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

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by Dante Alighieri


  11. Though the word fratello is not used of Beatrice’s brother (XXXII) or sorella of Dante’s sister (XXXIII), we do find Beatrice’s father (XXII) called, secondarily, lo suo padre. After presenting him at the beginning of the chapter as “colui che era stato genitore di tanta maraviglia quanta si vedea ch’era questa nobilissima Beatrice,” the author briefly touches upon the intimacy of the bond between father and child: “Onde, con ciò sia cosa che … nulla sia sì intima amistade come da buon padre a buon figliuolo e da buon figliuolo a buon padre… After this generai statement (note that Dante permits himself to use the diminutive of the noun figlio) containing the word padre used generically, we find it at last applied to Beatrice’s own father: “… e lo suo padre … fosse bono in alto grado….”

  12. Luigi Russo (as quoted by Pino da Prati, Realtà e allegoria nella “Vita Nuova” di Dante, 1963, p. 4) shows himself sensitive to the shadowy atmosphere in which the “real” events of the story unfold, but he has not seen the contrast between the presentation of these events and the colorful description offered in the visions; he sees, instead, a continuous flow within the same dream world.

  II Aspects

  1. In two cases (III and XII) Love appears to the protagonist in his sleep, and both times the experience is termed a visione; in Chapters IX and XXIV, where the word imaginazione is used, it is the lover’s fancy while he is awake that conjures up the figure of Love. For purposes of convenience I shall often use the term “vision” in referring to all four scenes.

  2. In addition to the scenes in Chapters III, IX, XII and XXIV, there are three other occasions in which Love speaks to the protagonist: in Chapter XV he warns him to flee the sight of Beatrice if he would not perish; in Chapter XXXIV he tells the lover’s sighs to go forth (he actually addresses the sospiri); in Chapter XXIII, in the canzone prophesying the death of Beatrice, Love, after the angels have sung their hosannas, directs the lover to go look upon his lady. But in none of the three is the figure of Love visible. Again, in the first canzone (XIX) we hear Love speak and we see him gaze upon Beatrice, but he does not speak to the protagonist and no moment in time is fixed. In the first sonnet of Chapter VIII Love weeps and looks up toward Heaven, but he does not speak, and again the temporal reference is very vague. And in none of these scenes is Love the central figure.

  In the five passages just mentioned there is at least some degree of what might be called “dramatic” personification. Then there are dozens of cases of a nondramatic nature in which some degree of personification is involved: of the more than 150 occurrences of the word amore in the Vita nuova there are only a few in which personification is totally excluded, as, for example, questa donna era schermo di tanto amore (VI). Usually the language and the constructions are such as to permit an interpretation of abstract personification to some degree: … e ha lasciato amor meco dolente (XXXI), Sì lungiamente m’ha tenuto amore … (XXVII), … per la volontade d’amore (IV).

  3. I once believed that Dante’s statement about the poet’s need to be able to retell in prose what he had put into verse contained an explanation of his procedure of accompanying most of his poems with divisioni in prose. Compare his use of aprire in the first quotation from Chapter XXV (“… con ragione la quale poi sia possible d’aprire per prosa”) with his explanation in Chapter XIV of the purpose of his divisioni: “… la divisione non si fa se non per aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa.” But I have come to reject this idea, for the statements quoted above from Chapter XXV should mean, within the context of this chapter, that the poet would be able by means of a prose rewording to justify his use of poetic license. Yet never do we find in Dante’s divisioni any attempt to rephrase the metaphorical in nonmetaphorical terms.

  4. I know of no critic of the Vita nuova who has offered a detailed treatment of the appearances of the figure of Love. Shaw, for example, who believes that the significance of this figure changes in the course of the narrative, states that in his first two appearances (III and IX) he represents Cavalcantian love and in the last two (XII and XXIV) Guinizellian love; Singleton, who believes that the figure continues unchanged, declares him to be the Troubadour god of Love. But neither scholar attempts to show how all the details of the four scenes serve to support his theory.

