The English Life of the Vita Nova. Translation and Reception from the Victorians to the Present, ed. by Jacob Blakesley and Federica Coluzzi (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 2022
In his Preface to a recent NYRB reprint of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The New Life 1-Rossetti's 186... more In his Preface to a recent NYRB reprint of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The New Life 1-Rossetti's 1861 translation of Dante's Vita Nuovathe poet and translator Michael Palmer reflects on Dante's importance to early twentiethcentury modernism 'in its broadest reaches and to much of the literature that followed' (Palmer, 2008, p. 61). Palmer acknowledges that the Comme dia exerted the greater force, but suggests that 'the quieter influence of the Vita Nuova and the lyrics of the stilnovisti should not be underestimated'. Poets' interest in the libello, he claims, had to do with their desire 'to break free from the hothouse of neoromantic ornament that late Victorian poetry was perceived, justly or not, to have become' (ibid., p. 61). Dante was not only recruited by the modernists, but was also a key point of reference for American poets in the mid-century too. This chapter investigates Robert Duncan's reception of Dante and his Vita Nuova, 2 broadly focusing on Dante's role in Duncan's articulation of notions such as those of 'poetic community' and 'literary tradition'notions which many deemed to be central to Duncan's poetry and poe tics (Davidson, 1989, pp. 125-49). 3 To this purpose, I shall make broader reference to the Berkeley Renaissance, 4 the 1940s queer poetic movement from which Duncan came forth, consisting of former students of the University of California, Berkeley, in which Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser were key figures. 5 Their reception of Dante was indebted of course to the central figures of earlier Anglo-American modernism-Pound, Yeats, and Eliotbut also to the teaching of the medievalist and historian Ernst Kantorowicz, under whom Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser studied between 1946 and 1949. 6 Following on from Palmer's crucial intuition (crucial because Palmer himself emerges from the later affiliated San Francisco Renaissance movement), I shall argue that Duncan's allusions to Dante and his work-Dante's presence as an intertext in Duncan's poetry, but also Duncan's translations and his debt to Dante in his own reflections on poetic prac ticeraise important questions about poetic community, lyric sub jectivity, and translation practice. More than just a vehicle 'to break free' from past poetic tradition, the Vita Nuova was instrumental for Duncan
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