Vita Nuova

The Vita Nuova (the New Life) is a small book which relates in prose and often very beautiful verse the story of the youthful Dante’s love for Beatrice. The essay which follows the translation provides new insights into this puzzling thirteenth-century work. Musa regards Dante’s intention in this so called “book of memory” as a cruel and comic commentary on the youthful lover. He argues that Dante, using the tradition of love poetry current in his time, points up the foolishness and shallowness of his protagonist, a self-centered and self-pitying youth who only occasionally in the progress of his suffering catches even a glimpse of the true nature of love or his beloved. “The sensitive man who would realize a man’s destiny must ruthlessly cut out of his heart the canker at its center [i.e. self-pity], the canker that the heart instinctively tends to cultivate.” According to Musa, this is one of Dante’s central ideas. Dante scholars, libraries, and students of the Italian classics will welcome this distinguished translation and its provocative commentary.