Tag Archives: Dante Alighieri

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First sonnet of Dante Alighieri’s “La Vita Nuova,” translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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This is me reading Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s stylized translation of “La Vita Nuova,” by Dante Alighieri.

 

To every heart which the sweet pain doth move,

And unto which these words may now be brought

For true interpretation and kind thought,

Be greeting in our Lord’s name, which is Love.

Of those long hours wherein the stars, above,

Wake and keep watch, the third was almost nought,

When Love was shown me with such terrors fraught

As may not carelessly be spoken of.

He seemed like one who is full of joy, and had

My heart within his hand, and on his arm

My lady, with a mantle round her, slept;

Whom (having wakened her) anon he made

To eat that heart; she ate, as fearing harm.

Then he went out; and as he went, he wept.

 

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An excerpt from the first sonnet of “La Vita Nuova,” by Dante Alighieri (read by Eric Robert Nolan)

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This is not the complete sonnet. Neither is it necessarily the best translation of Dante’s original words.  It is merely one of the more direct and literal translations that one can find online (and it’s therefore easy to read). Fans of Ridley Scott’s “Hannibal” (2000) might recognize this as being featured in the film.

 

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Evolution stinks sometimes.

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Soooooo, I finally gained a true appreciation earlier tonight of how bad a skunk could smell.  I’ve smelled them before … I’ve been in Virginia for a while now, and I actually spotted my first skunk in upstate New York when I was a kid.  (They’re not pretty.)  But this is the first time I’ve encountered a full dose from an animal that was evidently nearby.

Dear Lord.

This was the olfactory equivalent of Dante Alighieri’s worst visions of hell.  The odor was at once strangely metallic, horribly organic and chemically toxic.   If one of Michael Bay’s “Transformers” were possessed by the demon from William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist,” and it wielded flatulence to punish the damned, this would be it.  If the three Kryptonian villains from 1980’s “Superman II” had been poisoned by chili laced with spoiled pork and Ex-Lax, this would be it.

Skunks might now top my list of hated animals, were it not for my enduring abhorrence of alligators.

Earwigs are moving up on that list, too — at least since I spotted one at 7:15 tonight in my kitchen.  Earwigs look like God tried to make a proper beetle while on acid.

 

 

 

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“Trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand.”

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“In his arms, my lady lay asleep, wrapped in a veil. He woke her then and trembling and obedient she ate that burning heart out of his hand. Weeping I saw him then depart from me.

“Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her?  Find nourishment in the very sight of her?  I think so.  But would she see through the bars of his plight, and ache for him?”

— Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, First Sonnet.

(Everyone else is quoting Shakespeare today; I just figured I’d go in the other direction.)

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