  5. Of the four visions described in the prose narrative of Chapters III, IX, XII, and XXIV, three are retold (III, IX and XXIV) in a sonnet following the prose; in Chapter XII the ballata that closes the chapter contains no allusion to the vision. In discussing the other three visions I shall limit myself almost entirely to the prose version. Hardly ever is a significant detail added in the sonnets; always some details of the prose version are absent. In fact, in the poem of Chapter XXIV the theological significance of the vision is entirely lacking.

  6. Singleton, in an article devoted to the appearance of Love in Chapter XII (Romanic Review XXXVI, 89-102), believing that the vision in question is prophetic of Beatrice’s death, says that Love weeps because he knows that Beatrice is soon to die. Shaw, replying to Singleton’s article (Italica XXIV, 113-118), states that Love’s tears are due to his grief over Beatrice’s refusal of her greeting, a refusal caused by her mistrust of the protagonist’s love.

  If my interpretation of Love’s significance in this scene is correct, then the explanation of Shaw would be impossible; by offering such a motivation for Love’s tears, he would be identifying this figure with what I have called the Lesser Aspect. As for Singleton’s explanation, I should say that, even if the vision were prophetic of Beatrice’s death (which I do not believe), tears over the approaching death and apotheosis of Beatrice would be a reaction most unfitting the Greater Aspect of love for Beatrice. How could this god, who in Chapter XXIV compares Beatrice to Christ, weep at the thought of Beatrice in glory?

  Singleton, it is true, believes that Love in all of his appearances represents the Troubadour god of Love. And, in that case, tears over the lady’s death might be appropriate for such a deity. But to identify with this deity the figure who appears in Chapter XII is in my opinion impossible: the idea of the Troubadour god of Love speaking solemn Latin is incongruous. Moreover, in Provençal love poetry the god of Love was never dramatically personified. The canso (XVI) of Arnault Daniel cited by Pignatelli as a possible influence on Dante’s personification of Love (“La Vita nuova” di Dante, Padova, 1949, p. 27) is hardly a case in point: the Provençal poet merely states that Love commands him to serve his lady faithfully, and then devotes two stanzas to direct discourse supposedly representing the words of Love. But the figure of the god does not appear on stage, and there is no dialogue.

  7. Singleton believes that in Love’s self-definition involving a contrast with the lover, the god is proclaiming his ability and the lover’s inability to see the future—that is, Love can see ahead to Beatrice’s death and the lover cannot. It is true that when this image was applied to the Christian God by theologians (compare, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus), the center of the circle was taken to represent eternity, equidistant from all the points on the circumference, in the sense that, in Eternity, present, past and future can be seen as one. But that this metaphor was intended to stress God’s ability to know the future, as representing the divine attribute par excellence, is less certain, as Shaw points out in his answer to Singleton. And even if such were the emphasis, it seems out of proportion for Love to use such a sublime image in order merely to claim that he is able to foresee the death of a given individual, while the lover is not. Shaw, who shares my opinion that the vision in question is not prophetic, believes, as I do, that the metaphor, and the contrast between the god and the lover, have to do with the two types of love these represent. I must confess, however, that I was not able to grasp the precise nature of the contrast intended by Shaw.

  8. The color of the cloth in which Beatrice’s body is wrapped (III), and which is probably meant to suggest her shroud, recalls that of the garment she wore when the protagonist first saw her in the preceding chap
ter. And perhaps the white of the garment she wore when she first greeted the lover is reflected in another vision, in which Love does not appear: in the lover’s prophetic dream of Beatrice’s death he sees her face being covered by a white veil. Thus the colors of caritas and purity appear twice in the Vita nuova: once in the narrative proper, once in visions.

  9. The four visions in which Love appears on stage and speaks to the protagonist have been analyzed from the point of view of the Greater or Lesser Aspect. Each of these two aspects is represented in three of the four visions (during the whole of it, or a part of it).

