Dante’s Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay

by Dante Alighieri

  In those poems which simply relate the experience itself this experience is seldom an event in the usual sense. It may be a vision (III, IX, XXIII, XXIV), but more often it is a mood, and usually one in which despondency or tension or both predominate (XIII, XV, XVI, XXXV through XXXIX).2 Twice, the experience involves an outer event of which the protagonist is an eyewitness. In Chapter XXVI he describes in his two sonnets Beatrice passing before the people, receiving their veneration; he decides to describe this, we learn from the prose narrative, in order that those who cannot see his lady with the physical eye may somehow share the experience from his description. In Chapter XL the outward event described, which also takes place in the streets of the lover’s city, has meaning only for himself: he sees a group of pilgrims passing down the middle of the city, having come from other places, on their way to Rome; to his bewilderment they show no signs of grief as they pass through the city widowed by Beatrice’s death.

  Of the remaining chapters, that is, those in which the theme of the poem is not the event that occasioned its composition, four tell us that the poem represents the fulfillment of a request. The ballata of Chapter XII was written at the suggestion of the god of Love; in the other three, the author of the request will be one (or more) of the lover’s friends: the admirers of his first canzone, who ask him to write a definition of love (XX); the brother of Beatrice who, after her death, indirectly requests a poem about her (XXXII); the two ladies of Chapter XLI who, while they ask the protagonist only to send them some of his already-written poetry, inspire him also to compose a poem especially for them.

  Again, the occasion for the poem is the writing of a previous poem. Having written the sonnet of Chapter XX, describing in generic terms the effect on a man of a beautiful woman, the protagonist-lover decides, in Chapter XXI, to continue the theme of love and the gentle heart by limiting the phenomenon of the birth of love to the more extraordinary effect produced by Beatrice. Later, in Chapter XXVII, on re-reading his twin sonnets of praise in Chapter XXVI, that describe the effect of Beatrice on the people of Florence, he finds them defective since nothing was said about her effect on him at the present time. And he begins to write a canzone on this theme. The third case in which a poem leads to a poem also involves disappointment over the previous composition: having written in Chapter XXXIII a poem for Beatrice’s brother, the lover decides in the next chapter that the close relationship between brother and sister calls for a worthier poem, and he writes a canzone of two stanzas.

  It could be said that in all three cases it is the protagonist’s thoughts rather than some outward event that provides the occasion for writing the poems. And this is all that can be said of the inspiration of the poem in Chapter XXXIV. On the anniversary of Beatrice’s death the lover sits remembering her and drawing the figure of an angel on “certe tavolette.” He looks up to see a group of men watching him, and speaks the ambiguous words, “Altri era testé meco, però pensava.” After their departure he returns to his sketching, in the midst of which he decides to write an anniversary poem—which, we can only assume, continues the thoughts that came to him as the angel took form under his hand.

  With the rest of the poems the occasion is a happening which takes place in society. In Chapter VII, after his first screen-lady has left Florence for a far-away place, the protagonist decides to write a poem expressing grief over her departure. One might call the theme of his poem “loss of a loved one.” And in Chapter VIII this theme is found again, in a tragic sense: both poems in this chapter are poems of mourning for the death of a lovely young lady who had been one of Beatrice’s companions. There will be three more poems of mourning: two in Chapter XXII, occasioned by the death of Beatrice’s father, and in Chapter XXXI, the last canzone, in which the dead Beatrice is mourned.

  In addition to the theme of death (loss) there is the theme of mockery. Already in Chapter IV the ravaged appearance of the young lover (whose absorption in Beatrice had been detrimental to his spirito naturale) had aroused the impertinent curiosity of his neighbors. In Chapter XIV the suggestion of mockery introduced earlier takes the form of a public humiliation. Having accompanied a friend of his to a wedding feast where Beatrice is present, the lover collapses at the sight of her; his appearance provokes the derision of the ladies surrounding Beatrice and he sees her laughing with them. The chapter ends with a sonnet written to his lady, reproaching her for her cruelty and appealing to her pity by describing in detail the disastrous effects of her presence on his nervous system. And there are reverberations of this scene of mockery in the two chapters that follow; the lover, still suffering from the shameful memory and wrestling with the problems it raises, writes two more sonnets in which he mainly seeks to explain to his lady the paradoxical effect her desired presence produces in him—making of him the object of her mockery.

