The Portable Dante Read Free Page A

reputation as a Florentine and resume his life in the city that had turned against him, Dante refused to compromise his principles and turned down more than one opportunity to return to Florence, because such opportunities involved answering the false charges made against him. Such unwillingness to dishonor himself brought him yet another sentence of death, this one extending to his sons as well.
    The last years of the poet’s life were spent at Ravenna, where he was offered asylum by Guido Nevella da Polenta, the nephew of the famous Francesca da Rimini, the only woman sinner who actually speaks in the
Inferno.
These years seem to have been serene ones. In Ravenna he was greatly esteemed, and he enjoyed a very pleasant social life and an eager following of pupils, for he was already well known for his lyrics, and especially the
Convivio, Inferno,
and
Purgatorio.
Shortly before hisdeath he was sent by Guido on a mission to Venice. Although Florence still rejected him, other cities very much valued his presence. Dante’s friendship with Can Grande della Scala remained intact, and Dante placed great store in him; it is to him that he dedicated the
Paradiso.
Ravenna was Dante’s home until his death on September 13 or 14, 1321.
WORKS
    The
Vita nuova,
one of Dante’s earliest works, is a combination of prose and poetry (thirty-one poems accompanied by a prose text). It is one of the first important examples of Italian literary prose and probably the first work of fiction that has come down to us in which the prose serves the purpose not only of offering a continuous narrative but also of explaining the occasion for the composition of each of the poems included. The originality of the
Vita nuova
consists of the functional relationship between the poetry and the prose.
    In recent years the critics of the
Divine Comedy
have come to see more clearly the necessity of distinguishing between Dante the poet, the historical figure who wrote the poem in his own voice, and Dante the pilgrim, who is the poet’s creation and who moves in a world of the poet’s invention. In the case of the
Vita nuova
it is more difficult to distinguish between Dante the poet and Dante the lover, because in this book the lover, the protagonist, is himself a poet. More important, however, is the fact that the events of the
Vita nuova,
unlike those of the
Divine Comedy,
are surely not to be taken as pure fiction, and the protagonist himself is no fictional character: he is the historical character Dante at an earlier age. But we must attempt, just as we must in the case of any first-person novel, to distinguish between the point of view of the one who has already lived through the experiences recorded and has had time to reflect upon them in retrospect, and the point of view of the one undergoing the experiences at the time. What we have in the
Vita nuova
is a more mature Dante, reevoking his youthful experiences in a way that points up the folly of his younger self.
    Also significant is the chronological relationship between the composition of the poems and that of the prose narrative, which reflects the way in which the author has adapted to a new purpose some of his earlier writings. In general scholars agree that when Dante, sometimebetween 1292 (that is, two years after the death of Beatrice) and 1300, composed the
Vita nuova,
most, if not all, of the poems that were to appear in the text had already been written. The architecture of the work, as has been said, consists of selected poems arranged in a certain order, with bridges of prose that serve primarily a narrative function: to describe those events in the life of the protagonist that supposedly inspired the poems included in the text. By giving the poems a narrative background, Dante was able to make their meaning clearer or even to change their original meaning or purpose.
    For example, though the beauty of the first
canzone
in the book,
Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore
(“Ladies who have