La Vita Nuova 9780674270619

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La Vita Nuova

La Vita Nuova Dante Alighieri

Translated by David R. Slavitt

h a rva r d u n i v e r sit y pr e s s Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England 2010

Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. [Vita nuova. English] La vita nuova / Dante Alighieri ; translated by David R. Slavitt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-674-05093-8 (alk. paper) I. Slavitt, David R., 1935– II. Title. PQ4315.58.S63 2010 851 .1—dc22 ' 2010007334

For Janet Quel ch’ella par quando un poco sorride, non si pò dicer nè tenere a mente, sì è novo miracolo e gentile.

C ON T EN TS

Translator’s Preface ix Introduction by Seth Lerer 1 Further Reading 24 Text of La Vita Nuova 25

T R A NSL ATOR ’ S PR EFACE

Translation is a vague undertaking. Everyone agrees that the perfect translation is impossible, but then there is a lot of carping about the inevitable imperfections and shortcomings of any particu lar attempt. It might be well to do away entirely with the word and to replace it with something that admits the imperfections and even proclaims them. I think of these undertakings of mine as “renditions,” which is to say that they are performances, and also acts of some violence (poems being blindfolded and hustled off to interrogation centers in distant countries). Most of the versions of La Vita Nuova that I have seen are entirely in prose. These are, for the most part, accurate betrayals, because they give the “meaning” of the poems while denying or ignoring their fundamental character as poems. In La Vita Nuova this is particularly unfortunate, because the piece is prosimetric, or Menippian, or, in plain language, partly in prose and partly in verse. It is important then that, in its English

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garb, that basic amphibiousness should be preserved. I am not saying that the prose versions are entirely useless. But their purpose is to help readers with some Italian who need assistance. They are reading Dante’s original work and conferring with the English version in difficult places as though it were a long footnote. This is not at all a bad way to read this or any other literary work that comes from a language you do not know. It is the rationale, I believe, for the Loeb Classical Library, in which, if one looks only at the pages in English, one misses the experience of the poetry. What I have been doing, and what I do here, is to contrive a simulacrum, to do the poems as poems, to reproduce the verse forms (harder in English, actually, than it was for Dante in a language in which almost everything rhymes). Inevitably, this means some cutting here and padding there, as I work within the constraints of the forms. But that is the fun of poetry, the acceptance of these constraints that, in the ideal, force the poet to some expression he or she might not have thought of otherwise. To write poetry is to write better than one can. And to read poetry? Those same constraints have an inevitable effect on the alert reader who is following along with the grammar and

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the “sense” of the piece but is also lulled by the technical display, as if in a hypnotic induction. The business of rhyming, which has never been satisfactorily explained, is both a distraction and an enhancement. And to do Dante (or any other poet) justice, one must reproduce that doubleness in order to approximate, as well as one can, the experience of encountering a poem. Poems have meanings, but they are not merely meanings. For many people, the first experience of reading poetry comes, alas, in school, where they are instructed, more often than not, by teachers who do not themselves read poetry for pleasure. (Imagine sex ed. classes taught by nuns.) The usual procedure is to “assign” a poem— hideous thought—and then to require from the students that they write essays explicating what they have read. This does not help in the connection between each reader and the poem. It is indeed more likely to have a reverse effect. Consider all the bumbling essays about “The Road Not Taken,” which have pretty much killed that delicate little piece for two or three generations. Poems are not hoops for students to jump through in order to graduate (and, more often than not, try to get into law school). This kind of pedagogy has resulted in the performance sweats about which

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English majors complain whenever they see writing that does not come out to the right-hand side of the page. To be required to mount the poem’s coffi n and tap dance in a way that will impress an instructor is appalling and grotesque. It is true, even so, that there are likely to be people studying Dante or the Italian Renaissance, and for these students (who are not quite readers but only aspiring readers) I have been as faithful as I could be. Some of the prose sections are explanations of the poems, as if Dante thought it was a good idea to incorporate the Cliffs Notes into the text. I have always thought that these passages were unnecessary and boring, and I was not unhappy that my renditions of the poems meant that there were now inaccuracies in his line references. So I just got rid of them. Wasn’t that taking a liberty? Of course it was. But liberty and justice are interconnected. Translating prose, one is the author’s more or less sedulous clerk; translating poetry, one is, perforce, his partner. The bottom line, then, is that for those people who, for whatever reason, absolutely require those explanations, they are still available. I have not destroyed the original or the literal translations. And therefore

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I have no feelings of guilt about departing from the words now and then in order more accurately to suggest the poetry. Readers who do not face the prospect of an essay or an examination will, I hope, be grateful.

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IN T RODUC T ION Seth Lerer

La Vita Nuova of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is many things. It is a story of desire: a passionate account (perhaps true, perhaps invented) of Dante’s love of Beatrice, from their fi rst chance encounter when the poet was nine and she was eight, to her death sixteen years later. It is an anthology of lyric poetry: a collection of Dante’s earliest verse, assembled and annotated to chart his own growth as a writer. It is a treatise on literary criticism: a compendium of medieval theories of form and allegory, authorship and readership, pressed into the ser vice of a new, vernacular self-consciousness. But, most compellingly, it is the announcement of a literary career: a testimony to impulses lyrical and philosophical, erotic and spiritual. If we lament the life and early death of Beatrice in this work, we must, by contrast, celebrate the birth of Dante himself as the great synthesizer of medieval traditions and the harbinger of the modern voice. If his forebears ranged from scholiasts in Latin and

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courtly makers in Old French, Provençal, and early Italian, Dante exceeded all. He brought together and transcended tradition to become, in the words of the great literary critic Erich Auerbach, “the poet of the secular world,” and La Vita Nuova stands as one of the earliest, defi ning masterpieces of European literature. How did he do it? How did a boy born in the age of St. Thomas Aquinas become the master of Italian verse? Much like his contemporary, the painter Giotto (who drew the poet from life), Dante inflected the techniques of medieval figural representation with a new sensitivity to the surface texture of experience and the inner life of the emotions. Characters remain deeply allegorical: they represent ideals and types; they have their meaning grounded in spiritual experience; they have their demeanor and décor resonate with biblical image. People in Dante may be saints and sinners; they may act in ways that recall passages from scripture; they may speak in words that evoke classical poetry or biblical prose. But they are always people. Thus, we need to understand the tensions between history and allegory, felt experience and spiritual meaning, in La Vita Nuova. We need to understand how its

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account of Dante’s love of Beatrice feels both absolutely real and absolutely allegorical at the same time. And we need to understand what Dante learned from his poetic and philosophical predecessors and how he went beyond them. But fi rst, the story. One day in church, the young boy fi rst sees Beatrice and is smitten. He spends his youth preoccupied with her, never speaking directly to her, but contriving chance encounters. Nine years pass from this fi rst sighting, and he sees her on the street in Florence, dressed in white, with two other, older women. She turns and greets him. Joyfully dumbstruck, he goes home and dreams of her. Time passes. Dante pines. Friends worry about his health. Dante himself cannot let on her name or his affections. And so he contrives a so-called screen love, modeled on the practices of courtly troubadours and romanciers. He selects another woman as the public object of attention. When this woman leaves Florence, Dante fi nds another—but he treats her with such obvious attention that, when Beatrice passes him one day, she publicly cuts him in the street. Now, shaken to the core, Dante writes a poem for her and continues to reflect in verse on love and loss. He considers a shift in his poetic themes, from anguish to

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elation, but is blocked. Then, while walking by a stream, he blurts out the beginning of what would become one of his most renowned lyrics: Donne ch’avete intelleto d’amore (“Ladies, you who can understand love”). More poems come. But then Dante learns of Beatrice’s father’s death, and, while he knows he cannot directly approach her with his consolation, her sorrow is in his heart. Soon, Dante himself falls ill and languishes for nine days. Febrile and fearful, he imagines Beatrice dead and has a nightmare about losing her. On his recovery, he sees her once again, writes more verse about love, but then—without expectation or explanation—she dies. Dante grieves, and his grief provokes some of the most exquisite poetry and prose of the whole work: a poem brilliantly engaging his own anguish with that of her brother; sonnets in response to the sympathy of another woman; poems written to pilgrims passing through Florence who are unaware of Beatrice’s death; and fi nally, the last sonnet of the work, written for two women of noble birth. Love here, as throughout La Vita Nuova, moves past mere physical desire to embrace the power of the spirit and the vision of salvation. Dante now ends the work, resolving to write no more of Beatrice until he could do so “in a more

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admirable and a worthier manner.” He looks forward to writing “of her what has never been said of any woman” and imagines Beatrice looking on the face of Him qui est per omnia secula benedictus (who is blessed forever). Such, in barest outline, is the story of La Vita Nuova. How much of this is true and how much literary fiction we will never know. The passion of his poetry has convinced generations of readers that Beatrice lived and died as Dante says. For other readers, Dante’s story is as “real” as that of the Divine Comedy: it possesses all the surface texture and the felt experience of reality, but it remains a fiction pressed into the ser vice of a higher truth. The great American Dante scholar Charles Singleton once wrote that “the fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not fiction.” So, too, for La Vita Nuova lies the governing conceit in the supposed reality of its events. Dante, it is important to remember, does not recount the love of Beatrice as it happened; nor does he recall it in the past tense, unmediated and directly. Rather, he makes clear at the opening that what will follow is a transcript of another text—a book copied out of his own book of memory. Dante presents himself less as the main character within its action than as a scribe, putting

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together the materials into a new, coherent, literary form. Thus, La Vita Nuova begins with one of the most famous, and most enigmatic, statements in all Western literature: “In that part of the book of my memory before which very little is legible, there is a passage with the rubric that says: Incipit vita nova (A new life begins). Below the rubric I fi nd written the words which it is my intention to collect in this little book—or, if not all of them, then at least their general meaning.” Like poets and philosophers from antiquity on, Dante imagines memory as a book. Nine hundred years before Dante began, the scholar Martianus Capella asserted that “what is sent to memory is written into areas, as if . . . on the written page.” Three centuries after Beatrice’s death, Shakespeare’s Hamlet could still reflect on the challenge of his father’s ghost: “Remember thee! / Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, . . And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” (Hamlet, 1.5.97–103). To remember is to turn the page, and flipping through the leaves of memory’s volume, Dante comes across what he calls, in Italian, a rubrica. This is the title of a chapter or a section of a manuscript.

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Dante’s Italian word comes straight from Latin, rubrica, a term that literally meant “something written in red.” Anyone who has seen a medieval manuscript will recall the red letters at the top of pages or the start of sections. Dante imagines fi nding something similar. Even though his work is in Italian, the rubric is in Latin, and we must recall that medieval literacy was Latin literacy. Anything of import, be it history or philosophy, devotion or desire, would be in the language of the learned. To be literate in Dante’s day was to be literate in Latin, and the brilliance of this moment is to show us that the vision of this work is not just of transcription but of translation. Incipit vita nova. At one level, it means simply, “A new life begins.” But at another level, it is the title to the book itself. Incipit, “here begins,” was how medieval manuscripts began their works, and scholars today speak of “the incipit” to a medieval text. Another way of reading these three Latin words is thus: “Here begins The New Life.” Dante presents his work as a transcription and translation. His purpose, he announces, is to copy and collect into this current, smaller book the material from his book of memory. His Italian word here is assemplare (to assemble). And his goal is to preserve, if

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not everything word for word, then at the very least its gist or meaning: sentenzia. These Italian words take terms from Latin literacy and make them new. For medieval poets and philosophers, a writer could be many things. St. Bonaventure, writing in the middle of the thirteenth century, codified the four ways of producing a book. If someone, he noted, simply transcribed the words of another exactly as they were originally written, he was a scribe (scriptor). If he wrote down the words of another, but orga nized them in a special way, he was a compiler (compilator). If he did either of these things and added material of his own, clarifying or explaining the words of another, he was a commentator. And, if he wrote his own words fi rst, and then added material from other writers to support or explain his own words, then and only then was he an author (auctor). Authorship in the Middle Ages was not thought of as an act of complete, original invention. It was, instead, a form of reworking and responding to the words of others—classical poetry, biblical narrative, history, philosophy. In one sense, then, Dante asserts: I am a medieval writer, copying, compiling, and distilling something that I read elsewhere. But what he also says is: where I read it is in my own book of

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memory. Through this brilliant rhetorical device, Dante can be both traditional and innovative. He can be his own author, scribe, compiler, and commentator. He can maintain the practices of his contemporaries, but at the same time assert his own originality. For any reader attuned to the nuances of these scholastic distinctions, the status of La Vita Nuova as a treatise on literary composition and criticism should come as no surprise. For almost every poem in the book, Dante provides analysis of form and meaning, personal intention and audience response. Take the fi rst one, for example, “To anyone whose heart and soul have been smitten” (section III). Dante announces why he wrote the poem (what medieval scholars would have called the intentio auctoris, the author’s intention): “I resolved to make a sonnet in which I could greet all devotees of Love and ask them to evaluate my vision.” Then, after presenting the sonnet’s text, he analyzes its structure in detail: “This sonnet is divided into two parts.” Then, he reports the range of reader responses: “I received answers from many, and their opinions varied.” These three elements of analysis—author’s intention, formal structure, and reader’s responses—are the core of medieval literary

