Boethius’s successive prose pieces undertake a sustained dialogue on moral questions with Lady Philosophy, while his interspersed lyrics (varying in form) include exhortations, stories, hymns, prayers, and lamentations. The form was popularized by the sixth-century philosopher Boethius’s Latin work called The Consolation of Philosophy, but Dante’s “little book” (as he called it) could hardly be more different from Boethius’s compendium. (I depend on Frisardi’s scholarly Introduction and Notes for some of what follows.) The Vita Nuova is a “prosimetrum”-a work in which prose alternates with poetry. Andrew Frisardi’s new translation of the Vita Nuova, finely introduced and closely annotated, is a book intended for the general reader who wants to understand the intricacy of Dante’s early undertaking in the deceptively “open” poems of the sequence. We have a fairly solid idea of how Dante ended up, but most of us have a vague notion of how he began.
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