The Fifth Desk · Evaluation

Act I · The Map

Literature · Book of poems in a prose narrative · 13th c. · Florence, from a first sight in Dante’s ninth year to a last vision after the first anniversary of Beatrice’s death in 1290

Vita Nuova

Dante Alighieri · a book in prose and verse · a proem, thirty-one poems and Dante’s own divisions of them, cited in forty-two chapters · about 1292 to 1295 · scored on Dante’s Italian, with Rossetti’s translation (1861) for sense only; every English rendering on this page is the desk’s own

The Plate · the thirty-one poems standing in their order on the line of the prose, each as tall as its lines, three canzoni rising at the eleventh, the sixteenth and the twenty-first places, the dream of her death in the middle one, at the centre; the divisions leaning after each poem until the death and before each poem after it, and absent where Dante declines to divide; the broken canzone continued only in dots, and the line cut where the death goes untold; brackets beneath for ten, four, four and ten; and a dotted stroke rising from the end toward what the book promises and does not write

Mode

Lyric sequence set in a prose history of the soul; love poetry, elegy, conversion narrative and self-commentary in one book

Mythos

The number nine as the beloved herself; Love as a lord who commands and weeps; the eaten heart; the forerunner and the true light; the city left a widow

Phase

From a first sight at the end of Dante’s ninth year, through the greeting given and denied and the turn to praise, to Beatrice’s death in 1290, a temptation overcome and a last vision

Presentation

Prose and verse; a proem, thirty-one poems (twenty-five sonnets, five canzoni, one ballata) set in a prose narrative, and Dante’s divisions of his own poems, which follow the poem until the death and precede it after

Register

From the Latin of the spirits and of Love to the talk of the ladies who mock him; the scholastic division beside the sonnet of praise

Scale

One love, one city, one death; the nine moving heavens

Governing Proposition

A young Florentine sees a girl dressed in crimson when both are nearly nine, is greeted by her nine years later, loses the greeting through his own pretence, learns to love her without return by praising her, and is left by her death with a widowed city, a pity that tempts him and a vision he will not yet write. The wager of the book is that a man can read his own past as a book and gloss it, and that a love which asks for no return can be set where it cannot fail: in the words that praise her.

What Cannot Fail

8.9 / 10
Tier IV · Canonical

Act II · The Essay

Movement I

The Book of My Memory

“In quella parte del libro della mia memoria, dinanzi alla quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice:”
“In that part of the book of my memory before which little could be read, there is found a rubric which says:” and under it, in Latin, “INCIPIT VITA NOVA”, here begins the new life. The book opens by calling itself a copy of another book, made by a scribe who will set down its words, “e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia” (and if not all, at least their sense). The past is already a text, and the man who lived it comes to it after its end, choosing what to copy and explaining what he copies.

“Nove fiate già, appresso al mio nascimento, era tornato lo cielo della luce quasi ad un medesimo punto” (nine times since my birth the heaven of light had returned almost to the same point) when she first appeared to him, near the start of her ninth year and the end of his, “vestita di nobilissimo colore, umile ed onesto sanguigno” (dressed in a most noble colour, a humble and seemly crimson). The spirit of life in his heart trembles and speaks in Latin: “Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi.”
“Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me.” The spirit of the senses announces that beatitude has appeared, and the natural spirit weeps that it will often be hindered from now on. Nine years later, at the ninth hour, she greets him in the street, dressed in white; it is the first time her words reach his ears.

That night he dreams that a lord of fearful aspect, saying “Ego dominus tuus” (I am your lord), holds her asleep in a crimson cloth and makes her eat his burning heart, “la quale ella mangiava dubitosamente” (which she ate fearfully), then goes weeping toward heaven with her in his arms. Dante writes his first sonnet to ask the poets of the city to judge the dream. Many answered, the first of his friends among them, and none judged it: “Lo verace giudicio del detto sogno non fu veduto allora per alcuno: ma ora è manifesto alli più semplici.”
“The true meaning of that dream was not seen then by anyone; but now it is plain to the simplest.” The poem did not know its ending; the prose does. That is the book’s method in small: thirty-one poems, a quarter of its 18,085 words, set in a prose that reads them after the fact, and nearly a fifth of the book given to divisions in which Dante explains his own poems part by part, as the schools explained an authority.