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criticism. At times, Dante goes beyond these basics to locate particu lar poems in a larger narrative arc. For example, section XII describes how he fell asleep and dreamed that a young man, dressed all in white, called to him—fi rst in Latin, then in Italian (what he calls volgari, the vernacular). He tells Dante to write to Beatrice: “Write the piece, moreover, in such a way that the words themselves are an intermediary and that you are not addressing her directly.” Here, he provides the statement of authorial intention. “Have it set to music,” he directs, too. Now, he is telling Dante how to frame his subject. After the ballad, Dante himself announces: “Now, it may be that some will criticize me on the ground that it isn’t clear whom I am addressing in the second person—because the ballad I speak to is identical with the words on the page. I shall clear this up later on, in an even more difficult passage of this little book. After he has read that, my critic, I am confident, will, when he looks back, understand the ballad quite clearly.” Now, we hear the voice of Dante the commentator, carefully monitoring, if not manipulating, the reader’s responses. But even he can only go so far. At one point he announces, after the poem in section XIV, “this is impossible to explain to anyone who has never been in

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love, whereas those who have been in Love’s thrall will understand instantly and completely.” At stake here is not simply the belief that only those who know true love can understand love in another. At stake is a notion of poetic truth as something to be shared by an elite. Medieval scholars long held that poetry veiled truth, so that it could be eloquently shared with worthy audiences but kept from the vulgar or the uninformed. Dante echoes this sentiment after the poem “Ladies, you who can understand love” when, after his detailed, extended analysis, he states: “I am addressing only a select group and I shouldn’t want its meaning spread to too many people or those not fit to receive it” (XIX). La Vita Nuova’s prose, however, offers more than local commentary on particu lar poems, and it presents more than just a retrospective of traditional, medieval notions of poetic form and practice. It reflects on the new vernaculars of literary culture that had emerged by Dante’s time and that had recalibrated the relationships of love and poetry. In section XXV, Dante argues that love is not a thing in itself with physical form, but rather is an aspect of the processes of understanding or of human social relations. Thus, to imagine “Love” as an

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entity—whether it be the figure of a “god of love” or an embodiment of love like Beatrice—is a way of speaking figuratively. Figurative language had long been developed in the classical, Latin traditions. Virgil, Horace, and Ovid (Dante notes) all wrote of love as if it were an animate being, and so too, now, can poets in the vernacular. Dante suggests that vernacular love poetry began when a lover tried to address a lady unschooled in Latin. The poets of what he calls the langue d’oc (the Provençal poets of southern France) and the langue del si (the Italian poets) took the traditional, Latin forms of personification and domesticated them about a hundred and fi fty years before Dante’s time. Unlike the Latin poets, Dante notes, they wrote “in rhyme”: they developed patterns of sound and stanza that became the hallmarks of vernacular practice (forms such as the canzone and the sonnet). But, Dante makes clear, not every effort in the vernacular will be worthwhile. The mark of a true poet is one who can use the figures of speech and rhetorical ornament and then, when asked to do so, can strip his words (in the Italian, denudare) of such covering (vesta) to reveal the true meaning. Good poetry is as much a matter of technique as it is of inner value, as much an intellectual as an aesthetic

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practice. “My foremost friend” and I, Dante avers, know this. That friend was the great lyricist Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1255–1300), and in many ways La Vita Nuova is as much a record of that literary friendship as it is a testimony to the love for Beatrice. Cavalcanti, along with his older contemporary Guido Guinizelli (ca. 1230/40–1276), built out of the emerging forms of Italian lyric a new way of doing verse: a verse that addressed love as a habit of mind, an emotional condition, and a physical state. These poets were psychologists of love, concerned not simply with desire but with intelligence. Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, along with a clutch of other thirteenth-century Italian lyricists, brought to perfection what Dante would call, in the Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy, il dolce stil novo, the sweet new style. For by making love a matter of the inner life, by looking at the psychological condition and the philosophical implications of that condition, these “new poets” could move lyric poetry away from the aristocratic play of courtly love (the social world of the troubadours) and give it intellectual, moral, and even theological weight. Philosophically, the new style sought to understand the inner life of love. But socially, it sought to

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understand the civic life of love. The new poets were not courtly aristocrats but sons of the emerging urban elite. They were educated, often affluent, participants in the political and social dramas of the great Italian cities and communes. The ideals of this social world— public morality, virtuous moderation—could inform the poetry as well. These poets were as concerned with their loves as with their public lives: how they stood in the eyes of peers. So is Dante. What stands out so remarkably throughout La Vita Nuova is Dante’s own concern with what others will think of him. Developing the screen love, seeking Beatrice’s approval, the anxiety about publicly mourning her father’s death, the repeated remarks on how other readers view him and his poetry—all of these concerns mark Dante as a poet of civic life. Indeed, Beatrice lives as much on city streets and open congregations as she does in bedroom fantasies and dreams. Dante’s lyric poetry tries to adjudicate between private emotion and public response. He is fascinated by how we may “know” of love. The canzone “Ladies, you who can understand love” (XIX) brilliantly walks these lines. This is a poem about knowledge: he addresses those ladies who have intelleto—not really experience, but inner understanding, intuition, insight.

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And yet, the object of his love, Beatrice, is a body he describes in detail: every aspect of her form he catalogues. She is available for public view—but no man should dare linger in his gaze. Other poems walk the line between public and private. In fact, walking the line is more than just a figure of speech here. It is the governing image for the entire work. The road or pathway is a figure for life and understanding. Look, for example, at the poem in section VII, “O you who venture on Love’s flowery way.” Dante rides along this way of love (via d’amore), while in section IX he sets forth and meets Love looking like a pilgrim, “in mezzo de la via.” These images of travel would have been old and familiar to Dante’s readership. Phi losophers and poets of antiquity had long sought the true way of learning; life was a road for almost as long as there had been roads. The Consolation of Philosophy, by the fi fth-century philosopher Boethius, had developed the “way” (via) as an image of both philosophical argument and ethical action. Geograph ical direction became moral directive, and in La Vita Nuova Dante takes this inherited imagery one step further by locating his journey in the specific, recognizable streets of his native Florence. Every place in the book is real; but every place,

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too, is imbued with moral meaning or with spiritual sense. When Dante leaves city streets for private rooms, he does so still along the journey. In section XXIII, when he falls ill and lies tormented by dreams and fantasies, it is the language of the journey that propels him. “My mind started to stray”—errare is his word here, the root of modern English error but the legacy of Latin, too. To err, in Virgil, was to lose the straight path; in Augustine, it was to fall into sin (as a child, Augustine remembers in his Confessions, he was forced to memorize the errores of Aeneas—both his physical journeys and his failed moral choices). When Dante, here, imagines Beatrice lying dead, it is not just an illusion but “al erronea fantasia,” the erroneous fantasy. Throughout the poem that follows the prose of section XXIII, Dante wanders like some romance or epic hero lost: “My soul was fi lled with confusion” (literally, it went wandering, errando). And, toward the end of La Vita Nuova, with Beatrice truly dead and Dante deep in mourning, he looks out and sees the pilgrims traveling the road through Florence. Pilgrimage was one of the great medieval Christian activities: the journey to a shrine, a holy site, a saint’s tomb, to seek healing and forgiveness. But pilgrimage became the

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image for all journeys of the soul. Dante himself is on a pilgrimage to truth (as he would be in his later Divine Comedy). A pilgrim can be “any traveler who is outside his native area,” he writes in section XL. Why do these pilgrims not know of Beatrice’s death, Dante asks. But, of course, the real question is, how is Dante here a pilgrim; from what native area has he journeyed and to what goal? In the fi nal movements of La Vita Nuova, we see Dante leaving the familiar turf of township or of human tears to view a landscape, at the end, “beyond the sphere of the ninth heaven” (XLI). Dante imagines Beatrice in heaven, and he prays that he be granted life to “say of her what has never been said of any woman.” Beatrice may well behold the face of Him, qui est per omnia secula benedictus. But it is Dante who has set himself a goal as great. If La Vita Nuova asks the question, what is love, it offers many answers. Love is a condition of desire, an emotional state that gives rise to physical symptoms. But love is also a condition of language, a philosophical problem that requires thought and faith, a problem for expression as much as for feeling. The new poets of the thirteenth century made love a matter of the mind as much as of the heart. They opened up the possibility of love as something of a theological

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problem: a way of fi nding behind physical desire a pattern of Christian understanding. But they made love a matter of the city street as much as of the bedchamber. Dante remains preoccupied with what people will think, with how he looks, and with the social censure that may come of his desire. In the end, however, Florence’s roads become venues for religious pilgrims, and the goal of Dante’s own journey will be to reside with Beatrice among the stars. The themes of love and spirit, public and private, politics and piety will come together to drive Dante’s later journey in the Divine Comedy. Readers coming to La Vita Nuova from this later work will no doubt feel the resonances between the two. They will fi nd Beatrice in the Comedy, as well as many of the poets and personages mentioned or alluded to in the earlier work. But they will also fi nd shared images of life and literature. The Comedy begins where Dante had already been: midway along the road. The famous opening, “Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita” (In the middle of the road of our life), chimes with the phrasing in poem IX of La Vita Nuova, when Dante fi nds love “in mezzo di la via.” And, in a sense, the Divine Comedy ends where La Vita Nuova had started: with the book. But now, at the close of Paradiso, Dante sees love bound

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into not just the book of his own memory, but the book of all creation: Nel suo profundo vidi che s’interna, legato con amore in un volume, ció che per l’universo si squaderna . . . In its depth I saw going inside, bound by love into a single volume, that which is scattered as pages through the universe . . . As we make sense of Dante’s pages, we will fi nd them ordered in complex ways. La Vita Nuova may be a book of words and feelings, men and women, poetry and prose, but it is, too, a book of numbers. Nine seems to be everywhere, from his own age when seeing Beatrice, to the years that passed until he saw her again—at nine in the morning. He lies ill for nine days, and in the middle of the book he explains why the number nine has been so friendly (contanto amico) to Beatrice. In fact, the words for nine or ninth appear twenty-two times in La Vita Nuova. It is a special number (three times the Trinity, resonant with medieval cosmology). It even governs the construction of the work itself. Its thirty-one poems are arranged in a pattern: ten short poems; then one long canzone; then

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a group of four short poems, one long canzone, and four short poems; then one long canzone; then ten short poems. Schematically arranged, this looks like: 10 - 1 - 9 - 1 - 10. This kind of numerical organization, it is important to stress, was everywhere in medieval art and literature, philosophy and theology. The Divine Comedy itself is built out of the three-line terza rima, with three books, each containing thirty-three cantos (with an introductory canto to Inferno). It is important to stress, too, that this kind of architecture is more than a game. It lay at the heart of reading and writing. Numerological patterns were found in the Bible, in nature, and in the human body. They revealed, for students of their patterns, a divine hand in creation, an order to the world, a code behind confusion. But we should not be daunted by that code. Even medieval readers found that the passion and the poignancy of La Vita Nuova could transcend any attempts at cryptographic understanding. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), famous for his Italian fiction and his Latin scholarship, read deeply in La Vita Nuova for his own Life of Dante. And by the time the book was printed (for the fi rst time in 1576), it had had great influence on poets in Italy and perhaps even En-

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gland (Chaucer, himself a reader of the Divine Comedy, may have drawn, too, on La Vita Nuova’s idioms of pilgrimage and piety throughout his work). Generations found the work a repository of Dante at his most lyrical, as well as at his most theoretical and personal. But it was not until the nineteenth century that readers drew on it for sentiment (if not sentimentality). Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), fascinated by the legends of his namesake, translated poems from La Vita Nuova, and the dead Beatrice came to stand as an icon of Pre-Raphaelite desire. For T. S. Eliot, in his 1929 essay on Dante, La Vita Nuova still had the patina of this Victorian sentiment: for any reader, he advises, coming to the work without fi rst knowing the Divine Comedy, it will offer “nothing but Pre-Raphaelite quaintness.” Scholars since Eliot’s time have returned Dante and his early masterpiece to historical and critical prominence. Erich Auerbach and Charles Singleton, in the mid-twentieth century, excavated the methods of figural narration and interpretation that shaped the poet’s work. “Analogy and metaphor,” Singleton summarized in his field-defi ning Essay on The Vita Nuova, are its “central and controlling principle.” Building on these insights, contemporary Dantisti such as

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Robert Hollander, Giuseppe Mazzotta, and Robert Harrison have clarified relationships of secular and sacred, literal and figurative. They have shown how the work fits into the larger scheme of Dante’s theories of allegory, his political and social affi liations, and his relationships to medieval scholiasts and lyric forebears. For the twenty-fi rst century, Dante is a poet as vivid and as vigorous as ever. David Slavitt’s new translation of La Vita Nuova animates its verse and prose with a contemporary idiom and a directness far from the quaint archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites. A translator who has tackled everything from Martial and Boethius to Renaissance French lyricists, Slavitt gives a new urgency to Dante’s lines. In his rendering, for example, of the great canzone “Donna pietose e di novella etate” (XXIII), he blends a classical stateliness with an almost surreal, emotional tessitura: I saw in the empty corridors of my mind monstrous things spring up and disappear, as I struggled slowly forward. I could see disheveled women in front of me and behind, weeping and wailing, piteous to hear and oddly radiant in their misery.

