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

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by Dante Alighieri


  That the exposure of Dante the protagonist was a constant (if not the only) preoccupation of Dante, the author of the Vita nuova, I am convinced. For if the picture the author presents of his youthful self had been offered for the reader’s sympathy, the Vita nuova would have to be judged a very silly book indeed. And if other Dante scholars have arrived at a more idealistic, optimistic interpretation of the protagonist’s development as a lover, I should say that there are two reasons for this. On the one hand, they have failed to distinguish clearly between the two Dantes: because, for example, in Chapter XXIX the true essence of Beatrice is clearly presented, many critics seem to have assumed that her true nature was perceived by the lover himself immediately after her death.26 But the poems that follow all show that this could not possibly have been the case. Secondly, the critics have simply not read closely enough to catch the numerous indications of the lover’s weaknesses and confusion that should be evident from the above analysis. It is understandable, given the confusion as to the two Dante’s, attributing to the protagonist-lover, as they do, the clairvoyance of Dante the author, that the critics would tend to underestimate the significance of the many clear-cut demonstrations of failure: the failure of the protagonist to dominate his need for self-pity. What contempt Augustine, either as saint or as the lover he had been, would have felt for Dante’s lover in the Vita nuova!

  The Vita nuova is a cruel book. Cruel, that is, in the treatment of the human type represented by the protagonist. In the picture of the lover there is offered a condemnation of the vice of emotional self-indulgence and an exposure of its destructive effects on a man’s integrity.27 The “tender feelings” that move the lover to hope or to despair, to rejoice or to grieve (and perhaps to enjoy his grief), spring from his vulnerability and self-love; however idealistically inspired, these feelings cannot, except spasmodically, lead him ahead and above: as long as he continues to be at their mercy, he must always fall back into the helplessness of his self-centeredness. The sensitive man who would realize a man’s destiny must ruthlessly cut out of his heart the canker at its center, the canker that the heart instinctively tends to cultivate.28

  This is, I am convinced, the main, though not the only, message of the Vita nuova. And the consistent, uncompromising indictment it levels has no parallel in the literature of Dante’s time—unless it be that baffling literary phenomenon which is the Roman de la Rose.29 Of course, the Vita nuova offers more than a picture of the misguided lover: there is also the glory of Beatrice, and the slowly-increasing ability of the lover to understand it—who must confess at the end, however, that he has not truly understood it.

  Both in the treatment of the lover and in that of Beatrice, Dante has gone far beyond what he found at hand in the love poetry of the Troubadours and of their followers. He has taken up two of their preoccupations (one might almost say obsessions) and developed each of them in a most original way: the lover’s glorification of his own feelings, and his glorification of the Beloved. Of the first he has made a caricature. Unlike his friend Cavalcanti, also highly critical of the havoc wrought by the emotions within a man’s soul, who tends to make of his distraught lover a macabre portrait of doom, Dante has presented his protagonist again and again as a purely ridiculous figure, and more than once we have seen him mocked in society—the main scene being that of the wedding feast when the lover suffers a complete collapse in the presence of his lady. Such physiological manifestations of passion are familiar to us, of course, from the Troubadour love lyrics or the precepts of Andreas Capellanus (for instance, every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his belovèd). What Dante has done with this conventional material is to stage it (we hear the lover’s sobs, we see him stagger, we feel the pain in the left breast spreading as he falls back against the wall for support)—as indeed had been done before him by Chrétien de Troyes and the author of the Énéas. Their intention is obviously comic, as we well may assume that Dante’s was.

  In my analysis of Chapter II of the Vita nuova I stated that all the important themes to be developed in the book are already suggested in this opening chapter. A few pages later, in treating the thematic relationship between the narrative and the poems, I had occasion to mention the importance of the theme of mockery which, I suggested, works on more than one level. The attentive reader must have wondered why, if this theme were so important, nothing was said of it in the analysis of the chapter which opens the story. This was a deliberate omission on my part: I felt that to introduce the idea of Dante’s mockery of his younger self at the very beginning of my essay would win little credence from the reader. But surely Dante the author of the Vita nuova was smiling when he introduced into this chapter the three spiriti (a triad which never appears again) who choose to express in solemn Latin their reaction to the sight of Beatrice—the climax being reached in the weeping lament of the “natural spirit” (the spirit of digestion!): Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps!30 According to one critic the Latin of the spiriti serves to establish a kind of transcendental level: in a sense, the words are “oracular.”31 What the third “oracle” is prophesying, of course, is the succession of spells of indigestion which will afflict the young lover throughout the course of his new life. So at the very beginning of the Vita nuova the author has given a most important hint (which was surely not lost on the medieval reader) as to the light in which so many of the protagonist’s actions should be viewed.

