Vita nova
In his youth work Vita nova (more recent spelling: Vita nuova , also La vita nuova ; German Neues Leben or Das neue Leben ) Dante Alighieri describes his love for Beatrice , which has renewed his life. The prose work was created in the years up to 1293, the first print appeared in 1576.
In the narrow ribbon, Dante develops the story of his great love in the tradition of medieval love poetry . The term “new” has multiple meanings, referring to both the youth of lovers and the renewing power of love, as well as the new style. The historical background of the story is disputed. The text consists of a narrative commentary that connects a number of sonnets and canzons .
Structure and poetics
42 short chapters connect 25 sonnets, a ballad and four canzons through the story of Dante's great love for Beatrice, told in prose . The reason for writing and the content of the poems are explained in comments. The Vita Nova has a frame structure. If at the beginning there is the encounter of the child lovers, at the end the beloved appears to him again in a vision in the shape and clothes of the first encounter.
In addition to the actual love story, the work contains a number of reflections on writing and poetry in the Tuscan language. The conscious decision in favor of the vernacular appears as a move towards a language of love, since understanding Latin verses is difficult for the venerated women.
Dante's “New Life” appears as a defining document of a new style, the “ dolce stil nuovo ” (= sweet new style), which is differentiated from sources of courtly Minnesian poetry and classical poetry. It is an important literary movement that began at the end of the 13th century with Guido Guinizelli and was so named by Dante himself. It arose from trobadord poetry and the Sicilian school of poetry and is important for the development of the Italian national language. Love is exaggerated and viewed as a divine power, accompanied by many symbols and metaphors. Compared to the Provencal singers of the time and their openly sensual texts, love in dolce stil nuovo takes on a metaphysical - platonic trait. The adored woman is an angelic being sent by God. The beauty of the beloved is highly praised.
In Dante's work, love appears mystically and religiously as an advertisement for the mere greeting of the beloved, who through beauty and virtue is more a sign of divine greatness than a woman of flesh and blood. The spiritual connection between religious visions and earthly love is mediated by number- mystical speculations, dreams and appearances. The Eros the god of love, is complemented with the Christian idea of Trinity and Ptolemaic notions of order in the world.
The work not only documents and comments on the lyrical production of Dante's youth, but also stands out from the literature of the time through its autobiographical intention. It is not about the concrete development and representation of everyday events, but exclusively about the emotional development of the lover, his way through the ritualized love relationship to spiritual turning away from instincts and everyday conflicts. Dante research sees “Vita nuova” not only as the love story, but as the basis of Dante's main work, the Divina Commedia (“ Divine Comedy ”). Dante felt called to see her there again through her lover, who had been taken to heaven.
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The “glorious mistress of his heart” appeared to Dante for the first time when he was nine years old. “Incipit vita nova” is how he headed this encounter - a new life begins with the love for Beatrice. But it wasn't until nine years later, at the ninth hour of the day, that she spoke to him for the first time. This speech confuses him so much that he takes refuge in his room and falls asleep. In the dream the figure of his master appears to him ("Ego dominus tuus"), in his arms the naked Beatrice, barely covered by a blood-red cloth, in his hand the glowing heart of the lover. The God of love moves the awakening Beatrice to eat the lover's heart. The dream ends with an anticipation of Beatrice's death: Weeping, the god floats off into heaven with Beatrice. When he wakes up, Dante summarizes his dream in a sonnet, which he recites to his friends, but hides the name of the loved one.
- The Lord of Love
- (Translation by Richard Dehmel )
- To everyone who joins the league with a noble spirit
- the heavenly powers serve in the valleys of the earth
- and willingly do what they ordered,
- come from the spirit of love my client.
- It was night and already the fourth hour
- then suddenly I saw everything shining around me
- and before me stood the lord of love torments,
- his look terrified me to the bottom.
- At first he seemed happy. In the hand of the one
- he held my heart; on his arm, however
- my mistress slept, pale, in red linen.
- He woke her, and let her of the little one
- and eat completely glowing hearts shyly.
- Then he escaped from me crying loudly.
The love for Beatrice begins to undermine his health. When the whole world begins to be interested in the identity of the beloved who makes him so unhappy, he uses a coincidence to pretend love for another noblewoman ( donna dello schermo ). Hiding the true loved one becomes an important motive. On a trip, the god of love appears to him again and recommends a new lady of the heart when the noblewoman moves away.
This camouflage becomes a problem when Beatrice learns of Dante's devotion to the other women and therefore refuses to greet him. Desperate about the loss of the greeting, the aim and meaning of his love, he withdraws into solitude, where the God of love appears again and commands him to give up the game of hide and seek and reveal himself to Beatrice in verse.
