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Vita Nova (Northwestern World Classics),Used
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Dante's Vita nova (ca. 129295) is one of themost famous love stories in literature. Many know the story of Dante's love for Beatrice,starting in childhood, her death at a young age, and his devotion to her indeath eventually leading to her reappearance as Dante's guide to paradise inthe Divine Comedy. Less knownis the fact that many of the poems in the Vitanova that Dante claims or implies he wrote for Beatriceprobably were not written for her, and that the poems alone (there are thirtyoneof them total in the libello,or 'little book,' as Dante calls it) don't tell this story at all:the prose, written years after many of the poems, has this function. The prose creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante's way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Danteand his poetfriends inherited from the Provenal poets, the Sicilian poets ofthe court of Frederick II, and the Tuscan poets before them). Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered onthe self and more aimed at love as such: he intended to elevate courtly love poetry, many of its tropes and its language, into sacred love poetry. Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of lovetransparent to the Absolute,inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor.Andrew Frisardi's translation captures both the tone and the meaning of Dante's language, creating poems and prose in contemporary English that convey much of theaesthetic experience of the originals. The book includes extensive explanatory notes and a long introduction that provide background and context for better understanding Dante's references and use of symbols that were well known in his time but not as well known in ours.Christian Moevs, Associate Professor of Italian, Notre Dame University and author of The Metaphysics of Dante's 'Comedy' has written that '[Andrew Frisardi's edition of the Vitanova is] a real monument, a real achievement, stunning actually. I never thought there would appear in English an edition so rich, so sound, so nuanced,so masterful in its introduction and commentary and notes. . . . To be able to lead anyone into this text, and show what is really happening, and the extraordinary depth and complexity and originality of it in terms that are still comprehensible to a nonDantist, I don't think has happened in any edition before, in Italian or English.'
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