’s Bones
Title | Dante’s Bones PDF eBook |
Author | Guy P. Raffa |
Publisher | Belknap Press |
Pages | 385 |
Release | 2020-05-12 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0674980832 |
A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint’s relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante’s Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet’s hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante’s posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today.