Movement II

A Screen for the Truth

In church a lady happened to sit on the straight line between his eyes and Beatrice, and those watching thought his looks were for her. He resolves “di fare di questa gentile donna ischermo della veritade” (to make this gentle lady a screen for the truth), writes her small poems, and hides behind her for years. In a verse letter naming the sixty most beautiful women of the city, Beatrice’s name will stand nowhere but ninth. The first screen leaves; Love, dressed as a pilgrim on the road, names a second. The pretence works too well. The talk reaches Beatrice, and she refuses him her greeting, “nel quale stava tutta la mia beatitudine” (in which lay all my beatitude).

Deprived of it, he sleeps “come un pargoletto battuto” (like a beaten child), and dreams of a young man in white who sits weeping beside him and says: “Ego tamquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo habent circumferentiæ partes; tu autem non sic.”
“I am as the centre of a circle, to which all parts of the circumference stand alike; but you are not so.” Asked what so dark a saying means, Love answers in the vernacular: “Non dimandare più che utile ti sia” (ask no more than is useful to you). The book does not explain it, and no reader since has settled it.

At a wedding feast he feels a trembling begin at the left of his chest, leans against a painting on the wall, and looks up to see Beatrice among the women. His spirits are routed, and the ladies mock him, she with them. Led away, he tells his friend: “Io ho tenuti i piedi in quella parte della vita, di là dalla quale non si può ire più per intendimento di ritornare”
“I have set my feet in that part of life beyond which one cannot go with any intention of returning.” A run of sonnets follows in which love is a wound to the spirits and nothing else: near her, in the drunkenness of his trembling, “Le pietre par che gridin: Moia, moia” (the stones seem to cry: let him die, let him die). It is love as the first of his friends wrote it, shown from inside to its limit, and he resolves to say no more to her.

Movement III

Ladies Who Have Understanding of Love

Ladies who have watched his defeats call him over, and one asks: “A che fine ami tu questa tua donna, poi che tu non puoi la sua presenza sostenere?”
“To what end do you love this lady of yours, since you cannot bear her presence?” He answers that the end of his love was once her greeting, and that since she denied it, Love “ha posta tutta la mia beatitudine in quello, che non mi puote venir meno” (has put all my beatitude in what cannot fail me). They talk among themselves, and “sì come talor vedemo cadere l’acqua mischiata di bella neve, così mi parea vedere le loro parole uscire mischiate di sospiri” (as we sometimes see water fall mixed with fair snow, so I seemed to see their words come out mixed with sighs). Where, then, is this beatitude? “In quelle parole che lodano la donna mia” (in the words that praise my lady). The lady’s answer is exact: if that were true, he would have written his other poems with another intent. He leaves ashamed, and takes praise of her for his matter from then on.

Walking beside a clear stream, “la mia lingua parlò quasi come per sè stessa mossa, e disse: Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (my tongue spoke as though moved of itself, and said: ladies who have understanding of love). In the canzone that grows from that line, heaven asks God for her, and God answers that the blessed must wait: one below expects to lose her, and will tell the damned in hell that he has seen the hope of the blessed. Her father dies. Then Dante lies ill for nine days, thinks that she too must one day die, and falls into delirium: women with loosened hair, the sun darkened, the stars weeping, birds falling dead, the earth shaking, and angels rising with a small white cloud before them, singing “Osanna in excelsis”. Her dead face seems to say: “Io sono a vedere lo principio della pace”
“I am looking upon the beginning of peace.” The canzone that tells this dream, Donna pietosa, is the sixteenth of the thirty-one poems, the exact centre.

Then the city runs to look at her as she passes, and he writes the sonnet of praise: “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare / La donna mia, quand’ella altrui saluta, / Ch’ogni lingua divien tremando muta / E gli occhi non l’ardiscon di guardare. / Ella sen va, sentendosi laudare, / Benignamente d’umiltà vestuta; / E par che sia una cosa venuta / Di cielo in terra a miracol mostrare. / Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira, / Che dà per gli occhi una dolcezza al core, / Che ’ntender non la può chi non la prova. / E par che della sua labbia si muova / Un spirito soave pien d’amore, / Che va dicendo all’anima: sospira.”
“So gentle and so seemly does my lady seem when she greets others that every tongue, trembling, falls mute, and eyes dare not look at her. She goes her way, hearing herself praised, benignly clothed in humility, and seems a thing come from heaven to earth to show a miracle. She shows herself so pleasing to whoever gazes on her that through the eyes she gives the heart a sweetness no one can understand who has not felt it; and from her lips there seems to move a gentle spirit full of love, that goes saying to the soul: sigh.” For once the commentator has nothing to add: “Questo Sonetto è si piano ad intendere, per quello che narrato è dinanzi, che non ha bisogno d’alcuna divisione” (this sonnet is so plain to understand, from what has been told before, that it has no need of any division).