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At moments such as this one, more evocative than literal, Slavitt shows how Dante’s poetry can still inspire. And in the prose, he can cut through the erudition of the commentary to give us conversation. In his handling, Beatrice “went about clad in humility without any show of pride in how people behaved toward her. Some said, ‘She is not a woman but an angel.’ Others put it a different way, remarking, ‘She is a wonder.’ ” Readers coming to La Vita Nuova may think it a wonder, too. Reclad in David Slavitt’s blend of formal, rhyming verse and direct prose, it should engage a new generation fascinated by the power of love, the subtleties of reading, and the trials of public life. This Vita Nuova may be a book of memory, but it is now a living testament for our time.

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F U RT H ER R E A DING

Erich Auerbach. Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Teodolinda Barolini. Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Mary Carruthers. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Robert Harrison. The Body of Beatrice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Robert Hollander. Dante: A Life in Works. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Rachel Jacoff, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Jerome Mazzaro. The Figure of Dante: An Essay on The Vita Nuova. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Giuseppe Mazzotta. Dante: Poet of the Desert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Alastair Minnis. Medieval Theory of Authorship. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Charles S. Singleton. An Essay on The Vita Nuova. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. 24

Text of

La Vita Nuova

I

In that part of the book of my memory before which very little is legible, there is a passage with the rubric that says: Incipit vita nova (A new life begins). Below the rubric I find written the words which it is my intention to collect in this little book—or, if not all of them, then at least their general meaning.

27

II

Nine times had the sun completed its yearly zodiacal journey returning to almost the same point, when there fi rst appeared before my eyes the glorious lady of my thoughts, who was called Beatrice [giver of blessings] even by many who did not know her name. She had passed enough time on earth for the fi xed stars in the heavens to have shifted eastward a twelfth of a degree.* When I fi rst saw her, then, she was nearly nine, and I was almost ten. She appeared dressed in the color of nobility, a subdued crimson, and was belted and trimmed in a proper style for one of her young years. At that instant, I can truthfully say that my animal spirit in the deep chamber of my heart began to tremble, and my fluttering pulses declared: “Behold, a god stronger than I am is coming and will rule me.” At that same moment, the vital spirit that resides in the lofty cham* The stars were thought to move one degree a century.

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bers of the skull to which all the nerves report spoke in its astonishment to my eyes, saying: “Now has your bliss appeared.” At this point, the natural spirit that dwells in the organ that regulates digestion* tearfully declared: “Alas, I shall be gravely affected from now on.” It was from that moment that Love tyrannized my soul which in no time had wedded itself to him, and he began to show such arrogance and exercise such power that I could not help but exert myself to the utmost to satisfy his slightest whim. Frequently he ordered me merely to go and stare at my young angel, and during my boyhood years I devoted much time to looking for her and at her. The more I looked, the more she seemed praiseworthy in her deportment, so that it now seems that Homer’s words apply perfectly to her: “She seemed less like the daughter of a mortal than of a god.”† By a bold stratagem of Love, her image was always with me, but it was of such inspiring nobility that the advice of reason that could have been a counterweight could fi nd no ground for objection and it concurred entirely.

* The liver. † Iliad XXIV, 258.

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But the passions and behavior of a ten-year-old are going to sound a lot like a children’s story, and I shall therefore drop the subject. Instead, I shall omit some of the detail of the text of that book and skip ahead to words that are inscribed in my memory under more important headings.

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III

Nine more years passed from that fi rst encounter with that noble girl, when I happened to see her again. Wearing a lily-white gown, she was walking between two gentlewomen, both of whom were older than she. As she proceeded down the street on which I was standing—in great fear—she greeted me with ineffable courtesy (which is now rewarded in the eternal life), and it seemed to me that I was experiencing every facet of perfect bliss. The hour of this great event was the ninth of the day,* and I was so intoxicated with delight at hearing her words that I withdrew at once and went to my room to contemplate this most courteous lady. Thinking of her, I dozed off and had a marvelous dream or a strange vision: I beheld in my room a cloud of a fiery red within which I could discern the figure of a man of

* Three in the afternoon is the ninth canonical hour, or nones.

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terrifying aspect. He seemed, nevertheless, to be paradoxically quite joyful, himself. He said many things, only a few of which I caught, but I did understand it when he announced, “I am your master.” In his arms he held a sleeping woman, naked except for a bloodred cloth in which she was draped. Staring at her closely, I recognized her as the lady who had deigned to greet me the day before. I thought the man held in one hand something ablaze and I heard—or thought I heard—him say, “Behold, your heart!” He had stood there for a while before he roused the sleeping woman and by an exercise of mental powers caused her to eat the object that was burning in his hand. Hesitantly, she did so, and soon after that his joy changed to the bitterest weeping. As he wept, the woman took shelter in his arms and I then thought he arose toward the sky, holding her. This caused me such agony that I could not sleep anymore. I awoke and began to think. The vision had appeared to me at the fourth hour of the night, which meant that it was the fi rst hour of the last nine of nighttime. As I pondered what it might have meant, I decided to consult some famous poets of the time and, inasmuch as I had already discovered in myself a talent for setting words into verse, I resolved to make a sonnet in

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which I could greet all devotees of Love and ask them to evaluate my vision. I wrote to them about what I had seen in my slumber, and I wrote this sonnet, which begins, “To anyone whose heart and soul have been smitten”: To anyone whose heart and soul have been smitten and to whom these presents come (so that they agree and confi rm that they, too, suffer what happened to me and therefore can vouch for the truth of what I have written), Greetings—in Love’s name, whose tyranny oppresses us all. It was a third of the way through the night, the hour when myriad stars twinkle their light when Love in his awesomeness appeared to me. In a spirit that seemed quite cheerful, Love held in his hand my heart, and in his arms my lady, asleep, wrapped in a blanket. Gently, he woke her and fed her my burning heart. You can understand

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how frightened she was as she ate it. I saw him weep, as he disappeared, grief-stricken and unmanned. This sonnet is divided into two parts; in the fi rst part I send greetings and request an answer; in the second, I make clear what it is that has to be replied to. I received answers from many, and their opinions varied. One of those who answered was the man I think of as the foremost of my friends,* who wrote the sonnet that begins, “In my opinion, you saw all the worth . . .” That was basically the beginning of the friendship between us—when he learned that I was the one who had sent him the sonnet. Nobody understood the true meaning of the dream then, but now it is perfectly clear even to the simplest person.

* Guido Cavalcanti, who had been Dante’s mentor. Within a decade, Dante played a part in the exile of Cavalcanti from Florence, and later, after his death, Dante puts him in The Inferno in the sixth circle, where heretics are punished.

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IV

After I had had that vision, my natural spirit was less well able to function because my soul was entirely occupied by thoughts of that noblest of ladies. I wasted away and became so weak and frail that the sight of me grieved many of my friends. Many people were curious, and some were even envious, but they all wanted to discover what I wanted to conceal. I understood why they were being so inquisitive, and by the will of Love (who was directing me in consultation with reason) I told them that it was Love who had overwhelmed me—because that was obvious to anyone, anyway. But then when they asked me with whom I was in love, I only smiled vaguely and said not a word.

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V

It happened one day that the glorious lady was seated where words praising the Queen of Glory were being chanted, and I happened to be positioned in a spot from which I could look at her without seeming to do so. In my line of sight was a very good-looking woman who was frequently gazing at me, surprised by my staring which she supposed was directed at her. People noticed. As I left the church, I heard someone behind me ask, “Did you see how that lady is destroying the young man’s constitution?” And then, when the speaker mentioned the woman’s name, I realized that he meant the woman who had been between Beatrice and me. I was amused and also comforted because this demonstrated that my secret had not become public knowledge because of my gazing. Immediately it occurred to me that I could take advantage of this inaccurate guess by making that gentlewoman a screen behind which I could conceal the truth.

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Using her, I could hide my real feelings, and I therefore began to send her such demonstrations of affection that most of the gossips in the town were convinced that they had winkled out what I had been trying to keep to myself. In the interests of verisimilitude, I even dedicated a few little verses to her—which it is not my intention to set down here except insofar as they involve the most gentle and sweet Beatrice. I shall omit them all, but may make some mention of those that seem really to be in praise of her.

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VI

In that period, when the lady was the screen concealing my great love, I felt the impulse to set down Beatrice’s name, accompanied by the names of many others—including that convenient gentlewoman with whom my name had been linked. I wrote down the names of the sixty most beautiful women in the city in which the Lord of heaven had put Beatrice, and I composed a piece in the form of a serventes,* which I shall not transcribe here. I would not mention it at all except for an extremely curious thing that happened while I was writing it: among all those names, the only place that Beatrice’s name would fit gracefully was the ninth.

* A Provençal form, generally used in satire.

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VII

That convenient gentlewoman had to leave the city and undertake a long journey, and I was dismayed at the loss of my “beard,” more upset than I would have believed. It crossed my mind that I would be expected to seem sad, and that if I didn’t express this somehow, people might be suspicious and realize that I had been feigning. I decided to lament in a sonnet, which I set down here because my real love was the prompting of certain passages in the poem, as careful readers will see. It was then that I wrote the sonnet that begins, “O you who venture on Love’s flowery way.” [A doubled sonnet, i. e., one with interpolations of shorter lines.] O you who venture on Love’s flowery way, look around yourselves, I pray and see if any suffer as I do; I only beg to have my say and once you’ve heard my gloomy roundelay you’ll be my judge and tell me if it’s true

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that in my house torment has come to stay. Surely, I hadn’t earned Love’s great display of interest in me. If only for a day my life was so sweet that you would hear men ask how they had not deserved such joys and comforts, too. Cock of the walk I was, but now no more. Love having turned away from me, I fi nd myself reduced, undone, and to my mind pride turns stranger. I become a poor unfortunate beggar, neither halt nor blind but pitiable still and longing for a sympathy that would shame me—so I grind my teeth and smile, although my heart is sore. This sonnet has two main parts. In the fi rst, my purpose is to summon the devotees of love in the words of Jeremiah,* “All you that pass on the road, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow,” and beg them to listen to me. In the second, I describe the position in which Love had put me, which is quite different from that at the end of the sonnet. And I tell what I have lost. * Lamentations 1:12.

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VIII

Soon after the departure of that woman, it was the pleasure of the Lord of the Angels to call to his glory a young woman of most pleasing appearance who had been a very charming citizen of our town. I saw her body lying lifeless and around her many women who were lamenting her loss most feelingly. I recalled that I had seen her in the company of my most gentle lady, and I felt tears well up in my eyes too. In fact, as I was weeping, I was prompted to write a poem about her death in gratitude for having seen her at times with my lady. I alluded to this in the last part of the poem, as astute readers will doubtless notice. And I wrote these two sonnets, one of them beginning “Weep, you lovers, weep,” and the other “O cruel Death.” Weep, you lovers, weep, for Love is weeping, distraught at the tears of the sorry women whose grief he is powerless to assuage or provide relief,

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now that Death has taken her into his keeping with his rough hands that hold her as she’s sleeping. Oh, what heartlessness—to be the thief of what is nearly as precious as the chief pride of the lady in this untimely reaping. Hear what respect and reverence that Love paid to her as he shed his hot tears of regret over the lovely corpse. Then, looking high over his head to that fi xed point in the sky in which the noble soul was already set, he groaned his salute to that ever-cheerful maid. This fi rst sonnet is divided into three parts, in the fi rst of which I summon and arouse Love’s devotees to weep, saying that their master weeps and asking, on that account, that they hear me out. In the second, I explain the cause. In the third, I speak of the kind of honor that Love paid the departed lady. O cruel Death, pity’s implacable foe, the ancient mother of woe and also the hanging judge before whom we

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must appear to learn what our sentences will be, you have burdened me with an insupportable grief that lays me low, and my complaints are so voluble as to slow my tired tongue’s invective, intended to show your culpability so that all men may know your wickedness, although you are, I’m sure, accustomed to calumny. In this world you have severed all connection from courtesy and the praise of womankind. You seem to be quite blind to beauty, virtue, and feminine perfection. I need not write her name here, especially when her excellence alone will identify her clearly enough: those who, by and by, fail to reach heaven will never see her again. This sonnet is divided into four parts, in the fi rst of which I address Death in appropriate terms. In the second, I state the reason for my reproaches. In the third, I revile it, and in the fourth, I refer to an unknown woman, although clearly I have a par ticu lar person in mind.