  The importance of the theme of death, which culminates in the central canzone and lingers to the end, hardly needs to be stressed; as all readers of the Vita nuova know, it is central to an understanding of the work. The theme of mockery does not seem to have attracted the attention of the critics; but as we shall see later, in the final part of this essay, the theme of mockery is also central, and it works on more than one level. The one instance of mockery discussed so far (and there will be a similar scene later on), has been simply society’s punishment for the young lover’s foolishness and morbidity.

  The prose that relates the events offers a narrative that is remarkably objective. Never does the author pause to reprove or commend the protagonist; even the descriptions of his emotions are done in a rather detached way. But not always is the author content to be the simple narrator of past events; occasionally the reader hears the author’s voice speaking on a time-level different from that of the narrative. Sometimes, when we hear his voice, the effect is merely that of a tilting upward of the time level, as when he describes Beatrice in her lifetime in such a way as to remind us of her death (in fact, she is introduced to the reader in terms that could apply only to Beatrice dead). More directly, as if in a conversation with his reader, he may explicitly contrast the present with the past: he tells us (III) that the significance of his first sonnet, which no one perceived at the time the poem was written and circulated, is “now” apparent to the least sophisticated. Much more often, however, we are also made aware of Dante’s concerns as author of the Vita nuova: we not only hear him speak on the post-narrative plane, we see him sitting at his desk. In fact, that is precisely where he is when the Vita nuova opens, for it opens with a proem announcing his intentions. Later we see him adding many things to the factual details of the narrative, the most consistent pattern of such “glosses” being that of the divisioni which the author felt necessary to add to most of the poems he includes in his work. Then there are the “essays” represented by Chapter XXV and XXIX in which he treats, respectively, the use of poetic license and the significance of the number 9—and the two brief interpolations in Chapters XXII and XL, the first concerned with the bond that unites a good father and a good child, the second with the terminology appropriate for the various types of pilgrims according to their geographical goals.

  As for Dante’s device of divisioni, which were omitted by Boccaccio in his edition of the Vita nuova, and which most readers since then have found tedious and unrewarding, how is his predilection for such analysis to be explained? The divisioni never serve to clear up any difficult points the poem may contain; they do serve, as he himself claims in Chapter XIV, to “open up” (aprire) the poem, but the parts into which it is neatly dissected are almost always obviously given, like the wedges of an orange. It is not enough to compare Dante’s procedure here with the common practice of the Scholastics—for example, Aquinas’ commentaries on Aristotle with their divisions and subdivisions of the original text. In the first place we have, with Aquinas, one writer commenting on another (and a Christian on a Pagan); secondly, the work which Aquinas divides with his prose headings was itself prose. Dante is the first to have
applied this scholastic procedure to poetry. He will use this device again in the Convivio, but there it serves a necessary function: it would be impossible for the reader to follow the lengthy allegorical interpretations of the poems without having the poetic material first cut into pieces for him (as a father cuts his child’s meat for him at the table). But there are few interpretations, allegorical or otherwise, contained in the divisioni in the Vita nuova.3

  I wonder if, in this work, Dante was not interested in the abstract act of subdividing for subdividing’s sake, and if he might not have had an artistic interest in breaking down a poetic structure into conceptual units. Any poem with fixed rhyme and meter, particularly a sonnet, already offers a rigid system of subdivisions; in breaking this down into conceptual units one is dissecting an artistic compound of a certain tangible form into parts not necessarily given by that form. And a number of the poems in the Vita nuova for which divisioni are offered show a conceptual pattern at variance with the metric pattern, to a greater or lesser degree: Chapters IX, XII, XIII, XXI, XXIII, XXIV, XXXII, XXXVII, XLI.4

