La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri
translated by David R. Slavitt
Harvard, 160 pp., $18.95
The great books of the Western canon rest on the presupposition that all the books contained therein are ipso facto “great.” But what happens if you encounter a book from one of the authors that seems—well, not so great? The initial response is disappointment, like paying a half-month’s salary for a dining experience that a food critic likened to the sensations of a supernova, except that your meal ends not with a bang but a whimper. The subsequent response is guilt: Why don’t you sense the greatness that must be there; is your palette not trained enough to detect the subtleties?
Reading La Vita Nuova, Dante’s first book, induced this disappointment and guilt because, as loath as I am to say, some of the lyrics don’t seem a whole lot more elevated than Katy Perry’s hormonal hit “Teenage Dream.” If I’m a philistine whose blunted imagination cannot apprehend the beauty, compare the lyrics for yourself.
First, Katy Perry:
My heart stops When you look at me Just one touch Now baby I believe This is real So take a chance And don’t ever look back.
Now, Dante:
My face grows pale. I feel my body shaking. In the presence of such sweetness, I am unmanned. I am reduced to total helplessness and if I could, I’d ask my lady for help, salvation from this strange duress, painful, and yet, I must admit, even more pleasurable than anything I know— although I cannot speak or tell her so.
Yes, more than seven centuries separate these lyrics written by twentysomethings, but they both emphasize the physiological and ethical malfunctioning that often accompanies love—or more accurately, lust. Perry invites her lover to put his hands on her skintight jeans; and to get Freudian, Dante pleads for his lover to ease the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Where one indulges the fantasy, owing to the sexual liberation of postmodern America (Perry), the other defers the fantasy, owing to the sexual restraint of medieval Catholicism (Dante). Content aside, the lyrical expression is not that different: breathless, terse, above all youthful.
I’m not alone in my disappointment with Dante’s inaugural poetry. The Italian scholar Robert Harrison writes:
The most striking aspect of the Vita nuova, for those who do not merely take its canonical stature for granted, or whose perception of the work is not mystified by the fact of its authorship, is the utter seriousness with which the author sets out to dignify and solemnify the rather innocent (and often mediocre) lyric poems that he composed in his youth. The Vita nuova gives the impression that Dante was unwilling to allow the poems to stand on their own but strove, through his prose commentary, to give them the sort of weight they lacked in their own right.
Judging these poems “innocent (and often mediocre)” is ageism, plain and simple. But a prejudice against the young can be fair when there’s evidence of inexperience. According to Harrison, Dante provides his own evidence by self-consciously and retrogressively defining “the nature and ambition of his literary vocation.” La Vita Nuova is a book within a book: His “little book” compiles, copies, and comments upon what is written in “the book of my memory.” The commentator seems insecure with the author, who’s trying to find not only his voice but his leitmotif as well. Under the rubric Incipit vita nova (a new life begins), Dante anxiously enters a career with words after finding his muse in a Florentine woman named Beatrice, who blurs the line between fact and allegory.
While the smitten Dante of La Vita Nuova doesn’t reward the reader like the world-weary Dante of La Divina Commedia, we’re still witness to the initial ascent of the soul’s journey toward God, a journey that gets entangled in the irregular heartbeats of erotic love. Following the autobiographical breakthrough of Augustine’s Confessions, this story narrates Dante’s youthful obsession with Beatrice, whom he first sees in church, an important location because it symbolizes the intersection of eros and agape. Although I’m skeptical about a nine-year-old who testifies, “It was from that moment that Love tyrannized my soul which in no time had wedded itself to him,” he becomes the slave of Cupid—the personification of the Latin noun cupido (desire). The burden of slavery goes so far that, after his second sighting at age 18, Love feeds his burning heart to Beatrice in a dream. And what better way to evoke the violent upheaval of eros than an image of forced cannibalism?