Movement IV

More Widowed

He begins a canzone on how her virtue works in him, Sì lungamente, and finishes one stanza. The next words on the page are not his: “Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium.”
“How the city sits alone that was full of people! She has become as a widow, the mistress of nations.” Jeremiah’s Lamentations break the poem off, and only then does the prose say that the Lord of justice called her to glory. The death is not told. It is not the purpose the proem set out, Dante says; his tongue would not suffice; and to tell it he would have to be “laudatore di me medesimo” (a praiser of myself), so “lascio cotale trattato ad altro chiosatore” (I leave that treatment to another glossator). At seven tenths of its length, the book that has told every greeting and every dream leaves a gap where its event should be.

In place of the death it gives a reckoning. By the Italian usage she died in the first hour of the ninth day of the month; by the Syrian, in the ninth month; by ours, in the year in which the perfect number had been completed nine times in her century. Nine is her number because the nine heavens were in accord at her birth; but, more subtly, “questo numero fu ella medesima” (this number was she herself): three is the root of nine, and the maker of miracles is three in one, “a dare ad intendere che ella era un nove, cioè un miracolo, la cui radice è solamente la mirabile Trinitade.”
“to make it understood that she was a nine, that is, a miracle, whose root is the wondrous Trinity alone.” After her death “rimase tutta la sopradetta cittade quasi vedova e dispogliata di ogni dignitade” (the whole city was left as if widowed and stripped of all dignity).

Then the form changes. “Acciò che questa Canzone paia rimanere più vedova dopo il suo fine, la dividerò prima ch’io la scriva: e cotal modo terrò da qui innanzi.”
“So that this canzone may seem the more widowed after its end, I will divide it before I write it; and I will keep this manner from here on.” Until now each division followed its poem; from here it comes before, and the poem is left alone at the end of its chapter, as she has left him. The canzone is Gli occhi dolenti, and its second stanza begins “Ita n’è Beatrice in alto cielo” (Beatrice has gone into high heaven). On the anniversary of her death he is found drawing angels on tablets, and tells his visitors: “Altri era testè meco, e perciò pensava” (someone else was with me just now, and so I was thinking). The sonnet he writes for the day ends on a line his sighs speak: “Oggi fa l’anno che nel ciel salisti” (today it is a year since you rose into heaven).

Movement V

Beyond the Widest Sphere

Some time after, a young and beautiful lady at a window looks at him in his grief, “sicchè tutta la pietade pareva in lei accolta” (so that all pity seemed gathered in her). He goes back to her for the tears she draws from him, until his eyes take too much delight in her. In the last of four sonnets to her and about her he divides himself as the book divides a poem, “L’anima dice al cor” (the soul says to the heart), reason against appetite, and the heart is winning. The temptation is real and the book gives it room. It is undone at the ninth hour by a strong imagining, in which he sees Beatrice “con quelle vestimenta sanguigne, colle quali apparve prima agli occhi miei”
“in that crimson clothing in which she first appeared to my eyes”, young, as when he first saw her. His heart repents, and his eyes, from long weeping, are ringed with purple, as if from a torment.

Pilgrims pass through the middle of the city on their way to Rome, to see the image Christ left of his likeness, thoughtful and unmoved. Dante thinks they have never heard of her, and writes as if he had stopped them: “Ella ha perduta la sua Beatrice: / E le parole, ch’uom di lei può dire, / Hanno virtù di far piangere altrui.”
“She has lost her Beatrice; and the words one can say of her have power to make others weep.” The city is the widow now, and strangers are the ones who do not know. For two ladies who ask for his poems he writes a last sonnet, in which the mind follows the sigh out of the world: “Oltre la spera, che più larga gira, / Passa il sospiro ch’esce del mio core” (beyond the sphere that circles widest passes the sigh that leaves my heart). What it sees there the grieving heart cannot understand, except that it often names Beatrice.

