Vita nuova

Dante Alighieri, Edward Vasta, Dino S. Cervigni

Description

This bilingual edition of the Vita Nuova is the first facing-page translation of this text to be available in over 50 years. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta have translated Dante's lyrics into line-by-line free verse that seeks to reproduce Dante's lyrical complexities of meaning, form, and style. The three-part introduction covers Dante's life and work, the form and content of the Vita Nuova, and the theory and practice adopted for the translation. A full concordance with glossary of the Italian text and a detailed index to the English translation will assist Dante scholars, college students, and educated readers alike.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Italian
• Poetry
• European
• Renaissance

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780268159047
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 17 Mo

Extrait

Dante Alighieri
ITALIAN TEXT
WITH FACING
ENGLISH
TRANSLATION BY
DINO So CJERV][GM
AND EDWARD VASTA VITA NUOVA Dante Alighieri
VITA NUOVA
ITALIAN TEXT
with
FACING ENGLISH TRANSLATION
by
DINO S. CERVIGNI
&
EDWARD VASTA
The University of Notre Dame Press Italian text ( except paragraph divisions)
© Societa Dantesca Italiana, Florence, Italy
All other texts (and Italian text divisions) ©
Dino S. Cervigni & Edward Vsta
University of Notre Dame Press
Copyright© 1995 University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Reprinted in 2002, 2007, 2011
Published in the United States of America
This ebook has been made possible in part by a major grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring
the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or
recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily
represent those of the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
NATIONAL
ENDOWMENT
FOR THE
HUMANITIES
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
[Vita nuova. English & Italian]
Vita nuova / Dante Alighieri; Italian text with facing English translation
by Dino S. Cervigni & Edward Vasta.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 10: 0-268-01925-8 (cloth)
ISBN 13: 978- 0-268-01926-6 (paper)
ISBN 10: (paper)
I. Cervigni, Dino S. II. Vasta, Edward, 1928- . III. Title.
1995 PQ4315.58.C47
851'.1-c 20 95-2300
CIPContents
Preface ................................................................ .ix
Introduction ........................................................... I
Vita nuova:
Italian Text & Facing English Translation ...... .46
Topical Index ...................................................... 147
Concordance and Glossary of Archaic Terms .......... 227
Appendix 1: The Manuscript Tradition & Barbi's
Divisions of the Vita nuova into Chapters ..... 305
Appendix 2: Barbi's General Comments
on Chapter Divisions of the Vita nuova ......... 311
Appendix 3: Incipits and Explicits of Paragraphs
According to Barbi's Edition
and Adopted Criteria ................................... 315
Appendix 4: Incipits of the Poems
in the Vita nuova ........................................ 327
Works Cited & Selected Bibliography .................... 329 Preface
Each of these two volumes on Dante's Vita nuova, the first centering on text,
the second on commentary, has two objectives: to render the original Italian
text accessible faithfully and fully to English readers, and to open text and
translation meticulously and comprehensively to study by a wide audience.
Thus, volume one's introduction reviews Dante's life and his libello with
sufficient clarity and comprehensiveness to familiarize Dante's or the Vita
nuova's first time reader, and also explains the translation's governing theory
and data to the Dante scholar. The Italian original reprints Michele Barbi's
1932 international edition, but with two important modifications: it no longer
divides the structure of Dante's text into chapters nor interrupts the text with
numbered divisions; it thereby restores the text as faithfully as possible to its
original manuscript culture. Similarly, the English translation breaks free
from the romantic tone and vocabulary evident in English translations thus far
and seeks instead to translate Dante's text faithfully in spirit as well as in
letter. The index of the English translation and the concordance with glossary
of the Italian original, together with appendices, strive to serve scholarship by
providing tools for complete and careful access to both texts. The
commentary in volume two, finally, provides information and observations
intended to serve reading and scholarship both particularly and broadly.
These objectives and the means of their implementation, it must be
added, were not fully foreseen at the initiation of these volumes; they did not
bring us, the volumes' two curators, both medievalists, readers of both Italian
and English, one a specialist in Italian literature and the other in English
