The New Life
is the masterpiece of Dante’s youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death. An allegory of the soul’s crisis and growth, combining prose and poetry, narrative and meditation, dreams and songs and prayers,
is a work of crystalline beauty and fascinating complexity that has long taken its place as one of the supreme revelations in the literature of love.
is published here in the beautiful translation by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an inspired poetic re-creation comparable to Edward Fitzgerald’s
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
and a classic in its own right.
This English-only edition does not include the poems in their original language.