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

Notes on the Essay

Notes to the Essay on the Vita Nuova I Patterns 1fT 1fT 1fT 1fT1fT 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 has 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. Notes for Pages 9I-92 I77 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 Ie 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 loye 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 L'amaro /agrimar ... (XXXVII) consist of thirteen lines and one line respectively. I78 Notes for Pages 96-97 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 / I / 9 / I / 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...