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IX

A few days after the death of that young woman, I had to leave the city and travel in the direction that my smokescreen lady had traveled (although not quite so far down that road). I had company on the way, but I was annoyed nonetheless to have to leave the girl of my bliss behind me, and for that reason I sighed and groaned from time to time, but that did nothing to relieve the misery in my heart. It was then that my dear master, who ruled me through the power of my affection for that noble lady, appeared before my mind’s eye—in the form of a simply clad pilgrim. He seemed dismayed and looked down at the ground except when he turned his eyes from time to time toward a beautiful, clear river that ran alongside the road. I fancied that he was calling to me, saying, “I have come from that woman who has served as your screen and I know that she is unlikely to return for a good while. Therefore, I am transferring the pretense of your infatuation to another woman who will serve as a shield,

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in the way that the first one did.” And he gave me her name. “Still, if you reveal anything of these words I have spoken to you, do so in such a way as to prevent them from discerning that these are pretended loves, or, indeed, that they have been transferred from the first to the second.” Having delivered his message, he vanished instantly and completely from my imagination, although he was still deeply embodied within me. My appearance was transformed and, as I rode along, I was lost in thought—and still sighing. The following day, I decided to write a sonnet about the event, which begins, “Trotting along on the road.” Trotting along on the road the other day on a trip I didn’t even want to make, I encountered Love. There could be no mistake. He was dressed in a pilgrim’s habit, and I must say he seemed to me dejected, a display of utter wretchedness, absolute heartache, as he stared at the ground, reluctant to partake in any conversation along the way. But seeing me, he called to me by name and said, “I’ve come from a distance where your heart

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has lodged, at my direction. But now I hand it back to you and give it a new command.” He whispered a name. I never saw him depart. He simply vanished—which isn’t quite the same. The sonnet has three parts: in the fi rst I describe how I found Love and how he seemed to me; in the second I recount what he said to me, but without revealing my secret; and in the third, I say how he abruptly and mysteriously disappeared.

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X

After my return, I started paying attention to that woman whom my master had named on the road, and, to make a longish story short, I made so much of her that the gossip about her and me exceeded the bounds of acceptability. For that reason, because of all the chatter that seemed to hold me up as a model of vice, when the noble lady who was the queen of virtue and the enemy of every vice encountered me in some thoroughfare, she refused me that greeting from which all my happiness arose. To digress for only a little bit, I want to explain more fully what effect her greeting had on me through its great and virtuous power.

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XI

Whenever she appeared anywhere, my expectation of a word or two from her was such that I had no enemies left in the world. Instead, I was transported by a warm feeling of benevolence and charity so that I forgave anyone who had ever given me offense. And if anyone had asked me any question about anything at all, my reply would have been simply, “Love!” which I would have delivered with a modest and all but beatific smile. At such times as she was about to greet me, a spirit of love drove out all other sensations, and would banish the feeble spirits of my eyes, saying to them, “Go and honor your lady!” and that love blinded me to all else. Anyone who wanted to see what Love looked like could satisfy his curiosity by looking into my eyes that, under the trembling lids, shone brightly. Then, when she did actually say hello to me, not only was Love no kind of intermediary but by a surfeit of

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happiness on my part, he came into control of all of me, and I moved like some kind of heavy, inert mass. It wasn’t only that my bliss came from her words of greeting then, but it often far surpassed my poor capacities for happiness.

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XII

Now, to return to my subject: After the object of my desire was denied to me, I was so grief stricken that I withdrew from all company and took myself to some lonely spot in which I could bathe the ground with my most bitter tears. After my weeping had exhausted itself, I shut myself in my room where I could lament without being overheard. There, I called for mercy from the lady of courtesy and said, “Love, come to the aid of your servant!” I then fell asleep in tears like a little boy who has been beaten. And halfway through my slumber, it happened that I fancied that there was a young man sitting beside me, clad in white garments and seemingly lost in thought. He looked at me as I lay there and, after gazing for a time, he sighed and, as I thought, called to me. He spoke these words: “My son, it is time to put an end to our pretending.” It seemed to me that I knew him, for he was addressing me in a way that felt familiar, as if he had done this often in the past during my slumbers. I looked at him

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more carefully and realized that he had been weeping compassionately. He also appeared to be waiting for some word from me. Taking my cue from this, I spoke to him in these words: “Lord of nobility, why do you weep?” He replied (in Latin), “I am the fi xed center of a circle from which all points of the circumference are equidistant. But you are not similarly fi rm.” I tried to understand this comment, which seemed, to say the least, obscure and I asked him, “Master, what does that mean?” He replied, speaking now in Italian, “Do not ask for more than you can bear to hear.” I told him about how I felt deprived of the usual greeting and I asked him the reason. His answer was: “Our Beatrice heard from certain people who were talking about you that the lady I named to you on the road was now the object of your attention— which she found vexatious. And not to cause vexation in you, she did not deign to greet you. Now, she knows your secret and has for a long time, and what I want is for you to write a poem in which you acknowledge my power over you through her, and in which you say that you were hers from the fi rst instant and have been hers ever since you were a young boy. You can, in the poem, summon me as a witness who knows the truth and say that you beg me to speak to her on the

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subject. Thus she will perceive your wishes and will be able to give their true value to the unreliable gossip of those whom you have deceived. Write the piece, moreover, in such a way that the words themselves are an intermediary and that you are not addressing her directly, which would not be proper. Finally, do not send the poem without me anywhere that she could hear it. Instead, have it set to music, in which I may be found whenever it turns out to be helpful.” Having spoken those words, he vanished and I awoke. Remembering this, I was struck by the fact that this vision had appeared to me in the ninth hour of the day. Before I left my bedchamber, I decided to write a poem in the form of a ballad, in which I would carry out my master’s command. And then I wrote this, which begins, “Ballad, I want you to make all possible haste.” Ballad, I want you to make all possible haste to Love and deliver him where my lady may be found. My deep apology that way, my master can deliver, for I am disgraced. Hurry, ballad. Move your delicate feet with which you know how to dance your clever way into people’s hearts to persuade.

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But with Love’s help, whatever resistance you meet or adverse circumstance you’ll overcome together. The mess I’ve made in my lady’s life is such that I am afraid of the chilly welcome you would probably get alone, but with Love to aid you and abet, there’s hope, which is not entirely misplaced. With the sweetest music you’re able to contrive with Love strumming along, ask for my lady’s pity; let her know that I am the most woeful man alive; and with your charming song say how my grief and love have laid me low. Love, who will be with you, can swear it’s so. You are there to explain if not to excuse my conduct. The other lady was merely a ruse; her image in my heart was never erased. Tell her his whole soul is devoted to her most sedulous ser vice, and that he was yours from the fi rst and never strayed. If she suspects that what you say is untrue, or seems in any way ner vous, tell her to ask Love if I have obeyed

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his every command for her sake, and that I have prayed for forgiveness for causing annoyance. If she should send me word by messenger, I would cheerfully end my life—for which I would have lost all taste. Tell Love, who is the key to all compassion, that, before he takes his leave, he may learn how best to persuade and plead my case to her in the most appropriate fashion. The lilt of your notes may weave a spell or at least create the mood he’ll need so that she will listen to him and even heed his recommendation. Maybe she will smile. And you, my pretty ballad, you, meanwhile, may go forth into the world to be embraced. The ballad is divided into three parts. In the fi rst I tell it where to go and whose company to seek, and I try to give it confidence. In the second, I tell it what message to deliver. And in the third, I commend it to Fortune, hoping that it may succeed in the world. Now, it may be that some will criticize me on the ground that it isn’t clear whom I am addressing in the

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second person—because the ballad I speak to is identical with the words on the page. I shall clear this up later on, in an even more difficult passage of this little book. After he has read that, my critic, I am confident, will, when he looks back, understand the ballad quite clearly.

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XIII

After this vision, and after I had spoken the words that Love had commanded me to speak, various thoughts began to assail me and try me, each of them enormously powerful. Among these, there were four that most disturbed my peace of mind. One of them was that Love’s domination is good because it distracts a person’s mind from everything that is base. The second was that Love’s domination is not good, because the more loyal his follower is to him, the more burdensome and sorrowful experiences he must undergo. The third was that the name of Love is so agreeable to the ear that it is impossible for a person’s actions to be other than agreeable—inasmuch as names are in accordance with the things they describe. As it is written, “Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.”* And the fourth was that the lady for whose sake Love is binding you in this way is not like other women and * Names are the consequences of things.

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will not easily change her affections. Each of these thoughts attacked me so violently that I was like a man who cannot decide which path to take on his journey. I tried to fi nd some direction that was common to them all and would bring them into agreement, but that was a road I did not wish to take. That would be to call upon and put myself in the care of Pity. It was while I was in this condition that I wrote the following sonnet, which begins “It is of Love.” It is of Love that all my thoughts now speak, but they are in such discord that I cannot order them or even determine what I think. One says to me that I should seek his tutelage, while another one’s critique is that Love is a kind of madness—but is it? Is it not sweet? Have I forgot already its lovely raptures? My mind is weak and cannot choose. I don’t know what to say in my confusion. I try to reconcile these notions that to my mind bring such strife but I cannot. It’s a Gordian knot no knife can cut through, and, although it is not my style, I call upon lady Pity to smooth my way.

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This sonnet can be divided into four parts. In the fi rst I declare that all my thoughts are of Love; in the second, I tell how they differ; in the third I say in what way they seem to agree; and in the fourth, I say that, wanting to speak of love, I cannot rely on my thoughts for material but must appeal to my enemy, Pity, upon whom I call in a less than respectful way, referring to her sarcastically as “lady.”

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XIV

After that skirmish of confl icting thoughts, it happened that the most noble lady came to a place where a number of gentlewomen were gathered. A friend of mine brought me there, thinking to give me pleasure by taking me where so many attractive women were displaying their beauty. I was unaware of his real reason but I went along, trusting him as I would trust a person who had brought me back from the brink of death. I asked him, “Why have we come to see these ladies?” And he answered, “To make sure that they are properly attended.” They were all there in the company of a gentlewoman who had been married that day, and they were accompanying her, as custom directed, as she sat down for the fi rst time at the dinner table of her bridegroom. Mostly to please my friend, I decided to stay and pay homage to these women of the party. But almost immediately, I felt a remarkable tremor which began on the left side of my chest and spread throughout my body. I propped

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myself against a fresco that ran all around the house. I was afraid that the others would notice my trembling. I looked about me and I saw, among these women, the most noble Beatrice. My senses were so overcome by the force of Love, fi nding himself in such propinquity to my lady, that only my sight seemed still to work. And it was as if they weren’t even my eyes anymore but that Love had taken over their use in order to get a good view of my splendid lady. I was in an odd, altered state, so that I found myself feeling sorry for my senses, which were complaining, “If that fellow had not driven us out, as if by lightning, we would be able to gaze upon her just as the others in the room are doing.” Many of the women, noticing my changed state, began to wonder, and in their talk they made fun of me to my noble lady. My friend, puzzled by all this, took my hand, led me out of their sight, and asked what was wrong with me. After a short time during which I recovered myself and my senses were restored to me, I answered him, saying, “I was at the very precipice of the life, beyond which one cannot pass with the expectation of coming back.” I excused myself and returned hurriedly to my room where, weeping and ashamed, I told myself over and over, “If that lady knew what

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distress I was in, she would not mock me as she did, but rather she would pity me.” And with the tears running down my face, I decided to write a poem in which I would declare the reason for the change that had come over me. And I would tell her that I realized no one knew the cause of my distress—because, if people did, they would feel pity for me. And I resolved to write it in the hope that it might eventually reach her ears. So I wrote this sonnet, which begins, “Along with the others.” Along with the others, you make mock of me and giggle at how I look and how I behave, agreeing with them that I am a fool or a knave, but it is your beauty that brings on stupidity and speechlessness to possess me. If you could see into my heart, you might condescend to save and deliver me, for near you, Love is brave, usurps my wits, and governs most cruelly. It is he who from my eyes gazes at you, while I become an inert object, a tower from which he can peer—but my heart is not stone

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and I am aware of myself and of you and groan in helplessness, for he has me in his power and there’s nothing that my tortured spirits can do. This sonnet, I think, does not require any explication, the meaning of the thing being quite clear from the background, which I have already given. There are perhaps some knotty phrases, such as the one where I say that Love usurps my wits (or senses) but that my sense of sight remains alive, although its organs, my eyes, are no longer entirely mine. But this is impossible to explain to anyone who has never been in love, whereas those who have been in Love’s thrall will understand instantly and completely. Any clarification I make, then, would be either futile or superfluous.