Then “una mirabil visione” (a wondrous vision), whose content the book withholds, makes him resolve to say no more of her until he can treat of her more worthily. He studies to that end, and closes on a hope: “spero di dire di lei quello che mai non fu detto d’alcuna.”
“I hope to say of her what was never said of any woman.” The last words pray that his soul may go to see her glory, as she gazes on the face of Him “qui est per omnia saecula benedictus” (who is blessed through all the ages). The book began by copying from the book of memory and ends by promising one not yet written, another work, not judged here. What it has done is its own: it has set the poems of a young man inside the prose of an older one who knows how they end, let the divisions fall silent before the poems that needed none, and moved the place of love from a greeting that could be refused to the words that praise her.

Act III · The Twelve

1The Inevitable (Ananke)

The test is subtractive, and the narrative and the poems resist it. The screen ladies (V to X) look removable and are not: the pretended loves cost Dante the greeting (X), and its loss forces the turn to praise (XVIII). Sì lungamente is required because it is broken: death cuts the canzone off after one stanza (XXVII to XXVIII). The digression on personification (XXV) is the book’s poetics. What the test removes lies in the divisions, nearly a fifth of the words. Some bear weight, above all where Dante stops dividing (XXVI) and where he divides before the poem (XXXI); many, like that of Spesse fïate (XVI), restate the prose just read. The double sonnets of VII and VIII are the slackest verse.

Score: 8.7 / 10

2The Unconcealment (Aletheia)

The disclosure can be stated and it holds. A love that depends on a return lives at the mercy of the beloved; a love that puts its beatitude “in quello, che non mi puote venir meno” (in what cannot fail me) is free, and what cannot fail is praise (XVIII). The ladies’ question, to what end he loves a lady whose presence he cannot bear, is put to everyone who has loved without return. Beside it: that grief seeks pity, and that the pity it finds can betray the dead (XXXV to XXXIX). Held off the top because Beatrice is disclosed only through her effects, never as a mind, and because the theology that makes her a miracle carries part of a truth that should stand without it.

Score: 8.9 / 10

3The Sublime (Hypsos)

Height is reached often for so short a book, in a hushed register: the first sight, with three spirits crying out in Latin (II); the dream in which she eats the burning heart “dubitosamente” (fearfully, III); the stanza of Donne ch’avete in which God answers heaven that one below will say in hell “Io vidi la speranza de’ beati” (I saw the hope of the blessed, XIX); the delirium of XXIII, the sun darkened and the birds falling; Tanto gentile (XXVI); Jeremiah breaking the canzone (XXVIII); the sigh that passes beyond the widest sphere (XLI). Held below the top by frequency: the divisions keep to the ground by design, and the screen-lady chapters and the early double sonnets do not rise.

Score: 8.9 / 10

4The Archetypal Deep (Mythos)

Myth built, and the number bears it. Nine at the first sight; nine years to the greeting, at the ninth hour; her name ninth among sixty (VI); death in the ninth month, in the year the perfect number was nine times completed in its century; and the gloss, “questo numero fu ella medesima” (this number was she herself, XXIX), a nine whose root is the Trinity. The figure is Christ’s: Giovanna, called Primavera, goes before her because “prima verrà” (she will come first), as John went before the true light (XXIV), and the dream of her death takes the darkened sun and the earthquake of the Passion (XXIII). The particular holds: a child in crimson, a dead father, a wedding where she joins the mockery (XIV). Held a step from the top because the myth is announced here and completed elsewhere.

Score: 9.2 / 10

5The Swerve (Parekklisis)

The inheritance: Provençal and Sicilian lyric; Guinizzelli’s gentle heart, named in “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa” (love and the gentle heart are one thing, XX); Cavalcanti’s love as a wound to the spirits; Boethius’s alternation of prose and verse; the razos that explained troubadour songs; the schools’ division of a text. The departure: a vernacular poet divides his own poems as the schools divided an authority, and sets them in a prose history of his soul that turns on the beloved’s death, so that lyric becomes elegy and conversion. The stake was real: the book is addressed to Cavalcanti, “primo de’ miei amici” (first of my friends, III), and wagers against his poetics of love as ruin. Held below the top because each component has a precedent; the swerve is their fusion.