  In presenting the third and last canzone of the Vita nuova Dante changes the position of the divisioni, letting them now precede the poem instead of follow it. He does this, he says, in order that the canzone may seem to remain more “widowed” after it has come to an end: “—Acciò che questa canzone paia rimanere più vedova dopo lo suo fine….” He will continue to follow this order with the rest of the poems. The reader may wonder why Dante’s artistic instinct had not shown him earlier that the poetic effect of a lyrical composition should be allowed to linger on; to follow the poem immediately by a rational analysis of its parts must tend to kill the effect. But I shall treat this matter later in this essay.

  Behind Dante’s fondness for his divisioni may also be his delight in mathematical figures and procedures. What comes to mind immediately is the importance he gives to the number 9 throughout the work and, in Chapter XXIX, his fascination with its divisibility, yielding three as the square root. And one remembers his use of the figure of the circle with its center equidistant from all points on the circumference (XII). There are also indications of his interest in geometrical form that show no concern with symbolical interpretation—for instance, the description of the passage of the pilgrims along a street “la quale è quasi mezzo de la cittade ove nacque e vivette e morìo la gentilissima donna” (XL). This city, which incidentally, the reader is never permitted to visualize, can be, like any other geometrical form, divided into two equal parts. There is a similar, and most effective indication of his interest in sheer geometrical form in Chapter V, where he describes the circumstances that led to the choice of the first screen-lady:

  Uno giorno avvenne che questa gentilissima sedea in parte ove s’udiano parole de la regina de la gloria, ed io era in luogo dal quale vedea la mia beatitudine; e nel mezzo di lei e di me per la retta linea sedea una gentile donna di molto piacevole aspetto, la quale mi mirava spesse volte, maravigliandosi del mio squardare, che parea che sopra lei terminasse. Onde molti s’accorsero de lo suo mirare; e in tanto vi fue posto mente, che, partendomi da questo luogo, mi sentìo dicere appresso di me: “Vedi come cotale donna distrugge la persona de costui”; nominandola, io intesi che dicea di colei che mezzo era stata ne la linea retta che movea da la gentilissima Beatrice e terminava ne li occhi miei.

  (It happened one day that this most gracious of ladies was sitting in a place where words about the Queen of Glory were being spoken, and I was in a place where I could behold my bliss. Halfway between her and me, in a direct line of vision, sat a gentlewoman of a very pleasing appearance, who glanced at me frequently as if bewildered by my gaze, which appeared to be directed at her. And many began to notice her glances in my direction, and paid close attention to them and, as I left this place, I heard someone near me say: “See what a devastating effect that lady has had on that man.” And, when her name was mentioned, I realized that the lady referred to was the one whose place had been half way along the direct line which extended from the most gracious Beatrice, ending in my eyes.)

  So the lady was exactly in the middle of the direct line of vision extending from the lover to the Belovèd! The lover must have had a feeling of fatality. Suddenly there were only three persons in the church, there were only three points on the line. And twice the idea is stressed of a straight line intersected in the middle.

  There is further evidence of this mathematical interest to be deduced from the symmetrical distribution of the three canzoni. The first canzone is preceded by ten poems, the last is followed by ten poems, and on each side of the central canzone are four poems giving the schema (the canzoni being indicated by Roman numerals): 10 /I / 4 / II / 4 / III / 10. Moreover, the central grouping containing the mid-canzone offers a section of nine poems; thus, disregarding the distinction between canzone and non-canzone, we find the undifferentiated schema: 10 / 1 / 9 / 1 / 10.5 Surely the first distribution, with its three symmetrically-placed canzoni, was deliberately intended by the poet; and the same is probably true for the second with its central 9.