  As to the conventional theme of “glorification of the lady,” all critics of the Vita nuova will admit that Dante carried his idealization to a point never reached before by any poet—and which no poet after him would ever quite attempt to reach. However blurred the lover’s vision may be of the gracious, pure, feminine Beatrice—Dante the Poet, in Chapter XXIX, probes to the essence of her being and presents the coldness of her sublimity, the coldness, the sublimity, of the square of the number 3. Thus, the (tender) foolishness of the lover is intensified by contrast with the (icy) perfection of the Beloved.32 Her nature was destined to inspire not tender sentiments, and surely not weak tears, but only the stern resolution to strive for spiritual growth. (Tears the divine Beatrice could approve, but these should be only tears of deep contrition, as she herself will tell the Pilgrim in the Divine Comedy, when she first addresses him on top of the Mountain of Purgatory: the Pilgrim, overcome by the appearance of Beatrice, trembling as he had years before at his sudden awareness of the presence of Beatrice at the wedding feast, turns to Virgil for comfort as “il fantolin corre alia mamma / quando ha paura o quand’ elli e affiitto” and, finding him gone, begins to weep. Beatrice, knowing the bitter tears of contrition he must shed—after confessing his failure to learn the meaning of her death, and before being washed in the waters of Lethe—rebukes him sternly for his childish tears: “Dante, perché Virgilio se ne vada / non pianger anco, non piangere ancora,/ ché pianger ti convien per altra spada.”)

  With a few exceptions, Dante’s lyrical poems (and not only those contained in the Vita nuova) are not superior as works of art, in themselves, to those of Cavalcanti and Guinizelli—or of Bernard de Ventadorn and Arnault Daniel. The greatness of the Vita nuova lies, not in the poems included by their author in the work, but in the purpose which he forced them to serve. Certainly it represents the most original form of recantation in medieval literature—a recantation that takes the form of a reenactment, from a new perspective, of the sin recanted.

  Notes

  to the Essay on

  the Vita Nuova

  I Patterns

  1. It is natural that when the poem describes not the emotions inspired by the experience recounted in the narrative but the experience itself, the effect made by the poem on the reader of the Vita nuova is “recapitulative”: in Chapter III the narrative describes the first coming of Love, and the poem contains many of the same details—as if the poem were repeating the prose. Actually, of course, both on the biographical plane and on that of the artistic fiction the composition of the poem ha
s preceded that of the prose account. With both groups of poems we must account for three events: first, the happening itself which inspired the poem, then the act of writing the poem and, finally, the writing of the explanatory prose narrative.

  2. As for the four times that the event “recapitulated” in the poem has been a vision, it would seem only natural that the protagonist would want to describe such unique events in verse. But two visions he does not recapitulate in verse: that of Beatrice in Chapter XXXIX, and the third coming of Love in Chapter XII. Certainly there are at least two reasons that he was not inspired to write a poem about the appearance of Beatrice in his memory as she had first appeared to him. There is nothing dramatic about this vision. No words are spoken. There is no movement. Moreover, it was not the vision itself that he wished to describe to the world but the intensity of feeling that this vision provoked: his overwhelming remorse, and his renewed allegiance to the image of Beatrice. Now, the same reason could not apply to the vision in Chapter XII: on the one hand, the third appearance of Love is most dramatic and, on the other, the lover’s reactions to it are not revealed to us. Just why this vision was not recounted in verse should become clear later on in the discussion of the four appearances of Love.

  3. The divisioni of the sonetto doppio in Chapter VII contain an ambiguous hint of the correct interpretation of the poem: the author divides it into two parts, stressing the opening lines of the second part (that is, the central part of the poem) in which he speaks of his past joy. He says that these lines were written “con altro intendimento che le stremme parti del sonetto non mostrano.” Now the opening lines of the sonnet refer to his grief, as do also the closing lines (one would think that this would call for a tripartite division): perhaps Dante is telling us that the joy he presents in the central portion as inspired by the absent screen-lady who has departed was actually inspired by his love for Beatrice.

  Incidentally, in his divisioni of sonnet XXI it seems to me that Dante is reading into the first three lines (corresponding to the first two subsections of the first part) something that they could not possibly mean.

  4. In two of the poems accompanied by divisioni the conceptual pattern is considerably at variance with the metrical: the two parts of Venite a intender … (XXXII) consist of two and twelve lines respectively; the two parts of Vamaro lagrimar … (XXXVII) consist of thirteen lines and one line respectively.

  For a completely different explanation of the divisioni, see Aldo Vallone, La prosa della “ Vita Nuova Florence, 1963, p. 31-32.

  5. For a discussion of these and other patterns of numerical symmetry that have been discerned in the Vita nuova see Kenneth McKenzie, PMLA XVIII, 341-355. He mentions, for example, Federzoni’s further fragmentation of the second schema (10 / 1 / 9 / 1 / 10): since between the first sonnet and the first canzone there are nine poems, he divides: 1 / 9 / 1 / 9 / 1 / 9 / 1. McKenzie dismissed Federzoni’s schema as unimportant, but he does not show why this arrangement is without significance. The reason, of course, is that the justification for the splitting up of the first group of ten poems (1/9) and the last group of ten poems (9 / 1) is based on the theme of the first and last sonnets: they both describe visions. But there are other sonnets (and other poems not sonnets) that also describe visions, and only if all of them would show symmetrical distribution could this schema hold true. This is unfortunate because the pattern on the surface is certainly attractive symbolically.