Score: 9.1 / 10

6The Living Form (Entelecheia)

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The poems came first and the prose after, so the book is a man reading his past: the dream sonnet no one could judge “ora è manifesto alli più semplici” (now is plain to the simplest, III). The divisions set reason over passion and then give way: Tanto gentile needs none (XXVI), and after the death they come before the poem so that it may end “più vedova” (more widowed, XXXI). The thirty-one poems fall ten, canzone, four, canzone, four, canzone, ten, and the dream of her death stands sixteenth, at the centre. Prose cannot do what the poems do, nor poems what the prose does: the knowledge is the gap between them. Held off the top because some divisions are a container, not an instrument.

Score: 9.3 / 10

7The Bottomless Well (Apeiron)

Evidence, over seven centuries. Boccaccio copied the book in his own hand. Dante returned to it himself, rereading the donna gentile as Philosophy in the Convivio and having a soul in Purgatorio XXIV name Donne ch’avete. Michele Barbi’s text fixed the forty-two chapters; Charles Singleton’s An Essay on the Vita Nuova (1949), Domenico De Robertis’s Il libro della Vita Nuova (1961), Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Body of Beatrice (1988) and Guglielmo Gorni’s Vita nova (1996) show the book contested at its foundations, down to its title and its divisions. The questions stay open: what the last vision showed (XLII); what Love means by the centre of the circle (XII); whether the donna gentile is a woman or a philosophy. Held a step down because the well, though deep, is narrow.

Score: 9.2 / 10

8Pressure on Tradition (Agon)

The field is Italian literature and, through it, the European lyric. The force is a new kind of book: a sequence of lyrics made into the history of a soul. The Commedia names its author as the one who drew forth “le nove rime” (the new rhymes, Purg. XXIV), beginning with Donne ch’avete. Held from the top because much of its reach runs through the Commedia and through Petrarch; delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the book was not printed until 1576. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Boccaccio’s transcription and his life of Dante; Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which made a lyric sequence of one life and one dead beloved the dominant form of the European lyric for three centuries; and the nineteenth-century revival, in Rossetti’s translation (1861) and paintings, Charles Eliot Norton’s translation (1867) and T. S. Eliot’s Dante (1929).

Score: 9.0 / 10

9The Imperishable (Aphtharsia)

Survival is demonstrated, with no discount for age: about seven hundred and thirty years, the text whole, carried in manuscript, in print since 1576 and in the national edition since 1932, read in Italian schools and translated widely; Project Gutenberg alone carries it in Italian, English, French, Dutch and Finnish. It became a painter’s lifelong subject in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and Dante’s Dream. The form is legible, the text entire, the presence continuous since the nineteenth century. Charged: a surface fixed to its moment larger than the great epics carry, in the physiology of the spirits, the coterie of the fedeli d’Amore, the numerology and the divisions, all of which now need a note; and a readership that comes to it, much of it, as the Commedia’s prelude.

Score: 9.0 / 10

10The Made (Techne)

Judged on Dante’s Italian; the music of the verse is heard only as far as this reading hears it, and is neither credited nor charged beyond that. Tanto gentile turns on “pare” and “par” (seems) in both quatrains and the last tercet, so that the poem is about seeming and showing, and it ends on its one imperative: “Che va dicendo all’anima: sospira.” (that goes saying to the soul: sigh). Donne ch’avete is a canzone whose whole matter is praise; Donna pietosa is a canzone that narrates. The prose, built on “onde”, “conciossiacosa che” and “avvegna che”, latinate and slow, holds the street, the dream and the gloss in one sentence. Charged: the early sonnets in Cavalcanti’s manner, the double sonnets of VII and VIII with their “d’ogni torto tortoso” (VIII), and the formula of the divisions.

