◦
“Introduction
to Part II” (in
Early Italian Poets)
189-193
◦
Foster and Boyd, Dante's Lyric Poetry,
I.78-79 (II. 125-127)
.
◦
De Robertis, ed., Vita Nuova, 185-187
.
This collection contains 10 texts and images, including:
Early Italian Poets text.
Scholarly Commentary
Introduction
This sonnet follows on its paired sonnet “My lady looks so gentle and so pure” (see commentary for the latter). DGR's “aesthetic” reading of his source text, marked most clearly in the first sonnet by an echo of Shelley, here comes forward, as so often with DGR, in a dramatic moment of “mistranslation” at lines 7-8. DGR uses a pictorial—indeed, an ekphrastic—figure to signal Beatrice's “perfect. . .beauty” where Dante's is vestmental.
DGR's source text was “Vede perfettamente ogni salute” in the third volume of Fraticell's Opere Minori di Dante Alighieri.
Textual History: Composition
An early work, probably late 1840s.
Printing History
The translation was first published in 1861 in The Early Italian Poets; it was reprinted in 1874 in Dante and his Circle.