  One must wonder about the distribution of roles in the five cases mentioned (Note 1) of partial dramatic personification of Love. In two of these it is possible to imagine that the Greater Aspect is represented (in the first canzone when Love marvels at Beatrice’s perfection, and in the central canzone when he bids the lover go look upon his lady dead), but because of the brevity of the god’s intervention, it is difficult to be sure that this is the case. In the other three, however, it is clear that we have to do with the Lesser Aspect: the Greater Love would hardly weep at the death of one called to glory (VIII); and it could only be the Lesser Love that would urge the lover to protect himself by fleeing the sight of Beatrice (XV), or invite him to give free rein to his sighs in grieving over Beatrice’s death (XXXIV).

  And, as for the dozens of cases of minimal personification in which the lover speaks of “love” and its effects, it is probably the Greater Love that goes with Beatrice when she passes before the people to freeze the hearts of the wicked. But in all the other cases we find either colorless, inconsequential allusions to the god or else clear representation of the Lesser Aspect, the most frequent being the destruction wrought by Love on the lover’s faculties. One might have thought that after Chapter XXIV, when he experienced complete fusion with the Greater Love, some traces of this experience might be found in his thoughts about love. Actually, it is from Chapter XXIV on that we find the Lesser Love most frequently involved: in fact, it is Love, the protagonist tells us, who sets the stage for his infidelity to Beatrice.

  10. The word Ualtrier ‘the other day’ in the opening line of the sonnet in Chapter IX (Cavalcando Paltrier per un cammino is a Provençalism used fairly frequently by the Italian poets. Indeed, the opening line itself is reminiscent of the Provençal pastorella—compare the one by Gui d’Ussel which begins: Ualtrier cavalcava. Why should Dante choose to remind us of this genre in a poem which has nothing to do with an amorous encounter between a man and a peasant girl? Whereas popular love poetry in general treats of natural sensuous love, the pastorella in its most characteristic form treated this love at its crudest: what was sought by the “lover” was simply the act of coitus. And instead of the tenderness so characteristic of the alba, for instance, there is usually present a note of cynicism. What more fitting than that the reader should be reminded of this ignoble treatment of love in a chapter devoted exclusively to the figure of the Lesser Aspect of Love (this contains the only vision concerned with this Aspect alone) who, here, is encouraging the lover in his amorous subterfuges.

  11. Whatever be the precise symbolic significance of the scene in Chapter III in which the lady is forced to eat the heart of the lover, it surely owes nothing to the wide-spread medieval “legend of the eaten heart”—a connection proposed by D’Ancona in Scritti danteschi (277 ff.). In all the versions of that legend contained in Matzke’s collection (“The Legend of the Eaten Heart” in MLN XXVI, 1-8) a vindictive husband takes revenge on his faithless wife by offering her, as a delicacy for the palate, the heart of her lover. That the theme concerned with a husband’s sadistic revenge on an adulterous wife could have inspired the scene in the Vita nuova is impossible. D’Ancona, it is true, also mentions other tales concerned with the ultimate disposal of a human heart (one can only wonder why he brings in the eating of a dead hero’s heart by warriors, or the feeding of a cruel lady’s heart to dogs), but it is the theme of a lady being forced to eat her lover’s heart unwittingly which he thinks Dante has seized upon in order to give it allegorical meaning. Here, supposedly, the eating of the heart would amount to an “interpenetration” (a one way interpenetration?) involving the concept “two hearts in a single breast.” But to allegorize a theme is to give greater depth to a significance already present in the original—not to transform this significance beyond recognition.

  If one should attempt to discuss the many differences that separate the legend in question from the first mysterious dream in the Vita nuova, the result would sound like a nightmare of confusion. This is often the result of attempting to refute in detail a theory which should never have been proposed in the first place.

  12. Because Love in his final appearance in Chapter XXIV speaks from the lover’s heart—or, as we are also told, the lover’s heart speaks using Love’s tongue—he will not speak in Latin, as he had done in his two earlier appearances (he does not, however, miss the opportunity to quote from Latin: “Ego vox clamantis …”). Thus, it could be said that Love as the Greater Aspect always speaks in Latin when he is separate from the lover.