Score: 9.2 / 10

11The Inner Law (Cosmos)

One law governs the whole: Beatrice works on whoever sees her, and what she works is written down. The two most distant elements, the comedy of the screen lady, made “ischermo della veritade” (a screen for the truth, V) because she sat on the line of his gaze, and the ninefold reckoning of a death in Ptolemy’s heavens (XXIX), obey it: everything is the working of her presence or its record, and even the deceit is told for what it cost the greeting. Love walks and laughs as a person and is then said to be “un accidente in sostanza” (an accident in a substance, XXV): the book names its apparent breach and closes it. Charged: the range is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence; and the donna gentile, a real temptation given four sonnets, is undone by one vision of the child in crimson (XXXIX) more quickly than her weight prepares.

Score: 9.0 / 10

12The Encompassed (Megethos)

A short form, and the low mark describes the form. Held: consciousness, minutely, from the three spirits of II to the self split into heart and soul, “L’anima dice al cor” (the soul says to the heart, XXXVIII); the sacred and the nine moving heavens (XXIX, XLII); the family at the edges, Beatrice’s father’s death (XXII), her brother (XXXII), a kinswoman weeping at Dante’s bed (XXIII); the city, widowed (XXX) and crossed by pilgrims bound for Rome (XL); the history of the vernacular (XXV). What holds the axis here is what the form leaves out: labour, the state, war and the political Florence of the 1290s are absent. What is held is integrated, each order a place where her effect is felt; what is not held is a great deal.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Act IV · The Reckoning

8.9 / 10 · Final Average

Placement: Tier IV · Canonical

Strongest Dimensions

The Living Form at 9.3, with The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.2. A form in which the prose reads the poems after the fact and the divisions give way at the death, so that the knowledge is the gap between them; a myth built on the number nine and the figure of Christ; seven centuries of argument down to the book’s title and divisions; and verse at the summit of the new style beside a latinate prose that holds the street, the dream and the gloss in one sentence.

Limiting Dimension

The Encompassed at 7.6, the mark of a short form: consciousness, the sacred, the nine heavens, the city and the family at its edges are held, each as a place where her effect is felt, and labour, the state, war and the political Florence of the 1290s are absent. Below the rest of the twelve, The Inevitable at 8.7: many of the divisions, nearly a fifth of the words, restate the prose just read, and the double sonnets of VII and VIII are the slackest verse.

The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 107.1, an average of 8.925 that displays 8.9, three tenths short of the 107.4 that would display 9.0; what holds the aggregate down is The Encompassed, the ceiling a short form sets, which the rubric records and does not adjust.

Basis · Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova (in the manuscripts and in some modern editions Vita Nova), written about 1292 to 1295, after the death of Beatrice in 1290, the year the book’s own reckoning gives (XXIX). It is scored as one work: the proem, the prose narrative, the thirty-one poems and the prose divisions in which Dante explains his own poems, all written as one libello (I) and all the maker’s; the divisions are credited and charged with the rest. The Convivio, where Dante gives the donna gentile a second sense as Philosophy, is a separate work. Every axis is judged on Dante’s Italian. The text read is Project Gutenberg e-text #71218, La vita nuova, which reproduces the Roux e Viarengo edition (Turin and Rome, dated 1903 on its title page) and states that it follows the text of Alessandro D’Ancona (Pisa, 1872). It is complete, in Barbi’s order, without chapter numbers. Michele Barbi’s critical text (1907; national edition, 1932) is not in hand; D’Ancona’s differs from it in spelling and in minor readings, and no judgment here turns on a variant. Citations are by Barbi’s chapters, I to XLII, mapped onto the unnumbered text by the openings of its passages; the words from Purgatorio XXIV are quoted from the Italian Commedia, Project Gutenberg e-text #1012. Counts on this page were made on the Italian, from the proem to the last word, with the illustration captions removed. Translation · Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The New Life, first printed in The Early Italian Poets (1861), Project Gutenberg e-text #41085 (the Siddal Edition, 1899), read beside the Italian for sense only. It was used because it is the only English in hand; it is a poet’s version, free by its translator’s own admission, and so it is not quoted, and nothing in it is charged to the book. The closer versions of Mark Musa, Barbara Reynolds and Andrew Frisardi are not in hand. Every quotation on this page is Dante’s Italian or Latin, checked against the file, and the English beside or beneath it is the desk’s own literal rendering. The music of late thirteenth-century Florentine verse as its first hearers heard it, the cursus of the prose, and the full weight of words such as gentile, salute and pietà among the fedeli d’Amore are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged.