Introduction
Dante's autobiography is the single most important work standing behind
DGR's spiritual and aesthetic endeavors. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that
DGR sought an identification with the great Florentine. The object was less to “imitate”
Dante's style or to recover the ethos of his work, than to open a passage into the
nineteenth-century for a set of cultural and aesthetic attitudes that DGR discovered
in Dante and his world. The
<hi rend="i">Vita Nuova</hi>
was DGR's point of focus—rather than the
<hi rend="i">Commedia</hi>
—probably
because at the outset of his career DGR looked to the autobiography
as both a model and perhaps even a forecast. The fact that DGR always insisted on
reading Dante's narrative as true biography—whatever other allegorical or
symbolic meanings it might have—underscores this devotional and even cultic relation
operating between Dante and DGR. Involved here is something quite beyond Dante serving DGR as
a cultural or artistic model. The translations, and especially the translation of this work, are
the first moves in a series of artistic acts that must be seen as quasi-magical practises. DGR's work
summons the dead via a series of spell-castings that take the form of works of art and poetry; and they
take this form because, for DGR, the spiritual power of Dante and his world is
fundamentally an aesthetic power. All its other virtues—moral, religious, cultural,
philosophical—are functions of that primal power.
If one thinks critically about DGR's work in relation to the
<hi rend="i">Vita Nuova</hi>
,
the parallels between Dante's work and DGR's leap to attention. The symmetry is especially clear
in the case of DGR's masterwork,
“The
House of Life”
. The sonnet sequence
(in its first published form) tells a story of events
that can be interpreted as falling roughly between 1860 and 1871, its key date being the death of
the poet's wife in February 1862. The real-time composition of the sequence as a whole begins in
1869 and is never really completed. Rossetti published two versions,
one in 1870, the second in
1881, though he constructed many more.
The
<hi rend="i">Vita Nuova</hi>
's
story has been similarly circumscribed, its key date falling in
June 1290, the month of Beatrice Portinari's death. The story it tells begins in 1274 when Dante
first sees Beatrice (he is nine years old, she is eight). For nine years—according to the
autobiography's retrospective prose account—he haunts her presence, trying to see her whenever he can.
Then in 1283 she gives him her famous salutation. This event throws him wholly under the
dominion of love. A year or so after Beatrice's death Dante begins to compose his famous narrative.
He completes the work sometime between 1292-1295.
DGR clearly understood the key
formal innovation of Dante's poetical autobiography. He knew that most of the poems inserted in
the
<hi rend="i">Vita Nuova</hi>
narrative were not written
for the reasons and with the meanings supplied by the
autobiographical interpretation. Indeed, many of the poems—for example the crucial first
sonnet—were written entirely apart from the Beatricean—not to say the Portinarian—
circumstances that dominate the work. That interpretive frame is supplied
retrospectively—is initiated, in fact, through the
<hi rend="i">Vita Nuova</hi>
itself.
“Rewriting” thus becomes a central concern of the “new life” theme, and DGR
places that concern at the heart of his translation, both theory and practise. The
“Preface”
to the
1861 volume sets out his theory of verse
translation (which holds that the object of the translation
must be aesthetic fidelity rather than linguistic literality), and the poems themselves
then execute the theory. They are, in DGR's view of the matter, a special genre of
intellectual and programmatic verse: interpretational poems that DGR calls “the most
direct form of commentary” (see the
“Preface”
page viii). In this respect they correspond closely to the group of poems written by Dante's friends
in answer to his opening sonnet,
“To every
heart which the sweet pain doth move”
.
DGR's source text for Dante's autobiography was the third volume of Fraticelli's
<hi rend="i">Opere
Minori di Dante Alighieri</hi>
.
Textual History: Composition
DGR translated this very early, in the late 1840s, and had probably completed it by September-October 1848 (see
Fredeman,
<hi rend="i">Correspondence</hi>
, 48. 12, 49.12
). His brother made the translations
of the prose divisiones in 1861, at DGR's request.
Pictorial
The development of DGR's “double work of art” is nowhere
more elaborately, not to say obsessively, pursued than it is in relation to this work
by Dante. DGR in fact had at one time hoped to produce an edition of Dante's work with
his illustrations of its key texts.
His first pictorial engagement seems to have been the study
he made in September 1848 for the first version of
<hi rend="i">The
First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice</hi>
, a drawing he completed in 1849. After that
followed three works completed in the 1850s:
<hi rend="i">Beatrice Meeting Dante
at a Marriage Feast. Denies him her Salutation</hi>
(1851); the watercolour version
of
<hi rend="i">The
First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice</hi>
(1853);
<hi rend="i">Dante's
Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice</hi>
(the watercolour version of 1856
as well as the vast oil elaboration completed in 1871); the
early version in two panels for
<hi rend="i">The
Salutation of Beatrice</hi>
(1859); and the closely related
<hi rend="i">Dantis Amor</hi>
1859). The
<hi rend="i">Beata Beatrix</hi>
is of
course central, and while its first completed version dates from 1864, DGR had in fact
been working at it for many years. The work exists in many studies and versions. Then there are the late
treatments of subjects from Dante's book:
<hi rend="i">La Donna Della Finestra</hi>
;
the 1879
<hi rend="i">Beatrice</hi>
; and the late version
of
<hi rend="i">The
Salutation of Beatrice</hi>
.
See also the commentary for
<hi rend="i">The
Early Italian Poets</hi>
.
Bibliographic
“Introduction
to Part II” (in
Early Italian Poets)
189-193.
De Robertis ed.,
Vita Nuova
.
De Robertis and Contini, eds.,
Dante. Opere Minori
, 3-247.
McGann,
The Game That Must Be Lost
, Chapters 2 and 3.
Megroz,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, 178-185.
Waller,
The Rossetti Family
, 191-197.