Dante and His Circle

9780942208092

0942208099

The young Dante's poems to Beatrice (Vita Nuova) & love sonnets by 14 Italian Renaissance poets. Dante Alighieri & fourteen of his contemporaries (including Guido Cavalcanti & Giotto, with an homage by Boccaccio) explored in Italian the love, poetry tradition of the Provencal troubadours. Many of these poems respond directly to each other, sometimes tauntingly. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the Pre-Raphelite painter), who translated all these poems, includes as the centerpiece Dante Alighieri's famous work of his youth, the Vita Nuova, a series of poems to Beatrice with a meticulous analysis of how he wrote them. The new impetus given by the ambition of Dante & these poets in northern Italy established a viable Italian literature. These poems are startlingly human in content, marking the first major break with the religious straitjacket of the Middle Ages. The text is modernized to rid it of Rossetti's antiquarian bent (thee, thou, etc.) & is gender-sensitive.