The "New Life" was occasioned by Dante's integration of his meeting of the divine Beatrice and the meaning she held for him in his own psyche. As such, it is an indispensable precursor to understanding his "Commedia" trilogy. This work is fascinating because through it we experience Dante's growth, from your run-of-the-mill medieval troubadour praising courtly love, to a man raised to the heights of ecstasy by way of his soul's true guide, Beatrice. A Jungian might say Beatrice was Dante's anima, projected onto a flesh-and-blood woman. But Beatrice is no malicious deciever (as Jung described); she is more akin to Goethe's meaning at the end of "Faust II"--"The eternal feminine/lures to perfection" or Joyce's tranfiguration at the sight of the maiden "gently stirring the water with her foot" in the "Portrait." Dante's work is brilliant not only because it reveals the spiritual urge lying beneath the veneer of romantic love (a collective illusion that our culture still labors under) but because Dante guides us through his own inner journey, from goo-goo-eyed adulator weeping because love 'hurts so good,' through his psychological turn within to question his own need for a woman's "pity," and on to his final integration of the feminine within, no longer dominated by his own unconscious need and able to follow Her from the depths of his own soul to the heights of glory. Mark Musa is also the translator of the highly touted Indiana Critical Edition of the "Commedia." But I found his translation occasionally stilted and unpoetic, when a few changes would have smoothed both verse and prose. The footnotes were nearly useless, their content was often obvious or uninformative. And they are very awkard to use: they are denoted in the text by an * rather than a number and keyed in the Appendix by page number. Unfortunately, only about half the pages are actually numbered, making the system cumbersome indeed. That said, I end with this: Read it and weep. And revel in its majesty.

La Vita Nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over approximately a ten-year period. The Vita Nuova brought together Dante's poetic efforts from before 1283 to about 1292-93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante's most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of La Divina Commedia.

The Vita Nuova, which Dante called his libello, or little book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth canzoni is left dramatically interrupted by the death of Beatrice (perhaps Bice Portinari, a woman Dante met and fell in love with in 1274 but who died in 1290). In Beatrice, Dante created one of the most celebrated women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante's thoughts and career, Beatrice underwent enormous changes in his hands--sanctified in the Vita Nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented again in the Convivio, only to be returned with more profound comprehension in La Divina Commedia as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the "vulgar herd" to Paradise.

The prose commentary provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course, conceivable that some were actually written for occasions other than those alleged). The story, however, is simple enough and tells of Dante's first sight of Beatrice when both were nine years of age, her salutation when they were eighteen, Dante's expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante's anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above the anguish and sing only of his lady's virtues, anticipations of her death in that of a young friend, the death of Beatrice's father, and Dante's own premonitory dream, and finally, the death of Beatrice, Dante's mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice's final triunph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante's determination to write at some later time about Beatrice, "that which has never been written of any woman."

Yet, with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose, the Vita Nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality. Names are rarely used...Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante's "best friend," Dante's sister is referred to as "she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood." On the one hand, Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other, he seem to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which Dante arranged poems written over a ten-year period and the generality of his poetic language are indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of the local poets.

The Italian of the Vita Nuova is Dante's own gorgeous Tuscan dialect, a limpid, ethereal and luminous Italian that seems as though it could have been written yesterday. In chapter XXX of the Vita Nuova, Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. In fact, Dante dedicated the Vita Nuova to Cavalcanti--to his best friend (primo amico).

Anyone who can, should definitely read this beautiful book in its original Italian, but those who cannot can still enjoy the beauty of Dante in a good translation. The book isn't as difficult or intimidating as La Divina Commedia and it makes a beautiful introduction to those who love Dante but just want to enjoy a little less of him in the beginning.

It's hard not to assign 5 stars to this early work of the author of the Divine Comedy. In any serious Dante course, a professor will usually pick the Vita Nuovo as an introduction to Dante's work. The work is not at all intimidating -- rather, it's quite accessible to the modern reader. Dante, in his youth, writes a series of love tributes to Beatrice, his ultimate guide in the Divine Comedy. Anyone who is contemplating reading the Divine Comedy should start here and read this first as mandatory background to the Commedia. Dante rules!