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Dante

Chapter 17: FOOTNOTES:
By Edmund G. Gardner
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About This Book

A concise, scholarly primer that situates the poet within his political and cultural milieu and summarizes his life, political activity, and long exile. It surveys the shorter vernacular poems and lyrical pieces, outlines the author’s Latin treatises and correspondence, and offers a structured reading of the three-part epic, discussing its moral, allegorical, and political dimensions in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Chapters combine biographical narrative, textual commentary, and interpretive notes, while bibliographical appendices, diagrams, and indexes guide further study; the volume presents itself as a revision that balances allegorical readings with the poet’s symbolic national role.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna: dicer (dire) and detta, have here (as elsewhere in Dante) the sense of artistic utterance, and more particularly composition in poetry, whether in Latin or the vernacular. Cf. V. N. xxv.

[11] Livi has shown that the first documentary evidence of the existence of the Vita Nuova as a book is found at Bologna in June 1306.

[12] The Sexcentenary Dante admits as authentic one canzone not included in this series: Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce (Rime lxviii., O. canz. xvi.*); which is evidently an early composition.

[13] Cf. Rime xlviii., lvi., lxiii. and the later xcix.; O. son. xlviii.*, ball. viii., son. I.*, son. xxxvii.*

[14] Note especially Rime lix., lxvi.; O. sonnets lv., xxxviii*.

[15] To this group I would assign the sonnet, Chi guarderà già mai sanza paura, and the ballata, I’ mi son pargoletta bella e nova, without attaching any special significance to the fact that “pargoletta” (“maiden” or “young girl”) occurs also in the canzone, Io son venuto al punto de la rota, and in Beatrice’s rebuke, Purg. xxxi. 59.

[16] Cf. G. Livi, Dante suoi primi cultori sua gente in Bologna, p. 24.

[17] Barbi adds to the Rime written in exile the impressive political sonnet, yearning for justice and peace, Se vedi li docchi miei di pianger vaghi (of which the attribution to Dante has sometimes been questioned), and the sonnet on Lisetta, Per quella via che la bellezza corre, a beautiful piece of unquestionable authenticity, but which may, perhaps, belong to an earlier epoch in the poet’s life.

[18] But cf. Wicksteed, From Vita Nuova to Paradiso, pp. 93-121.