  Incidentally, the perfect fusion of the god of Love and the lover that takes place almost immediately at the beginning of the vision has been anticipated in Chapter IX by the perfect fusion which takes place at the end of the vision as Love seems to become a part of the lover himself—as if he had disappeared into him. But then it was the Lesser Love who entered into the fusion. Thus, a similarity of detail between the two scenes makes for the greatest of contrasts between them: in Chapter IX the lover was wholly given up to Lesser Love; in Chapter XXIV he is wholly given up to Perfect Love.

  13. The pattern of “three” is occasionally found in the divi-sioniy but these may also be divided into four, or five, or two parts, the latter being the more frequent. Incidentally, though it is legitimate to speak of “the three canzoni” of the Vita nuova, one should not forget the imperfect canzone of two stanzas written on behalf of Beatrice’s brother, or the canzone which the lover began, only to be interrupted after one stanza by the news of Beatrice’s death. The “threeness” of the canzoni is, in this way, somewhat blurred.

  14. And it could be said that the living Beatrice of the story splits into two: she is not only the walking miracle of purifying efficacy, the sanctifying grace of the Vita nuova, she is also very much a lady of the world who, miffed at the report of her admirer’s attentions to another lady, refuses to give him her greeting, and who, seeing his lovesick appearance at a social gathering, does not hesitate to join in the general derision.

  15. At the beginning of the discussion of the surprising frequency of “pairs” in the Vita nuova it was said, as something obvious, that the number two has no Christian symbolic value (as do the numbers three and ten). But of course it has a philosophical symbolic value, cf. H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought … (Yale University Press, 1929), p. 502: “The significance of One in religion and in philosophy is clear, in the persistent strivings of the human mind for monotheism and for monism. Two expresses the fundamental dualities of the universe, which ?nake monism and monotheism alike seem so beset with contradictions.” As for the figure of Love it should, of course, have been a One, the Greater Aspect alone; we have seen the many “contradictions with which it has been beset.”

  III Growth

  1. The forty-two chapters of the Vita nuova must be divided into two main parts: that preceding and that following the death of Beatrice (I-XXVII; XXVIII-XLII). The first half can also be divided into two parts (I-XVI; XVII-XXVII), the second beginning with Dante’s rejection of self-centeredness and his choice of a new theme: praise of his lady.

  2. The poem of mourning for the first screen-lady begins with a paraphrase of Lamentations I, 12: “O vos qui transitis per viam… This invitation to the passerby to stop and mediate upon the grief of Jerusalem is changed by the poet into an appeal to the pilgrims of love”: “O voi che per la via d’amore passate….” The moving word
s of Jeremiah were supposed to represent the lament expressed by the city itself, destroyed and desolate, pleading for the compassion of mankind. And this sublime picture of historic grief the lover was able to exploit in his attempt to deceive others with his mock love-lament.

  3. In Chapter X the wave of gossip that destroyed the lover’s happiness is represented as a single voice: “questa sover-chievole voce.” We are reminded here of the theme of the lausengiers in Provençal poetry, those persons who loved to spy upon lovers, reveal their secrets, and even indulge in calumny—all this because they are inherently incapable of understanding the love that springs from the “gentle heart.” They are the enemies of love and joi. In the love poetry of the Troubadours they play only seldom a dramatic role; they represent mainly a possibility forever to be dreaded. Here in the Vita nuova, however, they are a strong dramatic force, producing irrevocable consequences.

  4. The summary of events recorded in the climactic Chapter X is offered, somehow, from a distance. The reader feels the increasing spread and virulence of the gossip which finally reaches the ears of Beatrice, who straightway refuses her greeting. But what lay behind Beatrice’s refusal could not have been clear to the lover at the moment she passed him by and, in fact, he is made to learn it two chapters later, when Love explains the reason for Beatrice’s hostility. Thus, Dante the author of the Vita nuova anticipates in Chapter X what the protagonist learns only later.

  5. Chapter XII, which contains the artfully delayed description of the lover’s bitter reaction to Beatrice’s refusal of her greeting in Chapter X, opens with the words, “Ora tornando al proposito …”. Singleton (Essay … p. 34) interprets these words as a confession on the author’s part of having wandered from the story in Chapter XI. Feigning surprise that the description of Beatrice’s greeting could constitute a “digression,” Singleton explains this digression as follows:

 

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