The love for Beatrice, however, remains ideal, unfulfilled. He also only takes part from afar in Beatrice's mourning for her late father. The lover falls ill again and sees his own death in a vision, but then that of the loved one. The image of the beloved being led into paradise by angels awakens in him the longing for death (“Come, sweet death”) as the only way to be united with her.
Dante reflects on the meaning and form of love poetry in the Tuscan language (Chapter 25). The love for a woman who was unable to speak Latin ( grammatica ) motivated the poets to use everyday language ( volgare ). He sees the use of literary means (bringing dead and unreal things to life, "rhetorical adornment") as justified if the poet is able to explain the meaning of these stylistic means in prose. Dante refers to the classics of antiquity: Virgil , Lucan , Horace , Homer and Ovid . Dante's strict verdict applies to the use of rhetorical jewelry without any explainable meaning.
The beauty of Beatrice begins to fascinate others too. It becomes a testimony to the greatness of God who created such beings. By virtue of her virtue she does not create envy, but rather induces humility.
Like their first encounter, Dante places Beatrice's death, which he does not want to describe, under the mystical symbol of the number nine . He notes that Beatrice died on the ninth day of the Arabian era, the ninth month of the year according to the Syrian era, and the year in which the perfect number ten was completed nine times according to our era . Depending on the calculation method, Beatrice's date of death is given as June 17, 1290 or June 8, 1290, in places also as June 12, 1290 or June 9, 1290, but without information on the procedure. Dante refers to the Ptolemaic worldview and its nine heavens, Beatrice's relationship to the nine indicates that when she was born the nine heavens were in the best possible constellation. In parable terms, Beatrice is herself the nine, the root of which is the Holy Trinity . God took Beatrice to himself because the earth was full of evil and no place for such a being.
Beatrice's death leads to Dante longing for death and contempt for life. He calls death to see her in heaven as a love light that amazes even the angels. A young woman's pity ( donna gentile ) for his grief awakens love for her in Dante, which he perceives as betrayal. In a vision, Beatrice appears to him “one day around the ninth hour” in the childlike form in which she first met him, which ends all wishes for new love. The book ends with a new vision. This makes him stop talking about Beatrice until he can do it in a better way. He wants to strive for that and hopes to be able to talk about Beatrice in a new way in the future, in a way that a woman has never been talked about before. He fulfills this promise with his work "The Divine Comedy ".
reception
Bertolt Brecht's literary engagement with Dante
Bertolt Brecht criticized Dante's Platonic love literary in a poem entitled “The twelfth sonnet” with the later added subtitle “On the poems of Dante on Beatrice” . The sonnet belongs to a group of 13 poems addressed to Brecht's absent lover Margarete Steffin and was composed in 1934. The first two verses already make the direction of this criticism clear:
- Still above the dusty tomb
- In which she lies, which he wasn't allowed to fuck
Brecht sent this sonnet and others from this collection to Margarete Steffin, who answered them “with sonnets of a similar caliber (...). Literature replaced cohabitation. ”But Brecht's intention goes beyond this self-deprecating confrontation with his biographical situation. With his drastic language, Brecht abolishes the idealizing approach to the classics and brings them “back to the ground of banal everyday life”, albeit in the classic form of the sonnet. Brecht editor Jan Knopf sees this ambiguous approach as a determination of Brecht's position in the Marxist literary debate. Against Georg Lukács 'Concept of Socialist Realism' , which called for an alignment with the classical heritage, Brecht wanted to deal with the classics "critically and militantly". Instead of orienting itself towards the traditional forms, literature has to be measured against reality.
Brecht's literary rejection of Dante's concept of love ends in the 12th sonnet with an ironic transfer to the present:
- Since he sang at the mere sight of it
- Applies to what looks pretty and crosses the street
- And what never gets wet is considered desirable.
Brecht also deals with Dante in the poem “The Thirteenth Sonnet”. Despite his abstinence, Dante appears here as the author who brought the drastic language of the people into poetry:
- The word you have often held up to me
- Comes from the Florentine, everywhere
- Woman's shame is called Fica. You switch
- The great Dante is therefore raw
- Because he used the word in poetry.
Unsurprisingly, Dante did not use this word or an Italian equivalent in his poems. What Brecht wanted to emphasize drastically is Dante's use of the Italian vernacular.
Dante motifs for Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk have literarily inspired motifs from Dante's Vita Nova. In his novel “Yeni Hayat” (The New Life) , Pamuk first takes up Dante's motif of the sudden change in life as a whole. In the case of Pamuk, however, it initially seems to be a book from which this sudden change in the hero originates. But even with Pamuk, the new life is linked to the experience of a surprising encounter with a beautiful woman, an encounter with the architecture student Canan. Like Dante's Beatrice when they first met, Canan Pamuk's hero Osman appears in a purple robe. Pamuk also takes up Dante's mystical numbers and color symbolism in his work.
