Crazy. Crazy how a 28 year old could have written this, and how you can already see the power of the mind behind the Divine Comedy between these lines. His flawless memory allowed him to infuse his writing with multiple layers, so that a superficial reading doesn’t even begin to make justice to this book. What remains unclear is whether Beatrice was actually a woman in the flesh or not. Everything in this book is SO internalized and abstract. What seems to be lacking is any hint or a tiny detail...

Who knew a 13th century Italian poet could be so relatable

Your sisters bringing messages of gladness;And you, who are the daughter of my sadness,Seek out their company, disconsolate.Lovely structure and I applaud the Florentine when he isn’t burning sinners. The spirit and sense data are privileged over reason. Our boy is loopy over Beatrice. He drools and convulses in her presence. Composure is found afterwards and sonnets composed. He’s got it bad. I won’t spoil the turn. Extreme emotion appears fairly uniform. That is a treatise all its own. As woul...

La Vita Nuova an unusual book: written in alternating prose and poetry, it is part ode, part autobiography, part literary analysis, part metaphysical exploration. It is historically important as it provides much of the background to Dante’s life, especially his relationship with his distant love and muse, Beatrice.My attempt to brush up on my Italian with this dual-language edition of the book was a bit of a failure. While the language has remained incredibly static over the past 700 years, Dant...

A book of poems (with commetary) for a girl Dante first saw when he was 9, follows the history of the love from that moment until the few months after her death. Both married someone else (neither marriage is mentioned in the story), but Beatrice's impact on him would spark first ideas for his best known book, "The Divine Comedy", which was begun a few years after this book.This book is a mix of story, poems, and commentary on the poems. Many of the poems were written while she was still alive,

La Vita Nuova (Latin- Vita Nova) is an expression of love written in both verse and prose. Unlike the typical works in the courtly love genre that were typical of the time, La Vita Nuova strives to mix romantic love with spiritual writing. It takes love poetry and prose on a whole new level. This ambitious task is what set Dante from other writers of similar work. It was a very important work for its time. It was in the Renaissance that the romantic sonnet expressing amorous suffering gave rise

A little 13th-century intensity here:"...she turned her eyes to where I was standing faint-hearted and, with that indescribable graciousness for which she is rewarded in the eternal life, she greeted me so miraculously that I seemed at that moment to behold the entire range of possible bliss. ... I became so ecstatic that, like a drunken man, I turned away from everyone ..." After this image, Dante tells us his 18-year-old self runs off to his bedroom and...well, has a vision. This is Dante's fi...

From XXXI - My sighs give me deep anguishWhen thought in the deep mindBrings me that which has cut my heart.And often thinking on deathComes to me a desire of it so sweetThat it changes the color of my faceWhen the thought of her becomes fixedPain attacks me from every sideThat I recover myself through the pain I feelAnd I become suchThat shame drives me from the company.Then weeping alone in my sorrowI call Beatrice & I say Art thou too deadAnd whilst I call her I am consoledWith weeping & with...

Most won't agree but I consider La Vita Nuova Dante's greatest work. The combination of poetry and prose comes as a welcome suprise and it helps us to better understand what Dante went through and what events inspired him. The biggest obstacle between La Vita Nuova and its readers is the way Dante analyses each poem afterward, explaining their parts and themes. I am not a fan of that either, it takes away some of the intimacy we can see and feel throughout the book. But it is a book for poets by...

It is a problematic poetic work, and I think it is necessary to know the author, his life, and his environment to appreciate poetry.The 13th century is a period of history that I do not know. However, it is the century when the literature moves away from Latin writing for the vulgar languages.Dante writes this story following his meeting with Beatrice, with whom he falls head over heels in love. Then she dies.The author alternates songs, sonnets, dialogue, invoke Love, God.In a second part, less...

‏ In a nutshell: I didn't love Dante that much when I read his Divine Comedy months ago. I didn't see him as great and inspiring as other people see him! Now, with this short book about his one and only love: Beatrice, I enjoyed it a little bit. But I don't think it's as good as I expected - or hoped! It was a good read. Just good. Not THAT good!

It's been awhile since I felt like my own self. The joy of reading is coming back. But still miss my beautiful mom.

It doesn’t much matter what the reality is when you are holding a dialogue in your mind with another part of your mind that has its roots in something that was in fact once real and refuses to depart. In the final analysis one experiences only oneself, and our life is no dream but it ought to become one and perhaps will. A part of us functions in the phantasmagoria which we call the everyday world, but another part holds on to memories and ideals which it instinctively knows are infinitely more

I'm not saying he was very silly, but one of us was very silly, and it wasn't me.

True love is theological. This is the conclusion one reaches while reading this early work of the writer of the Divine Comedy. Dante Alighieri wrote La Vita Nuova at the age of twenty-six, shortly after the death of his beloved Beatrice.On the surface this book is simply a collection of love poetry, displaying all the conventions of courtly love. Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Boy is too overcome with a sense of his own unworthiness to ever speak to girl. Girl dies. The end. However, below the

Read in a mixed Italian-Dutch edition. Mixture of prose and poetry, in analogy with Boethius. Some gems of love poetry, but generally much groans and moans focused on the author, and way too much affectionate for my taste.

This short little work is well worth reading if you want to know more about the origins of Dante's love affair with Beatrice - or, more accurately, if you want to read about the edited representation of the origins of his love which Dante presents. In many ways, this is my least favourite of Dante's works. Although to his contemporaries, Dante's inclusion of commentary upon the poems was revolutionary, to modern eyes, they appear rather trite and self-evident ("The first section of the poem appe...

No one agrees, but I think this is Dante's greatest work. It seems to be genuinely from the heart, whether it is or not, and so I find it beautiful. Largely absent are the seething hatred and revenge strategies that ruin THE DIVINE COMEDY for me.

New Life by Dante Alighieri is one of the most elegant short works of poetry and prose in Western literature. This book is around eighty pages, but it is one that inspires the spirit eternally. This work precedes Dante's timeless masterpiece Divine Comedy by over ten years, and if you want a glimpse into that work, but don't have the time to read that lengthy collection now, this work will completely satisfy your needs. It is the perfect starting point into the beautiful world of classical Itali...

Upfront, I am not a poet, and Dante wrote the book for poets about poetry (his own). How do I know? It says so, in the introduction’s first sentence, of the Penguin Classics 1980 edition by Barbara Reynolds, who also translated. So I am not the target audience.A tradition of love poetry, in the Italian vernacular (as opposed to Latin), had gone on for 150 years prior to Dante’s arrival in the early 14th century, which Dante transformed by grounding it in personal experience – which, in his case,...