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XV

After this peculiar experience, a thought came to me and would not let me go. It said to me, “Since you wind up looking ridiculous when you are near that lady, why do you persist in trying to see her? If she asked you this question, how would you answer— assuming that your wits were not entirely scattered by her presence?” And to answer this thought, another one arose that said, “If you hadn’t lost your faculties and were still able to speak, you could tell her that as soon as an image of her wonderful beauty comes into your mind, you feel a desire to see her that is so strong that it destroys your memory of past sufferings. When that happens, there is no objection you can make to seeing her, but only your strong desire.” I was stirred by that thought, enough to be prompted to write a poem apologizing for my earlier reproach and also mentioning what happens to me when I am near her. This is the sonnet that begins, “Obstacles in your presence.”

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Obstacles in your presence should disappear but whenever I am near you, I hear Love say, “Flee! Flee for your life. Death is near.” My face turns either purple or ashen gray. I try not to collapse. I feel quite queer; my knees tremble; my body starts to sway. I’m afraid of falling. Intuiting my fear, the stones cry out, “Let him die! Let him pass away!” Should somebody see me in that woeful state, he’d be a perfect villain not to try to comfort me and help me catch my breath out of simple compassion. But you berate and mock me. I am deeply wounded by your scorn—enough to desire my own death. The sonnet is divided into two parts. In the fi rst, I explain why I do not hesitate to seek the company of that lady; and in the second, I say what happens to me when I am near her. This second part makes five points. In the fi rst I recount what Love counsels my reason when I am near her; in the second I say what

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my condition is that can be read in my face; in the third, my self-confidence deserts me; in the fourth, I say that only a wicked person would fail to help someone in such a crisis; and in the last, I tell why people should have pity.

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XVI

After I’d written that, I realized that there was more to say, and I was prompted to write another in which I could say four things I hadn’t yet said. The fi rst was that I was often troubled by the thought of the state to which Love had reduced me. The second was that Love often assailed me so violently that nothing remained alive in me but the thought of that lady. The third was that when I saw her, Love made me go quite pale, even though I had supposed that seeing her would protect me from this kind of distress, altogether forgetting what had happened to me in her presence before. The fourth was that the sight of her not only failed to protect me but ruined the little life that remained in me. So I wrote this sonnet, which begins, “Often I think.” Often I think of how I can be undone by Love, and I feel pity for all men in whom this derangement happens. Everyone?

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Or only in me? It is appalling when Love transports me, leaving me with none of my faculties intact—like a denizen of some asylum, madman or simpleton, who repeats a single phrase, again and again. It is only of you I can think. I try to fight to recover myself and I come to you for aid, hoping for solace, hoping my mind may improve. But the instant that I raise my eyes, the sight of you increases my pain, I am afraid, and again my soul flees, routed by Love.

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XVII

After three sonnets addressed to my lady, which pretty well covered my condition, I expected to be silent. What more was there to say, after all? I had bared my soul, even though I took care not to address her anymore. I was compelled, therefore, to take up a new subject, perhaps nobler than the previous one. Because this new subject is pleasant to discuss, I shall explain it as well and as briefly as I can.

68

XVIII

From my altered appearance, people had been able to infer the secret of my heart, and certain women who got together for the pleasure of one another’s company were aware of my affections and were discussing them among themselves. Each of them had been present at one or another of my defeats. I passed by their group one day, as if guided by Fortune, and one of them called out to me—a woman of charming speech whom I could not simply ignore. I approached, made sure that my lady was not among them, and then, taking heart, I asked how I could be of ser vice to them. There were a good number of them, some of whom were laughing together. Some were chatting. Others stared at me, apparently wondering what I might say. One woman turned to me, called me by name, and spoke to me, “What is the point of loving this lady if you cannot endure to be in her presence? Tell us, because we fi nd it most curious. Such a love is, to say the least, a novelty.” The laughter had subsided and now

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they were waiting to hear what my answer would be. I said, “Ladies, the goal of my love was once to receive a greeting from that lady—I think you know whom I mean—and that was the only bliss I could imagine and the object of all my desires. But it has pleased her to deny me this, and ever since then my master, Love, has redirected me toward something that cannot fail me. And for this I thank him.” Hearing this, the women began to murmur to one another, and as sometimes we can see falling rain mixing with pretty snowflakes, I thought I heard, mixing in with their words, occasional sighs. They spoke together for a time and then the fi rst woman, the one who had addressed me by name, said, “We beg you to tell us what new object you now have in mind. What could it be?” I answered her saying, “It is in those words that praise my lady.” To this the gentlewoman then answered, “If what you just told us were the truth, then those words you have written describing your condition must have had an ulterior motive, no?” I was ashamed of myself, because there was a truth in what she’d said, and I took my leave of these ladies as quickly as possible, telling myself, “Since there is so much bliss in words that praise my lady, why have I ever written in any other way?” At that moment, I

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resolved that all my poetry would be in praise of this most gracious lady. But then I began to worry whether my talents were equal to the task of this praise and whether this theme might not be too lofty for me. For several days, then, I didn’t dare to begin and was torn between the desire to write and the fear of doing so.

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XIX

What happened was that I was walking down a road beside a very clear stream and I felt the urge to write something. But how to go about it? It didn’t seem right for me to speak about her—unless I included her among a larger group of women, and not just any women but only those of noble character. Or why limit myself to women? I felt the words beginning to form themselves, “Ladies, you who can understand love.” And I stored these words in my memory, resolved to use them as my opening line. Later, after I returned to town, I brooded for several days, and I began a canzone that started with those words and is orga nized in a manner that I shall describe below. Ladies, you who can understand love, let me speak to you of my lady. I cannot praise her highly enough, but poems can be ways of bringing relief to a sorely distracted mind.

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When I consider her worth and quality, Love lulls me into such a pleasant daze that I am dumbfounded. Could I but blurt one phrase, anyone who heard my words would fi nd himself also in love. (Love may be blind but isn’t deaf.) I must, therefore, take good care to show some circumspection in what I dare say. Sweet ladies, I rely on your kind indulgence, upon which I must here depend as if I spoke to a dear and intimate friend. An angel speaks to the Mind of God to report that there is a marvel on earth both strange and rare whose actions arise from a radiant soul down there, the glow of which illuminates the sky even to paradise’s heights. In short, our only lack in heaven is her fair and splendid presence. All the saints declare that the Lord must take some action to rectify this defect promptly. Fortunately, I can announce that Pity speaks to God as well:

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His judgment is that the lady ought to dwell on earth for a while longer: “It is my will that he say to the souls in hell that this was the vision he had of hope of heaven’s bliss.” If they call out for my lady in heaven, then you who wish to appear as gentlewomen should learn from her example and each of you in your turn should follow in her footsteps as well as you can and attend upon her as I have tried to do, despite the difficulties, for one may discern how Love casts a chill into base hearts that burn as ice does. In an ordinary man the mind goes blank and all his vital élan vanishes. He is either ennobled by the encounter or else he is likely to sicken and die, humbled and shamed—although it is God’s plan than none whom she has engaged in conversation by virtue of her virtue can suffer damnation. Love asks himself, how can a mortal be at once so beautiful and so pure. I know

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of none like her. It is almost as though the Lord had decided that he would create in her an ornament for the world, a novelty whose outward features would dazzle and serve to show her inner perfection. Nature alone can’t go to any such heights—as if her appearance were the touchstone of a beauty that can stir and refi ne the hearts of any who may pass her by in the street. This singular lady has the power to be the innocent ravisher of all men’s hearts, a quality that defies us all so that we are forced to avert our eyes. Canzone, I know that you will journey far, speaking to women when I send you on your way and into the world. When you have gone, because you are my offspring, allow me to say what your duties and my purposes are: to ask of any, hither, thither, or yon, to help you fi nd the lady, that paragon whose praises are in you on proud display. Avoid all crude and vulgar people, for they

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are a waste of your time. Gentle ladies and men will tell you where Love is, and he again will direct your feet to fi nd her the fastest way. Speak well of me to Love. Hold your head high and convey to him my respects. I pray you, try. So that this canzone may be clearly understood, let me divide it more completely than I did the preceding poems. There are three parts of it: the fi rst is the preamble; the second is the main subject; the third is kind of servant to the fi rst two. The initial section is, itself, in four parts: I speak of my lady and say why I wish to do so; I describe the condition in which I fi nd myself when I think of her and what I might say if I had the courage; I say how I would speak of her if I were not rendered mute by my cowardice; and in the fourth part I say who my audience is and why I address them. Then, in the second of the large parts of the poem, I state what is understood of her in heaven and on earth, referring both to the nobility of her soul and the perfection of her body. Finally, I add the last stanza in which I say what I want the canzone to do—but this is easy enough to understand and does not require any dissection. There may be some who,

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even with this map, are unable to follow the poem’s thought, but I will not be at all sorry if they put the poem aside. I am addressing only a select group and I shouldn’t want its meaning spread to too many people or those not fit to receive it.

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XX

That canzone of mine became widely known among my fellow townsmen, and when a friend of mine read it, he felt the desire to ask me what Love is, perhaps because the words I had used gave him expectations that I had not been able to satisfy. I brooded about this and decided that it might be a good thing to oblige him and to write something about Love. I resolved to write such a piece and try to explain Love with greater clarity. This impulse resulted in the sonnet that begins, “Love and the noble heart.” Love and the noble heart? But there is no difference between them. One can never fi nd the one without the other. The sage* says so.

* Guido Guinizelli, who, like Cavalcanti, was a leader of the Sweet New Style (Dolce Stil Novo), the movement that defi ned Dante’s poetic apprenticeship.

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They are like a thought arising from a mind, parts of the same whole. Love sets aglow that heart in which he resides or is enshrined. He may seem to doze but he can go suddenly active again when he is inclined. When beauty appears, for instance, in a wise and graceful woman, then a spark of desire can awaken Love so that he takes command of the heart and soul, an autocrat who defies all constraints. There is no authority higher. And in women, too, this happens, I understand. This sonnet is divided into two parts. In the fi rst, I speak of Love as a potentiality; in the second I speak of how that potentiality may be changed into activity.

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XXI

After I had written about Love in the verses above, I felt an urge to write a poem of praise of that noble lady in which I might show how this Love had been awakened by her, and not only is he awakened where he lay sleeping, but even where he doesn’t normally reside, where she makes him appear by the power of her miracles. So I wrote this sonnet which begins, “In her eyes.” In her eyes Love is living, and through him whatever she may glance at is perforce transformed, ennobled. And every man, of course, trembles at her greeting. His eyes swim and he grows faint considering the grim thought of his unworthiness. Remorse possesses his heart. My case is even worse. (Help me, ladies.) My chances, I know, are slim.

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And yet? One hears her speak and is refi ned like gold with all one’s base impurities melting away. A word, or even a smile, the memory of which lasts only a while, makes for strange and miraculous changes, and these endure forever in heart and soul and mind.

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XXII

Not many days after I’d written that, it pleased the Lord who did not refuse to take death upon himself, to take to himself the man who had begotten the marvelous Beatrice. Death is painful to friends who are left behind, and there is no closer friendship than that which obtains between a good father and a good child. That lady was good in the highest degree, and her father, as many rightly believed, was also extremely good. It only stood to reason, then, that the lady was fi lled with the bitterest grief. It was the custom in our city for women to join with women and men to join with men on such sad occasions to console one another. Many women came to be with Beatrice, who was weeping sorrowfully. And as they were returning from her house, I overheard some of them talking about how deeply she was grieving. One phrase, in particu lar, floated to my ears: “She is crying so heartbrokenly that anyone see-

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ing her would die of pity.” They passed on down the street, leaving me behind them, and now my face, too, was wet with tears. I tried to conceal this by putting my hands up in front of my eyes, and I would have hidden away somewhere, except that I was hoping to hear more about her from other women on their way home from having visited her. So I stayed where I was, and more women passed, chatting among themselves. I heard one say, “Who among us can ever be happy again, having heard that young woman speak so feelingly?” And then another group passed by, one of whom remarked, “Look at this man here, weeping exactly as if he had been to visit her along with us!” Another said, “He does not seem to be himself. What has overcome him?” There were more observations I could catch, mostly about her but also a few about me. And it was then that I decided to write a poem in which I would include what I had heard these women saying. I thought for an instant of questioning them, but that seemed a violation of good manners. I had heard enough, however, so that I could write the poem, almost as if they had talked to me about their experience. In fact, I wrote two sonnets, in the fi rst of which I ask the questions

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I did not have the temerity actually to put to them. And in the second, I give their replies, using what I had heard them say—as if they had said it to me. The fi rst begins, “You who appear so sad and stricken.” And the second starts, “Are you the young man whom we have spoken to.” You who appear so sad and stricken, where do you come from, what has happened to you? Your faces are streaked with tears, your handkerchiefs’ delicate lace is damp from dabbing your eyes. Is our lady in there also weeping? My fear is that her fair features are contorted and love’s embrace is turned to the grimace of grieving, although her grace is even greater bedecked with sorrow and care. If you do come from her and her profound dejection, stay with me, pause if you would, and tell me of every word she said, each slight gesture, that I may sit upon the ground and weep for her—when I have understood

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and shared what you felt when she was in your sight. The sonnet is in two parts, in the fi rst of which I ask the women if they are coming from my lady, and in the second of which I ask them to speak to me about her. And here is the other sonnet that I mentioned previously: Are you the young man whom we have spoken to about our lady? Your voice resembles his, but your haggard face, contorted as it is, seems altogether different, full of new and bitter grief such as to evoke for you in anyone’s heart great pity. Is it amiss for us to think that it is Beatrice for whom you mourn, as we suppose you do? We are the ones who should be the mourners in chief, beyond all solace, beyond all consolation, for we have been with her and we have seen her grief, and felt altogether helpless. Her desolation

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was unbearable for us, beyond belief, reducing us to a helpless and utter prostration. I have already explained what I was trying to do in this sonnet, and I believe that it requires no further elucidation.

