The New Life (La Vita Nuova)

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. PREFATORY NOTE Dante Gabriel Rossetti, being the son of an Italian who was greatly immersed in the study of Dante Alighieri, and who produced a Comment on the Inferno , and other books relating to Dantesque literature, was from his earliest childhood familiar with the name of the stupendous Florentine, and to some extent aware of the range and quality of his writings. Nevertheless—or perhaps indeed it may have been partly on that very account—he did not in those opening years read Dante to any degree worth mentioning: he was well versed in Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron, and some other writers, years before he applied himself to Dante. He may have been fourteen years of age, or even fifteen (May 1843), before he took seriously to the author of the Divina Commedia . He then read him eagerly, and with the profoundest admiration and delight; and from the Commedia he proceeded to the lyrical poems and the Vita Nuova . I question whether he ever read—unless in the most cursory way—other and less fascinating writings of Alighieri, such as the Convito and the De Monarchiâ . From reading, Rossetti went on to translating. He translated at an early age, chiefly between 1845 and 1849, a great number of poems by the Italians contemporary with Dante, or preceding him; and, among other things, he made a version of the whole Vita Nuova , prose and verse. This may possibly have been the first important thing that he translated from the Italian: if not the first, still less was it the last, and it may well be that his rendering of the book was completed within the year 1846, or early in 1847. He did not, of course, leave his version exactly as it had come at first: on the contrary, he took counsel with friends (Alfred Tennyson among the number), toned down crudities and juvenilities, and worked to make the whole thing impressive and artistic—for in such matters he was much more chargeable with over-fastidiousness than with laxity. Still, the work, as we now have it, is essentially the work of those adolescent years—from time to time reconsidered and improved, but not transmuted. Some few years after producing his translation of the Vita Nuova , Rossetti was desirous of publishing it, and of illustrating the volume with etchings from various designs,…