Scoring and stage version
Between 1901 and 1902 the German-Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari wrote the oratorio “La Vita Nuova” on texts from Dante's poetry as his op. The work for soprano and baritone solo, double choir, boys' choir, organ and orchestra was premiered on March 21, 1903 in Munich.
A stage version staged by Fred Berndt at the Berlin Renaissance Theater with compositions by Uri Rom was premiered on March 14, 2010 with actor Tilo Prückner and soprano Janet Williams in Leverkusen.
Annotated Italian-language editions
- Alighieri, Dante: La Vita Nuova, a cura di Tommaso Casini , Florence 1962.
- Alighieri, Dante: Vita Nuova , introduzione di Giorgio Petrocchi, nota al testo e commento di Marcello Ciccuto, Milan 1984 (and new editions).
Translations
- F. v. Oeyenhausen (ed.): The new life . Leipzig 1824.
- Karl Förster (ed.): The new life . Leipzig 1841.
- Karl Witte (Ed.): La Vita Nuova . Brockhaus, Leipzig 1876.
- Karl Federn (Ed.): The new life . Hendel, Halle 1897.
- Adolf Hüdinger (Ed.): The new life . Munich 1905.
- Richard Zoozmann (ed.): The new life . Hesse, Leipzig 1907.
- Otto Hauser (Author) (Ed.): The new life . Julius Bard, Berlin 1921.
- Else Thamm (Ed.): The new life . Tempel-Verlag, Leipzig 1922 (Italian, German).
- Rudolf Borchardt (Ed.): Vita Nova . Rowohlt, Berlin 1922.
- H. Müller (Ed.): Vita nuova . Jena 1941.
- Hanneliese Hinderberger (Ed.): The new life . Basel 1947.
- Friedrich Freiherrn von Falkenhausen (ed.): New life . Insel, Leipzig 1952.
- Sophie Hildebrandt (ed.): New life . Böhlau, Cologne / Graz 1957 (Italian, German).
- Karl Federn and Richard Zoozmann (eds.): The new life . 1958 (Italian, German).
- Karl Federn (Ed.): Vita nuova . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1964 (Italian, German).
- Hanneliese Hinderberger (Ed.): The new life . Manesse Verlag, Zurich 1987, ISBN 978-3-7175-8111-6 .
- Anna Coseriu and Ulrike Kunkel (eds.): Vita Nova. The new life . dtv klassik, Munich 1988, ISBN 978-3-423-02199-9 (Italian, German).
- Thomas Vormbaum (ed.): The new life . Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8305-1334-6 (Italian, German).
- Thomas Vormbaum (ed.): The new life . Reclam, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-15-019216-0 .
literature
- Friedrich Schneider: Dante, his life and work. 5th edition. Böhlau, Weimar 1960, OCLC 10866946 .
- Chiara Vasciaveo - Valentina Loiodice: Dante, Il Bifoglio della "Vita Nuova" (Frammento Trespiano 1325-1350) nel Carmelo di S. Maria degli Angeli e S. Maria Maddalena de 'Pazzi in Firenze . in Vivens Homo, 28/2 (2017), 321–334.
- Winfried Wehle : Poetry about poetry. Dante's 'Vita Nuova': The lifting of minstrels in the epic. Fink, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-7705-2427-6 ( PDF ).
- Winfried Wehle: "Innamoramento". The impetus of the heart as the beginning of thinking and poetry (Dante: Vita Nova, I – III). In: Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 89 (2014), pp. 83-106 ( PDF ).
Web links
- Text from Vita Nova at www.liberliber.it
- Link collection of the German Dante Society
- Vita Nuova MP3 audio book
Remarks
- ↑ Dante, Divine Comedy, Purgatorio XXIV 49 ff.
- ↑ See for example Friedrich Schneider: Dante, his life and work , p. 69 f.
- ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition , ed. by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, Klaus Detlev Müller, Vol. 11, Poems 1, Berlin, Weimar, Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 190.
- ↑ Bertolt Brecht: Werke , Vol. 11, Notes p. 359: "The sonnets arise as a kind of compensation for the distant lover."
- ↑ Jan Knopf: The twelfth sonnet. In: interpretations. Poems by Bertolt Brecht , Stuttgart 1995, p. 106.
- ↑ Jan Knopf: The twelfth sonnet , p. 108.
- ↑ Bertolt Brecht: Werke , Vol. 11, p. 190, verses 1-5 of the sonnet
- ↑ See Bertolt Brecht: Werke , Vol. 11, p. 362.
- ↑ Audio samples from the music for La vita nova by Uri Rom (vocals: Janet Williams) ( Memento of the original from December 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Review in Neue Musikzeitung Online