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XXIII

Not long after that, I was affl icted by a painful ailment from which I suffered constantly for nine days. This so weakened me that I could not bestir myself from bed. On that ninth day, I had a thought which— not surprisingly—was of my lady. I thought of her for a while and then went back to the consideration of my own weakened condition. I realized how brief the duration of my life was, even if I was in excellent health. And thinking of this, I began to weep in total wretchedness. I sighed deeply and said to myself that even the most noble Beatrice will have to die one day. This brought about such a dreadful confusion in me that I closed my eyes tight. I was affl icted as a madman is and had horrible visions. There were faces of disheveled hags who cried at me, “You, too, will die!” After them there were more faces, even uglier and quite awful to behold, and they announced to me, “You are dead.” My mind started to stray. I did not know where I was. I thought I saw more unkempt

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women wandering along the streets weeping copious tears. I thought I saw the sun darken so that the stars appeared—but in such a color that they seemed to be weeping too. Birds flying through the air plummeted to earth, dead as stones. The earth itself quaked. I thought all this was bad enough and I was frightened enough, but then I imagined that some friend appeared to say to me, “Do you not yet know? Your wonderful lady has departed from this life.” I began to weep, of course, not just in my fantasy but in real life too so that actual tears poured from my eyes. I thought I looked up to heaven and saw a host of angels returning home and in front of them they had a small white cloud. They were singing and I could make out the words of their chant, “Hosanna in excelsis,” and indeed, I could hear nothing else. Then my heart, in which there was so much love, spoke to me saying, “It is true; our lady is lying dead.” I supposed that I was going to view the corpse that had once housed that most noble and blessed soul. My fantasy was so vivid that I could see the body and the women who were covering her face with a white veil. The face had such a look of gentle humility that it seemed to declare, “I am now witnessing the beginning of peace.” This vision fi lled me with such humil-

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ity that I called upon Death: “Death, most sweet, come to me. Do not be cruel to me. You must be gentle, considering where you have just been. Come to me now, for I desire you greatly. See, I am already wearing your color.” And after I had seen those sorrowful tasks performed that are usually done for the bodies of the dead, I thought I returned to my chamber, where I looked up to heaven. It was so vivid that I said with all sincerity, “Ah, loveliest soul! Blessed is he who sees you!” I spoke these words while I was sobbing and I called upon Death to come for me. There was a kind woman at my bedside who supposed that my tears and moans were caused by the pains of my ailment and, fearing for my life, she began to weep too. Other women in the room knew that I was crying but when they saw that she was weeping as well they made her leave the room. (She was a near relative of mine.) They came close to me and, assuming that I was dreaming, decided to wake me up. “Sleep no more!” they said. And “Do not despair!” Hearing their words, I awoke and my strong imaginings stopped. I had just been about to call out, “O Beatrice, be blessed!” In fact, I had said “O Beatrice” aloud, when I realized that I had been dreaming. But my voice had been so distorted by my sobbing that

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the women had not been able to understand my words. I was deeply ashamed but, prompted by love and gratitude, I turned to them. They saw me and exclaimed, “He looks like a dead man!” To one another they said, “Let us try to console him,” and they spoke comforting words to me and asked what I had been dreaming about that was so frightening. I was comforted and relieved as I realized that these had been dreams. I answered them, saying that I would tell them what had troubled me. I recounted everything that I had seen, but omitting the name of that most noble lady. Afterward, when I had recovered, I resolved to write a poem about what I had seen, because I thought it was a powerful demonstration of love. Accordingly, I wrote this canzone about it, which begins with the words “A woman of great compassion” and is arranged in a way that I believe is perfectly clear. A woman of great compassion sat by my side and pitied me as she heard me, over and over, call upon Death to offer me his cure for all my ills. Earnestly she tried to make some sense of my mumblings and discover

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what I might be saying. She could not endure my suffering and wept for me, her pure heart full of pity. Noticing her distress, the others, moved by their kindliness, escorted her out of the room and came to my bed to wake me up. One of them said, “What dreams are you having? Do you know that you’re moaning?” And as I gradually came awake, I heard myself call my lady’s name. My voice was so choked up with sadness, so broken, that I heard the name as it welled up from my heart but otherwise couldn’t have known what I had tried to pronounce or understood the word I’d spoken. But I was ashamed, not having meant to impart that noble lady’s name to the world or confide in the women who attended at my bedside. They saw me blush but thought it was the burn of a raging fever. In great concern,

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one of them whispered (but I heard what she said) that I looked to her as if I were dead. Another took a cooling cloth she applied to my head as she asked me in her gentle and sad voice what terrible nightmares I had had. I replied that I had been pondering in the night the brevity of life and our frailty. Love in my heart wept many bitter tears for all of us, so briefly in the light and then in the dark for all eternity. My soul was fi lled with confusion and many fears as I thought in how few days or months or years my lady, too, must die. I shut my eyes to the sweet promise of paradise, and all my vital spirits, bewildered, fled. My mind thereupon was fi lled instead with ugly, angry women shouting jeers and taunts at me. I heard their spiteful cries: “You too will die. Everybody dies!” I saw in the empty corridors of my mind monstrous things spring up and disappear

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as I struggled slowly forward. I could see disheveled women in front of me and behind, weeping and wailing, piteous to hear and oddly radiant in their misery. The sun above grew dim and looked to be weeping along with the stars even as the flying birds, already dead or dying, fell to an earth that trembled. I assumed the end had come. An old man loomed up and in a hoarse voice said to me: “What are you doing? Have you not heard that your lady, who was so beautiful, is no more?” I raised my eyes that were a blur of tears up to the skies where I beheld a rare and striking vision. Manna, the Bible says, fell down from heaven—but gravity, it appears, can relax its law: upward into the air was a band of angels singing Hosannas of praise as they pushed a small cloud higher into the haze. Love then came to me with the news that she whom I had loved so ardently was dead. He said I should visit to show respect,

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and I thanked him and said that he was correct. Her face had been veiled. Nevertheless, the phrase “I am at peace” came to my mind as though she had spoken in order to let me know. Seeing her humility in the face of her own demise, her faith and piety, I felt those things in my own heart and I knew the peace she felt, and called upon Death to embrace my soul as well, quite confident that he, having been in my lady, had ascended to a degree of refi nement attained by only a few. I begged him to do me a kindness and take me as well to wherever the virtuous dwell after they’ve left all earthly cares behind. Then I took my leave with my mind calmed, for among all heaven’s blessings, the view of her beautiful face was one that might be in store for me—and the gift that I could now pray for. This canzone has two parts. In the fi rst, speaking to an unspecified person, I say how I was rescued from

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an empty fantasy by certain women and how I promised them that I would tell about it. In the second, I recount what I had promised them I would do. The fi rst part is subdivided in two, the fi rst being what a certain woman and what several women said and did for my fantasy before I recovered my normal state of mind, and the second being what the women said to me after I had left off my mad behavior. Then, in the second section, I narrate those fantasies and then tell at what time they called me.

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XXIV

After those idle fantasies, it happened one day that as I was sitting and thinking, I felt a flutter of my heart as if I were in the lady’s presence. Then a vision of Love came to me, and I was somehow convinced that he was coming from wherever my lady was. I was full of joy as he said to my heart, “Bless the day when I took you captive. That’s what you ought to do.” My heart was so full of happiness that I could scarcely recognize it as my own, for the change in its condition was so great. Shortly after this quasi annunciation and my heart’s report of what Love had told it, I saw a gentlewoman approaching, one who was famous for her beauty and had long ago been the lady my famous friend had loved. Her name was Giovanna, but because of her great beauty she was mostly called Primavera,* and she went by that name. And as I looked at her, I saw that Beatrice was following her. They approached * Springtime

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in that order, and Love seemed to be saying to me, “The fi rst one is named Primavera, only because of her arrival here today. It was at my direction that the man who gave her that name did so—because she will come fi rst ( prima verrà) on the day Beatrice shows herself after her admirer’s fantasies. Indeed, if you think about her earlier name, that too signifies that she will come fi rst, because Giovanna is the feminine version of Giovanni, Saint John the Baptist, who preceded the True Light, saying, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare ye the way of the lord.”* It seemed to me that he also said, “If you took the trouble to think about it seriously, the lady Beatrice could be called Love, because of her resemblance to me.” Later, thinking this over, I resolved to write a poem to my greatest friend, leaving out certain words that it seemed proper to omit. My supposition was that in his heart he still admired Primavera’s beauty. I wrote the sonnet that begins, “A loving spirit.” A loving spirit that had begun to doze in my heart I felt was stirring again to awake as I saw Love approach me. Heaven knows * Matthew 3:3.

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why, but he was cheerful. Was it to make amends for his usual gloom? Perhaps he chose this merry air to tease or for the sake of demonstrating how he could impose upon me and give orders that I must take. But at that moment Vanna and Bice too were coming down the street, each one a beauty, and Love pointed at them and said on a whim that the fi rst was Springtime. And somehow I knew he meant it. He wasn’t merely being cute. He said the other was Love—and resembled him.

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XXV

At this point, I think that there may be people who deserve to have all difficulties explained to them but are still hesitant because I speak of Love as if it were a thing in itself and not merely an imagined construct. I speak of it as if it were a bodily substance. In truth, this is taking a liberty, for Love is not in itself substantial. It is an accident, a nonessential aspect of substance. That I speak of it as if it were a thing, or even as if it were a person, is clear from the way I refer to it as “him.” I say I saw him coming—which indicates movement through space. And according to Aristotle, only bodies can move through space. So it appears that I am positing a corporeality to Love. I say of him that he was laughing or that he was saying things. And this makes him appear to be human. Let me remind readers, however, that in ancient times, there were no minstrels of love among us speaking in a vernacular. Only certain poets writing in Latin took up the subject of Love. “Among us,” I say, but the same

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thing could have happened in other countries. In Greece, these were not subjects for the vernacular language but for those writing in the old literary language. Only recently, those poets appeared who composed vernacular verse which was in some ways like metrical Latin poetry. But if we search through Provençal or Italian literature, we don’t fi nd any love poetry that is more than a hundred and fi fty years old. The reason that a few relatively unrefi ned men earned a reputation for skill in poetry is that they were the fi rst ones to write in Italian. I suppose the fi rst man who wrote love poetry in the vernacular did so because he wanted his words to be understood by a lady whose Latin wasn’t good enough for her to follow his thoughts easily. This is perhaps an argument against writing poetry in Italian on subjects other than love, inasmuch as the point of writing in the vernacular was to communicate about love. In Latin, there is a greater license given to poets than to writers of prose. And since the Italian writers are writing poetry, it follows that they too should be given a greater degree of freedom than other writers in the vernacular. Any image or trope that is allowed for the Latin poet should also be allowed for the Italian poet. And Latin poets often addressed inanimate

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objects as if these objects had sense and reason, or they had them address each other. Furthermore, they did this not only with real things but also with imagined things. So, if we see that they had nonexistent things speaking and had many accidental aspects of things conversing as if they were substantial or human, the vernacular poet also deserves that kind of latitude. But not without some underlying logic. There must always be a rationale which it is possible to expound in prose. That the metrical poets spoke as I have described is evident from Virgil, who says in the fi rst book of the Aeneid that Juno, who was a goddess hostile to the Trojans, spoke to Aeolus, the master of the winds, and that Aeolus answered her, “O queen, it is up to you to decide what you want; it is my duty to carry out orders.”* Virgil also has inanimate things talking to one another. Lucan has an animate creature addressing Rome, an inanimate thing.† Horace has a man addressing “knowledge” as if it were a person, and he cites Homer as his authority for doing this. In Ovid, Love speaks as if it were a human being in The Remedy

* Aeneid I, 65–77. † Pharsalia I, 44.

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of Love. Thus, it must be clear to anyone uneasy about this practice of mine that there is ample precedent for it. But, again, I say that the old metrical poets never used this trope without a reason, which also holds true for rhyming poets of today. There should be some underlying logic. It would be shameful if a man who wrote poems using this kind of imagery and rhetoric were asked to explain himself and he could not make clear what his true meaning was. There are people who do that. My foremost friend is as well acquainted with them as I am, and we agree about the foolishness of their practice.

