The New Life (Vita nuova)
Dante’s little book of his youth (1292-1294): the story of his love for Beatrice, from their first meeting at nine years old to the vision that leads him to say nothing more of her until he can write of her more worthily. A prosimetrum of forty-two chapters with thirty-one poems, each followed by its division. The Italian is the Agresti edition (Turin: Roux e Viarengo, 1903) as transcribed by Project Gutenberg, divided into Barbi’s forty-two chapters; the poems are verse, one line to a verse. The English is Rossetti’s verse and prose, cut to the same forty-two chapters.
Contents
Source: The text of Dante from the Incipit to the last chapter; Agresti’s essay on Rossetti, the indexes and the notes on the paintings are dropped. The book has no chapter numbers; they are restored here from the incipits of Barbi’s forty-two chapters (Società Dantesca Italiana, 1921), so cap-01 to cap-42 follow the standard reference numbering although the wording is Agresti’s (vulgate) text, not Barbi’s critical one. Poems are verse with hard breaks; the divisioni stay in italics. · Rossetti prints his version without chapter numbers, so it is cut into Barbi’s forty-two chapters at the sentences that match the Italian incipits (chapters VI, XI and XIX begin inside one of his paragraphs). The prefatory note and Rossetti’s preface are dropped; his notes stay as footnotes, the poems are verse. Norton’s 1867 version is not imported.