Vita Nuova by Dante, translated by Joseph Luzzi
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Vita Nuova
By Dante Alighieri
Translated by Joseph Luzzi
Liveright 2024
“Translation is a vague undertaking,” David Slavitt wrote back in 2010. “Everyone agrees that the perfect translation is impossible, but then there is a lot of carping about the inevitable imperfections and shortcomings of any particular attempt.” It’s a defensive, almost pouting note, made instantly understandable by the fact that it was prefixed to his translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, a notoriously strange “little book” (as Dante called it) that has defied and slightly taunted dozens of translators in the centuries since Dante wrote it in the early 1290s.
Slavitt’s translation was published by Harvard University Press, and this year Liveright publishes one by Bard College professor and long-time Dante scholar Joseph Luzzi, who strikes not so much a defensive tone in his own opening remarks but rather a slightly admonishing one. He mentions that the Vita Nuova has always raised more questions than it can answer, but he refreshingly chooses admiration over veneration throughout his dealing with the work.
The work itself is a strange, wrong-footing combination of prose and verse revolving around Dante’s artistic fixation with the grace and beauty of his Beatrice, and Luzzi wastes no time in declaring, rightly, that some of those prose elaborations on the book’s verse can be “winding, circuitous, and repetitive.” “Put simply,” he writes, “Dante the young poet is far superior to Dante the young prose writer, especially in the rather workmanlike explanations that Dante affixes to each of the delicate poems in the Vita Nuova.” One gets the strong impression that every translator, maybe even every reader, of this work has thought the same thing (some of those earlier translators simply omitted the prose, the Philistines).
Luzzi aims for clarity without slavish stylistic imitation (he likens his translation process to laying a transparent film over Dante’s text), and he’s similarly straightforward as to some of the reasons why. “Unlike Dante’s original,” he writes, for example, “my verse translations have no rhyme scheme, on the grounds that rhyme-poor English can sound forced and singsongy to a contemporary ear when laced into rhyming tercets.”
What results from this kind of approach may strike some readers as a bit balder than other translations, and they may find this baldness appealing. Translator Andrew Frisardi renders the book’s famous opening section this way:
In the book of my memory—the part of it before which not much is legible—there is the heading Incipit vita nova. Under this heading I find the words which I intend to copy down in this little book; if not all of them, at least their essential meaning.
It’s solid, but just slightly portentous, and although this might be closer to the tone used by a noticeably pompous young poet in his late twenties, it’s undeniably less congenial, less of an invitation, than Luzzi’s leaner version:
In the early, nearly empty part of my Book of Memory there is a chapter with the Latin title “Here begins the new life.” I intend to copy into this little book the words I find written under it – if not all of them, at least their essence.
Ultimately, of course, readers will decide for themselves which Vita Nuova they prefer, and perhaps many of them will find Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1861 translation and seek no further. But Luzzi notes that Rossetti’s “English is too dated and its idiosyncratic structure too loose” for today’s readers, and even though he’s an interested party with a book in the market, he’s right. Perhaps this lovely little Liveright edition deserves to become the new standard.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News