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That noble lady who was mentioned in the poem above found such great favor with the people that they would run up to her as she walked along the street to stare at her. This caused me great delight. And when she was near anyone, the chances were that a man’s heart would be fi lled with such modesty and ner vousness that he could barely speak or raise his eyes to meet her gaze. This happened frequently and there are many who can testify to the truth of my report. She went about clad in humility without any show of pride in how people behaved toward her. Some said, “She is not a woman but an angel.” Others put it a different way, remarking, “She is a wonder. Blessed be the Lord who has the power to perform such miracles.” She was so noble and impressive that those who saw her felt in themselves a modest and gentle sweetness that they were unable to express. No one could look at her without sighing. From her amazing virtue these and other remarkable things emanated. Thinking

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about that, and wanting to have the feel of my pen in my hand again, I resolved to write a poem in praise of her in which I might communicate some of her wonderful influences on passersby, so that those who had not been able to see her with their own eyes would have as much knowledge of the effects of the encounter as words are able to convey. The result was this sonnet, which begins, “How modest, how genteel . . .” How modest, how genteel my lady seems as she strolls, unself-conscious, along the street intimidating whomever she may meet. They are mute, as people sometimes are in dreams, and avert their eyes, as if the dazzling beams from hers would blind them. Still, it is a sweet kind of discomfort. It’s hardly a conceit to say she is angelic for her head gleams as if with a halo. And radiating from her person, there is quiet and delight, inexplicable but undeniable too. Anyone who has seen her knows it’s true, and that for an instant all the world seems right. One sighs in joy as they do in Elysium.

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This sonnet is easy enough to understand, especially in that it recounts what I have already described. It needs, I think, no further comment. To move onward, then, let me say that this lady of mine was in such favor that not only was she honored and praised but many other women, too, were honored and praised on her account. As I became aware of this, I decided to write another sonnet that would make it clear to those who had not themselves perceived the phenomenon. I wrote this other sonnet, beginning, “Who sees my lady,” which tells of how her virtue influenced other women. Who sees my lady among the others sees salvation, and her companions, aware of this, offer their thanks to God sincerely. These women feel no envy of her: it is a blessing to be one who accompanies her and to have a share in her special bliss, like a single note among the harmonies of a hymn or a stone in a noble edifice. The sight of her humbles everything else to make anyone around her beautiful too.

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In the honor paid her, each woman has a share that each of them is delighted and grateful to take. She all but disappears, as the virtuous do, into a delicate sweetness that hangs in the air. The sonnet has three parts. In the fi rst, I declare how this lady appears most prominently among the women with whom she is seen; in the second, I tell how charming her companions are; and in the third, I speak of how her beauty and virtue radiate to include and ennoble them.

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I then realized that in what I had said about my lady in those two sonnets I had omitted any mention of her effect upon me. In that respect, my utterance had been lacking. I resolved, then, to write a poem in which I would say how open I felt to her influence and how her virtue had its effect upon me. But could I get all that into a sonnet? I thought it would be better to do it as a canzone, which I began with a stanza starting, “So long had I been under Love’s command.” So long had I been under Love’s command that I had become accustomed to it, and taking orders from him I felt my former aching begin to subside. He had the upper hand, but it was gentler. Still, you must understand there are times when he can set my heart to quaking. My face goes pale. I feel my body shaking.

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In the presence of such sweetness, I am unmanned. I am reduced to total helplessness and if I could, I’d ask my lady for help, salvation from this strange duress, painful, and yet, I must admit, even more pleasurable than anything I know— although I cannot speak or tell her so.

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XXVIII

As it is written in Lamentations, “How does the city sit solitary that was full of people! How has she become a widow, she that was great among nations?”* I was planning that canzone and had completed the first stanza (which appears above) when the Lord summoned that noble lady to a life of bliss under the banner of the blessed queen of heaven, the Virgin Mary. Her name had been held in the highest regard in the conversations of the blessed Beatrice. It might be pleasant to say something about her departure from us, but I do not intend to do so here, for three reasons. First, it is not quite relevant to my present purpose. (Remember the little preamble to this book.) The second is that, even if it were relevant, my tongue would still be inadequate to treat it properly. Finally, even if the fi rst two reasons did not apply, it isn’t right for me to speak of this because I would * Lamentations 1:1.

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have to praise myself, which is a reprehensible thing to do, no matter who does it. So I shall leave that to some other commentator. Still, because the number nine has so frequently found a place in my narrative, I must point out that the number played a large part in her death, and I ought to say something at least about that—which does fit in with our purpose. So let me explain how it applied and suggest reasons for the congeniality of that number to her.

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If you figure it according to the Arab custom in which a new day starts at sunset, her noble soul departed this life in the fi rst hour of the ninth day of the month. And according to the Syrian calendar, she departed in the ninth month of the year, because the fi rst month there is Tishri, which is our October. Meanwhile, according to our reckoning, she departed in the calendar year in which the “perfect number” ten had been completed nine times in the century in which she had been born into this life (she lived in the thirteenth Christian century). This may be a reason why the number was so auspicious for her. According to Ptolemy, and Christian truth as well, there are nine moving heavens, and astrologers maintain that those heavens affect us here below by their workings among themselves. That number was auspicious for her and we should understand that, at her conception, all moving heavens were in perfect syzygy with one another. Pondering the matter more subtly, she

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was herself that number—at least by similitude. The number three is the square root of nine, because without the intervention of any other number it creates nine by itself. Three times three is nine. Therefore, three is a factor of nine, and the factor (or maker) of miracles is itself also three: that is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are three and one. That lady was accompanied by the number nine in order to make us understand that she was a nine (that is, a miracle) whose root (the miracle’s) is none other than the Trinity. Possibly an even more profound thinker could fi nd a more profound reason for this, but this is the one I see and the one that gives me pleasure.

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After she died, all the city was left as if it were a widow, shorn of all dignity. Weeping in the desolate city, I wrote to the princes of the land about its condition, quoting those opening lines of Jeremiah that say, “Quomodo sedet sola civitas.”* I say this so that no one will be surprised at my having quoted it above, as if it were the opening of a new topic. If anyone wants to blame me for not having set down the words that follow the verse I quoted, my explanation is that from the beginning my intention had been to write only in the vernacular. Inasmuch as the words that follow are all in Latin, it would violate my plan if I were to include them here. I know, too, that that foremost friend, to whom I am writing this, had a similar idea, and that I should write to him entirely in the vernacular.

* “How does the city sit solitary.”

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XXXI

After I had wept for so long that I was weary and still had not managed to relieve my sadness, I thought I might fi nd some solace in sorrowful words. I decided to write a canzone in which I would speak of her for whom I was experiencing such grief as to destroy my soul. I began the canzone that starts, “My eyes weep to assuage my heart’s hurt.” And in order to retain the effect of the poem, I shall analyze it fi rst and then present the canzone itself. Indeed, this shall be my practice henceforward. The canzone has three parts. The fi rst is a kind of preamble; in the second I describe her; and in the third I speak directly to the canzone. My eyes weep to assuage my heart’s hurt, and they are red and hurt as well—or as badly. What anodyne can I fi nd for my terrible pain? There has to be some way I can fi nd to avert a sickness unto death. If I write sadly,

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the activity may concentrate my brain as I try to fashion some lamenting strain I address to you. When she was still alive I spoke of her unceasingly to you as obsessive lovers do. Perhaps by making verses, I can contrive a handsome enough garland composed of rue. She has ascended to heaven. Love and I are left to comfort one another and cry. Beatrice has ascended to heaven where the angels reside and enjoy eternal peace. She is with them and has left you ladies behind. The loss is great and even harder to bear because it was an unusual decease— no chill, no fever. Nothing of that kind. It was only her great benevolence of mind, astonishing even in heaven that felt a lack of her magnanimity, her special grace that seemed to be out of place on earth: so the heavenly powers called her back and enfolded her in the Lord’s protective embrace, as was only right in the light of her great worth, too good for our tribulations here on earth.

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Her noble soul took leave of her flesh to soar aloft and arrive in a far, far better suited place. But whoever on earth does not lament her loss has a heart of stone. He is a boor, vile, worthless, base, and, ill-reputed, who’d not be allowed to take the sacrament. Meanwhile the stupid know no discontent, for they have no idea of the qualities that the world has lost and therefore cannot feel our grief that can never heal, and that even the passage of gray years can’t ease. Gloomily we recite the obsequies we frame to try to console one another whether we be alone or have come sadly together. A narcotic calm possesses me. My eyes dim as I think of her. I catch my breath as I brood on her loss and what she meant to me. I sob sometimes, or else in silent sighs I consider the certain prospect of my death not with fear but rather with longing—to see her beautiful face in paradise and be near her again. Bereft, I feel such pain

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that I am reduced to a quaking helplessness and, ashamed of my distress, I avoid other people who’d think I am insane. I prefer solitude for my misery. In my room I cry out to my dear Beatrice, “Are you really dead, my darling? What is this?” If anyone heard my groans or saw my weeping, he would sorrow deeply for my sake, but this is what my life has been like ever since my lady took her leave. I have been keeping a lonely and dolorous vigil in a wake that never ends. I cannot hope to convince you ladies what it is like, for it begins to verge on the grotesque. I am in pain day and night in a life as bitter as gall. My pallid face must appall my former friends who avoid enduring the strain of being with so morose a person. All I hope for is to be with my lady. I pray that she will comfort me or reward me some day. Go now, my sad canzone. Depart in tears to seek out the gentle women and girls who read

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your sister poems. Instead of amusement you will bring them now my dejection that necessitates your bringing the correction those happy pieces require, now that she’s dead.

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XXXII

After I wrote that canzone, a man came to see me, one whom I’d reckon as my second-best friend. He was a close relative of the dear departed lady. We talked for a while and then he got to the point of his visit and asked me to write some poems in memory of a lady who had died. He dissimulated a bit and made it appear that he had someone else in mind, but I realized that he was speaking of his sister, my blessed and beloved lady. Accordingly, I promised him that I would do what he’d asked. Considering the terms of his request, I resolved to write a sonnet of lamentation and give it to him as if I had written it to his feigned specifications. I then wrote this sonnet which begins, “Come, I invite you.” Come, I invite you to listen to my sighing. Your noble hearts will break in pity for me for I am in despair—and you will see that grief is all that’s keeping me from dying.

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My eyes want to betray me by their crying, for they attempt to relieve my misery but such an outcome as that would surely be fatal and not at all revivifying. The sighs at least keep me breathing as they call on my gentle lady now in the angel’s band and another life that is worthy of her and right. The torments of this world and our sorry plight are what we have deserved after the fall, as only the grieving can hope to understand.

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XXXIII

After I’d written it, I thought about the quality and rank of the friend to whom I intended to give it and circulate it as a work of his own. But I was not confident that it was good enough for someone who was so closely related to my lady who is now in glory. Before I gave him the sonnet, then, I wrote a couple of stanzas of a canzone, one of them in his voice and the other in my own—although, if you did not examine them too closely, you might not notice that the speaker changes. If one examines them scrupulously, however, he will see that the fi rst speaker does not call the woman “my lady,” while the second does so. I gave my friend this canzone and the foregoing sonnet, telling him that I had composed these pieces for his use. The canzone begins, “Whenever I remember” and has two parts. In the fi rst, her relative laments; in the second, I lament. The one grieves as a brother would, and the other as a lover.

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Whenever I remember in a sudden rush that I shall never see that lady whom I so sorely miss, I feel the heart within my chest turn leaden and my mind conspires in this, asking my soul why it does not try to sever its ties to a life in which it will suffer forever. Death becomes appealing as I think of the sweet repose that I anticipate. It is burdensome to me to have to wait so longingly as I stand here on the brink of others’ graves at which when I look down, I conceal my envy with a solemn frown. My sighs combine to form a sad chorale imploring Death to come as I have urged it to do since that dark day when my lady traded her corporeal existence to make her way to a better one in that Elysium she richly deserved. And radiating from her loveliness a sacred beauty shines to add its light to heaven’s glory. There the angels beat their wings in rarefied air, grateful for her presence that refi nes and enhances their collective holiness eternally blessed with perfect joyfulness. 122

XXXIV

On the anniversary of my lady’s departure to eternal life, I was seated in a place where I had once been able to observe her and I was drawing an angel on my sketch pad. While I was engaged in this drawing, I looked up to see beside me men whom it was proper for me to honor. They were looking at what I had been doing and, as I was told later, they had been standing there for a while before I noticed them. When I realized they were there, I stood up and greeted them, saying, “Someone was with me just now, which is why I was lost in thought.” After they left, I returned to my task, drawing figures of angels, but it occurred to me that I might compose a poem for the anniversary of her death, addressing those who had come to look at my work. Then I wrote the sonnet that begins, “Into my mind one day.” It has two different opening quatrains, and I shall try to analyze both versions of the poem. Both are in three parts, the fi rst saying how the lady was already in my memory, the second saying 123

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what Love did to me, and the third speaking of the effects of Love. The same analysis works with the variant opening, except that in the opening quatrain I tell when the lady had come into my memory, as I do not in the other opening. First draft Into my mind one day there came a stray thought of my noble lady, for whose great worth the Lord had taken her from us on earth to be with the blessed Mary and there to stay. Second version Into my mind one day there came a stray thought of my lady whose loss Love laments. I had been drawing angels with an intense concentration when you came my way, and I failed to greet you—for which I hope you may forgive me. Surely, I meant no insolence. Blind and deaf, bereft of any sense that you were there, I was under sorrow’s sway weeping from my eyes and from my heart, inconsolable in my constant pain,

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made even worse by the thought that it’s a year that has elapsed and that I mourn in vain. If there is healing, it has yet to start: eternity has a kind of presence here.

