The sonnet takes an important place in the final movement of the Vita Nuova
This complexity and deliberated confusion re-appears in DGR's translation in (perhaps) an even more acute form; for the first person syntax now acquires a further complication, the masked voice of DGR. Two passages are especially notable. First, lines 5-8: note how DGR leaves this difficult passage in an absolute grammatical space (no syntax makes clear what word is being modified by “Seeing”). Second, similar ambiguities play through the sestet, ambiguities that are not present in Dante's text but that, in DGR's, nicely complement the suggestive obscurities of the original sonnet. So we see the final tercet might mean either that the inmost spirit harbors a “bitter scorn of everything that mourns its joy etc.”; or that there is a “bitter scorn of everything sent by the spirit etc.”. Similarly, line 9's “Also in sighing ye shall hear me call” mistranslates Dante's literal sense, where it is the “sighs”, not the first person voice, that “calls”.
DGR's source text was
“Venite a intender li sospiri miei” in the third volume of Fraticelli's
Opere
Minori di Dante Alighieri
An early work, late 1840s.
The translation was first published in 1861 in
The
Early Italian Poets
Dante
and his Circle
Early Italian Poets)Dante's Lyric Poetry