  6. The two literary compositions written in the course of the Vita nuova which Dante explicitly states he will withhold from the reader are the serventese written in praise of sixty ladies (IV), and the letter written to “li principi de la terra” about the death of Beatrice. Incidentally, there is also suppression within the patterns of additions: nine times Dante decides not to offer his reader the usual divisioni.

  7. In spite of Dante’s admission in the Proem that he will not list every detail found in his Book of Memory, Professor Singleton (An Essay on the “Vita nuova” Cambridge 1958, p. 32) sees in the Proem a statement of Dante’s intention to limit his function, in reproducing the context of the Book of Memory, to that of mere copyist. He admits, however, that many times Dante transgresses this limitation. Accordingly, he distinguishes between two Dantes: the Dante who limits himself to the purely scribal program as supposedly outlined in the Proem, and the Dante who takes it upon himself to be “glossator” (Singleton does not consider the matter of “omissions”). His distinction between Dante the author serving a purely narrative function, and Dante the author functioning also as glossator is, in itself, surely legitimate.

  According to J. B. Shaw (Essays on the “Vita nuova” Princeton 1929, Ch. Ill), there are three Dantes to be considered in studying the Vita nuova (p. 79), and he discusses most dramatically the relationship between these three—in which the reader also becomes involved (81-82):

  As we begin to read the work we find that at one extreme of knowledge is Dante the author, who knows everything; at the other is the Dante of the poems, who knows nothing except the emotions he is expressing; between the extremes is the protagonist, the Dante of the prose narrative, who knows more than the Dante of the poems, but not as much as the reader, and far less than Dante the author, although here and there, in his desire to inform the reader, he seems to endow his hero with more knowledge than seems reasonably probable. By the time we have come to the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil” in the twentieth chapter, we realize that the Dante of the poems has caught up with the protagonist and both of them with the reader, and the author alone is ahead; and when the book is finished the three Dantes are one in knowledge, having outstripped the reader, who is lagging somewhat and looking back to pick up information he may have missed.

  I must confess that I, as a reader of Professor Shaw, am “lagging somewhat” in my comprehension of his meaning.

  8. The first reason given by Dante for his decision to omit all reference to the details of Beatrice’s death is rather ambiguously worded:

  La prima è che ciò non è del presente proposito, se volemo

  guardare nel proemio che precede questo libello.

  I have assumed that this reminder of the Proem was concerned particularly with the last words which serve to modify his proposed role of simple scribe (se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia); and I have suggested that since the significance of Beatrice’s death had already been made evident in the prophetic vision of Chapter XXIII, there was no need to offer the reader factual details involved in this event.

  Shaw, however (op. cit., Ch. VI), evidently thinking in terms of Dante’s overall presentation of himself as a faithful scribe, offers a quite different explanation. He believes that the death of Beatrice was not contained in Dante’s Book of Memory: “He is utterly without memory of the event itself … It is not only that her death happens so suddenly that he knew nothing of it at the time, but it also so stunned him that he had no memory of his sensations on hearing the news.” Singleton, on the other hand, cannot believe that Dante was ignorant of the details of Beatrice’s death or that his memory had been affected by the shock (and he gives several reasons in support of this belief). If he refuses to discuss this important event and refers us to the Proem it is because, so Singleton believes, in the Proem Dante had promised to limit himself to the role of scribe. And Singleton continues: “To write here and now [?] of anything at all is simply not according to that intention; and it is one which he expects his reader to respect.” But it is difficult for me to understand how Dante would be departing from his function of scribe in describing the death of Beatrice. And even if such a departure would be involved, the reader could hardly “respect his intention” since in the immediately following chapter (as Singleton himself admits with no qualms) he turns pure glossator in his discussion of the number 9. However, I agree with Singleton that we have no right to assume that Beatrice’s death was not contained in the lover’s Book of Memory.

  9. Another suggestion, a most delicate suggestion, that the ladi
es in Chapter XVIII are gathered together out-of-doors, against a background of Nature, is offered by a simile drawn from Nature. After the lover has told the ladies that, having lost Beatrice’s greeting, he has now placed his beatitude in something that cannot fail him, they respond to his remark with a flow of words and sighs which remind him of the fall of rain mingled with beautiful flakes of snow: “Allora queste donne cominciaro a parlare tra loro e si come talora vedemo cadere l’acqua mischiate di bella neve, cosi, mi parea udire le loro parole uscire mischiate di sospiri.”

  10. There are eight groups of persons whom we see on stage with the protagonist: the two older ladies flanking Beatrice (III); the group of ladies at the wake of Beatrice’s friend (VIII); the guests at the wedding feast (XIV); the ladies with whom he converses about his love (XVIII); those who return mourning from Beatrice’s home (XXII); the masses who rush to see Beatrice pass (XXVI); the men who watch him drawing an angel and to whom he speaks (XXXIV); the pilgrims passing through the center of his city (XL). In one case we learn of the presence of a group of persons with whom he has been mingling, only after he leaves their company: Chapter XII opens with the statement that when Beatrice refused him her greeting as she passed, “mi giunse tanto dolore … che, partito me da le genti, in solingo parte andai….”

 

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