Vita Nuova: Dual Language

The Vita Nuova, with its unusual blend of prose and poetry, is universally recognized as Dantes early masterpiece and provides an indispensable prequel to The Divine Comedy. Set in thirteenth-century Florence, part autobiography and part religious allegory, it traces Dantes quest to find a poetic idiom worthy of Beatrice, whom he had loved since boyhood. Her premature death plunges him into an emotional turmoil that finds release only through his faith in her continuing spiritual influence and through his determination to write of her what has never been written of any woman. The Vita Nuova remains a central document in European cultures examination of love and the self. It is a hundred and fifty years since Dante Gabriel Rossettis groundbreaking version of the Vita Nuova. Now Anthony Mortimer, already acclaimed as translator of Cavalcanti, Petrarch and Michelangelo, produces a verse translation that avoids Rossettis disturbing archaisms but preserves a lyric immediacy worthy of the original. This is a Vita Nuova for the twenty-first century.