La Vita Nuova (Italian for "The New Life") or Vita Nova (Latin title) is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse.
Referred to by Dante as his libello, or "little book," La Vita Nuova is the first of two collections of verse written by Dante in his life. The collection is a prosimetrum, a piece containing both verse and prose, in the vein of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Dante used each prosimetrum as a means for combining poems written over periods of roughly ten years-La Vita Nuova contains his works from before 1283 to roughly 1293. The collection and its style fit in with the movement called dolce stil novo.
The prose creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante's way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Dante and his poet-friends inherited from the Provençal poets, the Sicilian poets of the court of Frederick II, and the Tuscan poets before them). Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered on the self and more aimed at love itself. He intended to elevate courtly love poetry, many of its tropes and its language, into sacred love poetry. Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love-transparent to the Absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor.
The first full translation into English was published by Joseph Garrow in 1846.
Besides its content, La Vita Nuova is notable for being written in Tuscan vernacular, rather than Latin; Dante's work helped to establish Tuscan as the basis for the national Italian language.
American poet Wallace Stevens called the text "one of the great documents of Christianity," noting that the text displays the influence of Christianity in promulgating "the distinctly feminine virtues in place of the sterner ideals of antiquity."
The Henry Holiday painting Dante and Beatrice (1883) is inspired by La Vita Nuova, as was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Salutation of Beatrice (1859). Rossetti translated the work into English in 1848 and used the character name Monna Vanna from it as a title for his 1866 painting Monna Vanna.
La vita nuova is a 1902 cantata based on the text by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari.
Vladimir Martynov's 2003 opera Vita Nuova premiered in the U.S. on February 28, 2009 at the Alice Tully Hall, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski.
A modified version of the opening line of the work's Introduction was used on the television show Star Trek: Voyager in the episode "Latent Image" (1999). The Doctor is concerned with a moral situation and Captain Janeway reads this book and leaves the Doctor to discover the poem.
The author Allegra Goodman wrote a short story entitled "La Vita Nuova", published in the May 3, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, in which Dante's words (in English) are interspersed throughout the piece. (wikipedia.org)