literature, to the task; we discovered the necessity of these objectives and their
implementation as we proceeded. Our original objective centered on making
available, for the first time since the Temple Classics edition of 1906 and the
King's Classics edition of 1908, both long out of print, a facing page English
translation of Dante's Vita nuova. The first draft of our translation, however,
instigated between us, in our determination to be faithful to the original, a
penetrating give-and-take that released us from the romantic orientation
established by the translations of the nineteenth century: those by Garrow X Preface
1843, Emerson 1847, Norton 1859, Martin 1861, Rossetti 1861, and Boswell
1895: the first translations produced in English and never fully left behind.
Fidelity required the translation not only of the narrator-protagonist's words
but also his rational spirit and the precise and clear intellectual and spiritual
understanding that, as he reflects upon his memories, control his youthful
passions, however intense.
Simultaneously, fidelity's continuous revisions and refinements of the
translation exposed the degree to which the medieval culture of oral
communication governed Dante's expression along with that of written
composition. A faithful translation of the original text came to require the
preservation of its oral address and locutions as well as its literate meanings,
forms, and effects. We had to translate the narrator-protagonist's voice
together with his mind, and we had to translate it from his poetry, by free
verse rather than English iambics and rhyme, as well as from his prose. Our
revisions of the translation in regard to its orality, rationality, and literacy
have continued to the last moment before submission to the press, and the
result is a translation that reads and sounds, at least to us, quite different from
those available. This translation may invite a revision of the English-only
reader's expectation and understanding regarding the substance and style of
Dante's text.
Fidelity's ultimate challenge became, however, that of translating
Dante's text not only in light of itself but in light of the manuscript culture
that produced it. This requirement confronted the print culture format and
numbering that became universal in Dante studies after Barbi's 1907/1932
edition succeeded editions by his nineteenth-century forerunners: Torri 1843,
Witte 1876, and Casini 1885. All of these print culture editions obliterated
important manuscript culture qualities of the work, and to this day they affect
and control, to an extent that scholars more and more appreciate, how today's
readers, English or Italian, experience, understand, and study Dante's text.
After detailed examination of both Barbi's report and available manuscript
evidence regarding textual format and divisions, and in light of today's
understanding of narrativity, particularly narrative's verbal representation of
temporal structure, we have removed from the text the unjustified concept of
chapters, replaced unjustified paragraph divisions with divisions that are
strictly justified by the text's internal structure, and lifted Barbi's canonized
numbering from the text by placing them, to preserve scholarly continuity, in
the margins. In accord with manuscript practices, we have marked and XI Preface
decorated the beginning of prose paragraphs with drop letters, and in place of
line numbers and indentations that indicate the prosodic divisions of the
poetry, we have marked these divisions with bold letters. We have avoided
fragmenting the text, finally, in the original and in translation, by the
intrusion and distraction of footnotes, whose contents are instead incorporated
in the second volume. Employing print culture technology, then, as well as
philology, we have sought within reasonable limits to enhance our
presentation's fidelity to Dante's original.
The years required to produce these volumes also produced papers that
explored the data and principles that ultimately laid the groundwork for the
volumes' form and objectives. The sequence of these presentations reflects the
progress of our labors and records the sources of discussion included in our
introduction and commentary. In all, we have presented six papers that
confront the issues resolved in the present volumes. The first paper, "It takes
Two to Be Faithful: Translating Dante's Vita nuova," was written by Edward
Vasta and presented by him at the American Association of Italian Studies
conference held on April 9-12, 1992, at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill. Then followed "Against Dividing the Vita nuova: Philology,
Literacy, and Orality ," composed jointly and presented by Dino Cervigni on
November 23, 1992, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At the
meeting of the Modem Language Association in New York,