  The discussion of Dante’s mathematical thinking was offered as an explanation of the poet’s particular device of divisioni, the most ambitious of his techniques as “glossator”—that is, as one who makes additions to the factual details of the narrative. But not only does Dante make additions, there are also omissions of what might have been written down (it could perhaps be said that Dante the poet serves to “edit” as well as to “gloss”). Usually, when he confesses an omission he explains his motive; thus, he refuses to discuss in any detail the first nine years of his love for Beatrice (II), because of his immaturity at the time. Much more significant is his refusal to describe the death of Beatrice; for it he offers a three-fold motivation (XXVIII). Several times he announces that he will withhold from us certain of his literary compositions, the writing of which was described in the narrative.6

  In his Proem to the Vita nuova, where he presents himself as a scribe copying from his “Book of Memory,” Dante nevertheless makes allowances for omissions of factual detail, when a reference to the significance of an event seems sufficient (he says nothing, however, of his plans to make additions to the events, in the form of glosses or otherwise):7

  In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali e mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo li-bello, e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia.

  (In The Book of Memory, in the early part where there is little to be read, there comes a chapter with the rubric: Incipit vita nuova. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading, if not all of them, at least the essence of their meaning.)

  Now in Chapter XXVII, when refusing to discuss the death of Beatrice, Dante offers as his first justification the terms of the Proem (the only time in the book that he sends us back to his preface), and it must have been precisely the final words which I have italicized above that he had in mind. It was the significance of Beatrice’s death that alone mattered, and this significance had already been made evident in Chapter XXIII containing his prophetic vision of her death. What more could be added to the magnificent and terrible picture there offered?8 (It is also natural for the young lover to decide at this point, when faced with the simple, sheer fact of his lady’s death, to be silent and shun rhetoric of his own.) And obviously, these final words of his Proem explain his much less dramatic silence as to the many events that must have taken place in the time-span included in Chapter II. One may also think of Chapter V in which the events of several years are summed up.

  But perhaps the final words of the Proem in which Dante claims the right to omit reference to unessential details, cover even more than has been assumed so far. Perhaps they serve, somehow, to explain the shadowy, impalpable world in which the lover seems to move. What does that world contain? There are exactly two
references to concrete objects (both times the noun is subordinated by a preposition): the bed on which the lover lies during the illness that produced his prophetic vision of Beatrice’s death, and the “certe tavolette” on which he was drawing figures of angels on the anniversary of Beatrice’s death—probably the same angels he had seen in his macabre vision. As for places, twice the lover is represented as being out-of-doors in Nature: in Chapters IX and XIX (in both scenes only one detail is described and it is the same detail in each: a very clear stream flowing by the side of his path).

  Not once is a building described, and only once are we offered a descriptive detail of an interior: the frescoed wall against which the lover was forced to lean for support, having sensed the presence of Beatrice at the wedding feast. We are never given a glimpse of the city of Florence. Its massive medieval architecture has dissolved; its twisted, busy, colorful streets have been reduced to straight lines in space, along which Beatrice or a group of pilgrims passes—the one to receive the worship of the crowds we do not see, the others on their way to worship at a far-off shrine.

  Not only is there a dearth of descriptive detail, occasionally we have no idea where we are. One of the liveliest scenes in the Vita nuova is that of Chapter XVIII, when the lover explains to a group of ladies gathered together the new source of happiness he has found, and listens with some shame to the reactions of one of them. But where are these ladies who listen so attentively? Are they outdoors against a backdrop of Nature (they can hardly be on the street), or are they in some Florentine home (like the groups in Chapters VIII and XIV)? Probably we are meant to think of them as being outdoors, given the author’s words “e io passando appresso da loro.”9 And perhaps the same should be deduced for Chapter XXXIV: the lover, surrounded by a group of men who have come uninvited, must have been somewhere outdoors; but we are told only that he was in a place where he was drawing an angel and thinking of Beatrice. In the relative clause, “in parte ne la quale ricordandomi di lei, disegnavo uno angelo … ,” it is as though the activity that he was in the midst of constituted a place.