Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri: A Dual-Language Book

Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri: A Dual-Language (Parallel Text) Book

The Vita Nuova, with its unusual blend of prose and poetry, is universally recognized as Dante’s early masterpiece and provides an indispensable prequel to The Divine Comedy.

Set in thirteenth-century Florence, part autobiography and part religious allegory, it traces Dante’s quest to find a poetic idiom worthy of Beatrice whom he had loved since boyhood. Her premature death plunges him into an emotional turmoil that finds release only through his faith in her continuing spiritual influence and through his determination “to write of her what has never been written of any woman”. The Vita Nuova remains a central document in European culture’s examination of love and the self.

It is exactly one hundred and fifty years since Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s groundbreaking version of the Vita Nuova. Now Anthony Mortimer, already acclaimed as translator of Cavalcanti, Petrarch and Michelangelo, produces a verse translation that avoids Rossetti’s disturbing archaisms but preserves a lyric immediacy worthy of the original. This is a Vita Nuova for the twenty-first century.

Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri - About the author

Born in Florence, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is considered to be the father of Italian poetry and one of the greatest influences in world literature. His masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is the zenith of medieval knowledge and a paragon of poetic imagination. Its first part, the Inferno, remains one of the most popular books of all time.

Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri - Dual-Language (Parallel Text) Book

Translated from the Italian by Anthony Mortimer (Original Italian text on the left page with the English translation on the facing page).