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XXXV

For some time after that, as I passed through places that reminded me of my loss, I was very depressed and my thoughts were so morbid that they gave me an appearance of severe distress. I knew what I must look like and I was in the habit of glancing about to see if anyone was looking at me. One day, I did see a very pretty young woman staring down at me from her window with a pitying look on her face. I was so moved by her pity that I felt my own eyes watering with tears. Embarrassed by this display of my wretchedness, I departed as quickly as I could from the lady’s view, but I kept thinking about her and realized that it was impossible that such a person should be altogether lacking in noble love. I resolved, therefore, to write a sonnet in which I would address her and explain what had happened to me. The background makes the poem altogether transparent, I should think, so I omit any explication. The sonnet begins, “I saw in your face your pity.”

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I saw in your face your pity for my sad countenance, spontaneous, generous. Prompted by the charity that’s in us all, but seldom displays itself, you had compassion for a stranger almost mad with grief. I was ashamed to be seen thus, and fled as any startled animal does, realizing only later that I was glad to have encountered such compassion and sympathy. And immediately I knew that one who could show such magnanimity for any dejected passerby must be one whom Love has known, which is why you were able in only an instant to understand.

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XXXVI

After that, whenever this young woman saw me, her face grew pale and took on that same pitying expression . . . Or was it a kind of love? I remembered my lady and how her countenance had also displayed that same pallor. I got into the habit, when I was particularly depressed, of going to places where I might be able to look at this woman, who could draw fresh tears from me whenever our eyes met. I felt prompted to write another sonnet addressed to her, which begins, “So sweet a compassionate pallor” and needs no analysis. So sweet a compassionate pallor, so kindly a gaze has never appeared so beautifully on a face of a gentle lady, whose sympathy and grace respond to a stranger’s sorrow in so many ways. I pass by under your window sometimes, and days

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gone by come to mind and memories I would embrace except that they are so painful. In any case, I am grateful to you, and I offer these words of praise. I cannot look away, but neither can I meet your gaze directly. Your kindly regard, intended to comfort, causes me dreadful pain. To remain to receive your kindness is too hard. Ashamed and undone, I cannot help but cry. So I flee, as I have done again and again.

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XXXVII

While the sight of that lady was painful, as the poem says, I realized that it was also pleasurable. Perhaps too much so, and I found that I was tortured in my heart and felt worthless. I have often cursed the vanity of my eyes, saying to them in my mind, “You used to reduce everyone who saw your sorrowful state to tears. Now it appears that you want to forget this, because of that lady who gazes at you. But she does so only because she is grieving for the lady in heaven for whom you used to lament. But I will continue to remind you of her, you faithless eyes, because you should continue to cry until you are dead.” After I had spoken thus to my eyes, I was afflicted by a series of anguished sighs. It was a battle I could not keep entirely to myself. And I resolved to write a sonnet that would describe this horrible state of my mind. The sonnet begins, “You are my eyes,” and has two parts. In the first, I speak to my eyes just as my heart had spoken to them. In the second, I make it clear who has been speaking in this way.

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You are my eyes, but on your own you shed such bitter tears as to make strangers weep with pity merely to witness a grief so deep. But I begin to suspect that you would shed this burden if I hadn’t sternly said that the melancholy vigil that we keep can’t be forgotten. Sorrow does not sleep or slumber. It’s your fl ightiness I dread. You meet the gaze of a lady, someone new, and suddenly there is an interest in your stare that I can see as betrayal of my heart. Your fickle glances, wandering everywhere, make it quite clear what you would have me do. But I am in charge, and you’re a mere body part.

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I continued to think about this lady as a person I liked rather too well. What I thought was: she is a kind, lovely, young, intelligent lady who has appeared to me perhaps by Love’s will in order that I may fi nd some peace in my life. The more I thought of her, the more loving those thoughts became, and I found myself agreeing with Love’s reasoning. When I had conceded that much, I had second thoughts, my critical mind making the comment that these are disloyal and base emotions, a rationale for my infidelity to my deceased lady. But then, on the other hand, there was the perfectly reasonable question as to whether I hadn’t been in agony long enough. Would it not be healthier to fi nd a way to assuage my bitterness? This is the machination of Love, I told myself. He is the one who presents desires to us. But how could I resist such compassion and nobility as she had shown to me so often?

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Having debated with myself in this way many times, I realized that the thoughts that spoke on her behalf were winning the argument, and I thought it might be proper to address her. I wrote this sonnet, which begins, “A noble thought.” It is “noble” only insofar as it refers to the noble lady. Looking at the subject from another perspective, it isn’t noble at all but altogether shabby. The poem is in two parts that represent the confl ict in my heart. The fi rst describes my heart, which is to say carnal appetite; the second is about my soul, or if you prefer, my reason. The poem explains how each of these addresses the other. Why appetite is “heart” and reason is “soul” should be clear to those to whom I am speaking in the sonnet. In the preceding piece, I put the heart in opposition to the eyes, and the equivalents in this poem may seem inconsistent with that. But if I may explain, in the previous poem I also identify the heart with the appetite, because I had a greater desire to remember my most noble lady than to look at this new one—although I already had some appetite for her, too, although perhaps less strong. So the imagery of the previous piece does not altogether contradict what I have in this one.

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The sonnet has three parts. In the fi rst I tell this lady that my desire has turned toward her; in the second, I say what my soul (my reason) tells my heart (my appetite); and in the third, I give the heart’s reply. A noble thought of you is coming to me more and more often these days, and while I hear its blandishments, I also have some fear that my heart is behaving irresponsibly. My troubled soul inquires, “Who is she? Who comes to bring relief and even cheer? Would you risk having your memories disappear to which you have clung with such tenacity?” My heart replies in candor to my soul, declaring that the spirit of love cannot always be governed. Aroused by the gentle eyes of that compassionate lady, it tells me what persuades me. Broken, I can be made whole by her who is so empathetic and wise.

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XXXIX

One afternoon at about the hour of nones, I had a vivid vision of Beatrice wearing those blood-red robes in which I had fi rst beheld her. She appeared to be as young as she had been at that fi rst encounter. I could not help but think of her and remember her in the chronological sequence of events. My heart began to feel terrible remorse for the desire by which it had allowed itself to be possessed, despite the counsel of my reason. My evil desires were obliterated and all my thoughts were again concerned with the blessed Beatrice. And from then on, I thought of her with such intensity with all my guilt-laden heart that my sighs again made my suffering clear. My thoughts were now in agreement with my heart, as I concentrated on that most noble lady and how she had departed from us. Many of my thoughts were so sorrowful that I forgot where I was. Those tears that had diminished for a time were now refreshed and my eyes were again red with purple rings around them of the kind

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one sometimes sees in the faces of those who are gravely ill. In this way, I reflected, they were being punished for their faithlessness. But from then on, they were unable to look at anyone who looked at them. Their furtively appetitive glances were no more. My evil desires and temptations were destroyed, I thought. And I resolved to write a sonnet in which I would set forth this train of reasoning. I wrote, “Alas, by the force of many groans,” and I began with the word “Alas” because I was ashamed that my eyes had strayed in such a way. No analysis, I think, is required. The background of the poem, which I have already explained, makes it all perfectly clear. Alas, by the force of the many groans that arise from my heart’s steadfast emotions and belief, my eyes are affected by the thick smoke of grief and cannot return a look from another’s eyes. My soul chastises my heart: “Is it really wise to crave affection and hope for some relief if you allow yourself to forget your chief thought of a Love you had hoped to immortalize?”

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The observation is true, and my heart deplores its woeful inconstancy. Love, who resides within its chambers, faints with pity. Or shame. But the memory of my lady still abides, inscribed as it is upon its walls and doors on which I have written tributes to her name.

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XL

After that tribulation, in the season when many people go to Rome to see Veronica’s veil with its image of the face of Jesus Christ—which my lady is able to behold in heaven—there were some pilgrims who were walking along a street in the heart of our city, the street where, as a matter of fact, my lady was born and lived and died. The pilgrims were deep in contemplation, and thinking of them I observed that they had probably traveled for quite a distance. It was also probable they had never heard of my lady. Their thoughts are of other things, perhaps their distant friends, whom we here do not know. And then it occurred to me that if they were from someplace close, they would show distress or some kind of reaction as they made their way through a sorrowing city. Then I thought, if I could detain them for a short while, I could explain to them where they were and make them weep, because the words I would speak would affect anyone. Even after they had turned a corner

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and disappeared, that thought remained in my mind and I resolved to write a sonnet in which I would make clear what I had said to myself. To make it more powerful, I decided to write it as if I were addressing them. I wrote the sonnet that begins, “O Pilgrims who walk lost in thought.” I meant “pilgrims” in the broader sense of the word, because it has two senses, one general and one much more restrictive. In the general sense, it applies to any traveler who is outside his native area. In its strict sense, the only pilgrims are those who are on their way to the church of Santiago in Compostela, or who are returning from that church. As a matter of fact, those who travel in the ser vice of God have three proper appellations: they are palmers if they go overseas, because they often bring back palm leaves; they are pilgrims if they go to the tomb of St. James in Galicia, which is farther away from where most pilgrims live than the tombs of other apostles; and they are called romei if they go to Rome, where those to whom I here refer were headed. I do not analyze this sonnet because my narration of the events leading up to its writing make it entirely clear.

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O Pilgrims who walk lost in thought, do you know where you are? The street? The house you are near? You must have come from somewhere far from here, not to be shedding tears as most of us do. This is a city of sorrows in which there are few songs and little laughter. Gloomy, severe, we are in deep mourning. The atmosphere is like that of a church’s darkest pew. If you would pause in your travels, I could tell the story my sighing heart reiterates day and night, and you would weep with us. We have lost the source of our blessings, for the fates have taken our beatrice, our nonpareil the memory of whom is glorious.

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XLI

Two gentlewomen sent to me asking for some poems, and in view of their rank and standing in the city, I decided to send them and also to write something new that I could include with the copies they had asked for. This, I thought, would be the more respectful way to comply with their request. I wrote a sonnet that describes my condition and, along with the foregoing sonnet, the earlier one that starts, “Come, I invite you” [in section XXXII]. The new sonnet begins, “Beyond the sphere” and has five parts. In the fi rst, I say where my thoughts are tending, and I call them by the name of one of their effects. In the second, I say why they are going in that direction—that is, who is making them go there. In the third, I tell what they see: a lady honored up in that empyrean. In the fourth, I say how they see her in such a form and condition that I cannot myself understand it. In other words, my

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thoughts ascend as they behold her to a height that my intellect cannot grasp. Our intellect, after all, stands in the same relation to those souls in bliss as our weak eyes do to the sun. The Phi losopher says this in the second book of his Metaphysics. In the fi fth part, I say that although I cannot understand everything to which my thoughts carry me—that is, her indescribable condition—I do understand that these thoughts are of my lady, because I often hear her name in them. And at the end of this fi fth part, I say “dear ladies” to indicate that it is ladies whom I am addressing. Beyond the sphere of the ninth heaven, a sigh from my heart passes: a new intelligence that Love bestows upon it, an exquisite sense that draws it ever upward to where, on high, it can behold a lady honored by all who stand around her magnificence in a way that is both rapturous and intense and able to delight and sanctify. What it sees and then reports to me is beyond understanding, but my heart, in pain,

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is able sometimes to decipher a word it hears and I know what it means when, again and again, I hear “Beatrice.” Yes, of course! It is she! Her name, dear ladies, resonates in my ears.

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XLII

After I had written this sonnet, I had a wonderful vision of things that made me decide not to speak further of that blessed lady until I could do so in a more admirable and a worthier manner. As I believe she knows, I am now exerting myself to reach that goal. If it pleases the One in whom all things live that my life may last a few years more, I hope to say of her what has never been said of any woman. And then, I hope it may please the One who is the lord of courtesy that I be allowed to go and see the glory of my lady—that is, the blessed Beatrice—who in glory beholds the face of him qui est per omnia secula benedictus.*

* Who is blessed for all eternity.

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