L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURS DAY,   JULY  11,   2013 PAGE  35 Book Review Hungry Hearts: A New Translation Restores the Shock and Awe of Dante's Vita Nuova ANTHONy DI RENZO Hannibal Lecter, a fugitive from justice, begins a new life in Florence. Disguised as a curator, the exiled serial killer becomes fascinated by another exile, Dante Alighieri. One day, Lecter attends an opera based on Dante's Vita Nuova. As the singers playing Dante and Beatrice gaze into each other's eyes, a female acquaintance asks whether it is possible for a man to become obsessed with a woman after a single encounter. Lecter, who pines for his own Beatrice, the angelic FBI agent Clarice Stallings, weighs the question. "Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her and find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so," Lecter replies. "But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?" Joseph Noel Paton, Dante Meditating (1852) This scene from Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001) testifies to the power of La Vita Nuova (The New Life). Even a monster like Lecter, who feasts on his enemies like Ugolino in the Inferno, is touched by its insight. We are driven by urges that can never be fully fathomed or controlled; but by struggling to understand and articulate our animal desires, we become more fully human. Because the postmodern academy does not take these ideas seriously, however, ordinary people are denied Dante's wisdom. Fortunately, Sicilian American poet Emanuel di Pasquale and independent scholar Bruno Alemanni have published a new translation of the Vita Nuova (Xenos Books 2012). Rendered in everyday English, with useful footnotes and an elegant afterword, their edition makes Dante's early masterpiece relevant and accessible to contemporary readers. Written when Dante was in his twenties, the Vita Nuova is a stranger work than the Divine Comedy. A mixture of poetry, memoir, psychoanalysis, and criticism, the book chronicles Dante's love for Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a prominent banker. The two meet as children at a May Day party, encounter each other again as teens, and are separated when Beatrice dies young. This tragic loss changes Dante's life and inspires his poetry. Di Pasquale and Alemanni restore the shock and awe of this familiar story by making Dante a flesh-and-blood contemporary, not a marble bust in a library. Dante was no ascetic. Love and lust, he believed, as an initiate in the cult of courtly love, are not opposed but form a continuum. The "love that moves the sun and the other stars" extends from the highest heaven to the lowest rutting beast. Passages in the Paradiso are ripe with sex. As Dante and Beatrice ascend to the Empyrean, the sight of her glory arouses him. The first glimpse of this beatific vision, however, appears in the Vita Nuova, a far more corporeal work, even at its most hallucinatory. "Everybody's got a hungry heart," sings modern troubadour Bruce Springsteen. Dante takes this fact literally. In one vision, Love feeds his burning heart to a naked Beatrice. Di Pasquale and Alemanni's new translation perfectly balances poetics and somatics, capturing both Dante's hothouse eroticism and his ironic critique of romantic excess. It is also one of the few translations to do justice to the book's sly humor. When Dante first sees Beatrice, his vital and animate spirits, dwelling respectively in the heart and the brain, marvel at this revelation; in contrast, the animal spirit (lodged in the liver) gripes. Like all lovesick poets, Dante is about to lose his appetite and suffer cramps! Di Pasquale and Alemanni allow sarcasm to form a counterpoint to longing. We laugh at Dante as he practices his sighs, endures the taunts of Beatrice's girlfriends, and employs a decoy to keep his true love secret. Dante may chew up the scenery but offstage is always the voice of his cynical friend Guido Cavalcanti, who plays Mercutio to Dante's Romeo. Dante's true love affair, however, is with language. The Vita Nuova is his Valentine to the vernacular. Despite its eru- dition and mysticism, the book is composed not in polished Latin but rough Tuscan. Dante's contemporaries, in fact, accused him of being "a poet fit for cobblers." Unlike most translations, which are ornate and artificial, Di Pasquale and Alemanni's remains demotic, without sacrificing the beauty of Dante's verse. Take, for example, the opening line to the canzone: "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore." Most translators render this "Ladies who have intelligence or knowledge of love." Di Pasquale and Alemanni's reads "You ladies who are versed in love," which better captures the music and meaning of the original. Dante's libello (little book) is intimate and existential. To enhance its drama, this translation personifies love and death as Amore and Morte, making these entities seem less like allegorical abstractions and more like Freud's eternal antagonists: Eros and Thanatos. Equally effective, di Pasquale and Alemanni let Dante's poetic line follow the human breath. They cast his medieval Italian, not in rhymed English iambics, but in unrhymed variable meters that register every shift in Dante's thought, every catch in his throat. This technique naturalizes Dante's poetry without dishonoring its formality. Often the effect is psychologically powerful. When Dante recites his eulogy to the dead Beatrice ("The eyes that bear the pity of the heart"), he literally chokes on his tears. Di Pasquale and Alemanni are equally skillful with the book's prose. Like Hemingway, they make the most of common words, whether showing Dante's drawing angels on tablets or observing pilgrims pass through Florence. They also make the abstract concrete. Dante's academic asides daunt most translators. Dante Gabriel Rossetti ceded these passages to his brother William. David Slavitt completely eliminated them. Di Pasquale and Alemanni, however, make them sing. They treat Dante's commentary not as a lecture but as a manifesto. As students of Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown, di Pasquale and Alemanni understand and respect Dante's erotic philosophy. Centuries before the sexual revolution, Dante imagined a new civilization based on carnal affirmation. As A. N. Wilson explains in Dante in Love: "He was certain that love was going to bring about great changes in his lifetime—changes to the Church, changes to the way that society is ordered—as well as changes in the relations between men and women. To this extent, Dante and Beatrice are to be seen as subversives, as revolutionaries, in the sphere of human or secular love." This gospel of desire is badly needed in an age of leather bars and cyberporn. If Dante's times considered sex a curse or a sin, a catastrophe to be avoided or appeased through numerology and astrology, our times define sex as a twitch or a complex: a random product of Darwinian adaptation or a digital illusion generated by algorithms. Scribes use institutional power and abstract discourse to denigrate erotic love, while skeptics deny the possibility of agency and enlightenment because both spring from biology. Dominated by materialists and technocrats, the postmodern academy urges us to abandon love and poetry and to embrace the post-human future. Popular culture, however, suggests that even robots need Dante. In a Star Trek: Voyager episode called "Latent Image," the ship's Doctor (a computer generated holograph played by the Italian American actor Robert Picardo) takes another step in his difficult evolution towards humanity by reading the opening to the Vita Nuova: "In that book, which is my memory, on the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you appear the words, 'Here begins a new life.'" Who wrote the Book of Love? After seven centuries, the answer to the Montone's classic question remains Dante Alighieri. Read Emanuel di Pasquale and Bruno Alemanni's new translation and you too will cry: "Vide cor meuum!" Behold my heart.

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