Sickened with longing for his “young angel,” Dante invents a “screen” to hide his feelings for Beatrice: Other women are selected as public objects of his attention. If this lad had been on Freud’s sofa, these screen ladies would be diagnosed as sublimation, the superego’s policing of the unruly id. Whether the screen intensifies or diffuses his love for Beatrice is up for debate, but at the end, it’s clear that Beatrice has triumphed over her rivals, albeit in death rather than in life. Anguished over the loss, Dante courts death so he can be near Beatrice again. Eventually, he realizes that the incorporeal Beatrice is superior to the corporeal Beatrice because she was given to him as a rung in the ladder toward heaven, as a face to behold, dimly or brilliantly, “the face of him qui est per omnia secula benedictus” (who is blessed for all eternity). Overcoming the self-referential narcissism of youth, the poet has begun, in good Platonic fashion, to govern the appetites of his heart through the reasons of his soul, leading him out of grief and closer to glory.
Translations of La Divina Commedia abound, but La Vita Nuova has been somewhat neglected. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first to translate it into English; Dante Gabriel Rossetti liberally translated the libello and idolized Beatrice in his paintings, who was modeled after his deceased wife, most notably in Beata Beatrix. In our day Mark Musa’s prose and blank verse translation has become the standard. If you want your verse to rhyme, as it does in the original Italian, then this new translation of David Slavitt’s will be welcome. Rhyming hazards the risk of distortion through subtraction and addition, a risk that Slavitt accepts because the fun is working “within the constraints of the forms.” The prose commentary of La Vita Nuova, which Slavitt rightly describes as “unnecessary and boring,” is rendered in a clear and direct manner, bringing attention to where it belongs: to the poetry.
Following Slavitt’s preference for viewing translations as performances, permit me to treat one moment from the famous canzone in Chapter 19. Here, Dante glorifies Beatrice to the point of blasphemy.
An angel speaks to the Mind of God to report that there is a marvel on earth both strange and rare whose actions arise from a radiant soul down there, the glow of which illuminates the sky even to paradise’s heights. In short, our only lack in heaven is her fair and splendid presence. All the saints declare that the Lord must take some action to rectify this defect promptly. Fortunately, I can announce that Pity speaks to God as well: His judgment is that the lady ought to dwell on earth for a while longer: “It is my will that he say to the souls in hell that this was the vision he had of hope of heaven’s bliss.”
Yeats compared the relationship between form and content to the inseparability of dance and dancer. Form actually generates meaning rather than just containing it. Slavitt’s rhymed verse achieves efficient pace and pleasurable repetition, but there’s a monotony about the beat that seems ill-suited to the rapturous mood. His diction is clunky, throwing off rhythm and meaning. We might expect such phrases as “in short” to be deployed at the end of a business luncheon, not as a summary of your lover’s attributes. Defect, used as a synonym for lack, connotes more than an absence in heaven, implying a failure of God. The verbs declare, must, and rectify in this sentence— All the saints declare / that the Lord must take some action to rectify / this defect promptly—turn the saints into outraged customers and the Lord into an incompetent CEO, as if Google’s website had crashed. Compared with Musa’s sublime phrase “a living miracle,” Slavitt exalts Beatrice as “a marvel on earth both strange and rare,” which could make her a carnival sideshow rather than the highest nature can achieve / And by her mold all beauty tests itself, as Musa puts it later. The personification of Pity creates some ambiguity about who’s speaking when it’s clearly God. Divine speech dictates crystalline syntax, as in Musa’s the hope of heaven’s blessed. Instead, we get jumbled syntax in Slavitt’s the vision he had of hope of heaven’s bliss.
At this critical moment, and elsewhere in the performance, the rhymed verse struggles to communicate what we ought to be hearing, though secular ears may be largely deaf to the shock of Dante’s extravagant use of sacred language in reference to Beatrice. In this canzone, a mortal woman achieves beatification prior to death. Angels and saints conspire to fix the cosmological misalignment. Love itself says, Upon her face you see depicted Love, / There where none dares to hold his gaze too long, as if Love fires himself from the job because of her epiphany. Is all this poetic hyperbole? Perhaps it crosses what Robert Harrison calls “the limits of sacrilege.”
The live question for any reader of La Vita Nuova ought to be this: Has Dante argued that erotic love is the royal road to union with God? If Beatrice is a means of coming closer to God, eros redeems the lover. If, however, she’s an end in herself, eros damns the lover because it has become an idol rather than a burnt offering.
Christopher Benson writes for Books & Culture , Christianity Today , and Image .