Page:Dante and His Circle, with the Italian Poets Preceding Him.djvu/48

4 having occurred simultaneously with his first sight of Beatrice), appears the primary one, and therefore the most necessary to be given in a translation. The probability may be that both were meant, but this I cannot convey. I must hazard here (to relieve the first page of my translation from a long note) a suggestion as to the meaning of the most puzzling passage in the whole Vita Nuova,—that sentence just at the outset which says, "La gloriosa donna della mia mente, la quale fù chiamata da molti Beatrice, i quali non sapeano che si chiamare." On this passage all the commentators seem helpless, turning it about and sometimes adopting alterations not to be found in any ancient manuscript of the work. The words mean literally, "The glorious lady of my mind who was called Beatrice by many who knew not how she was called." This presents the obvious difficulty that the lady's name really was Beatrice, and that Dante throughout uses that name himself. In the text of my version I have adopted, as a rendering, the one of the various compromises which seemed to give the most beauty to the meaning. But it occurs to me that a less irrational escape out of the difficulty than any I have seen suggested may possibly be found by linking this passage with the close of the sonnet at page 69 of the Vita Nuova, beginning, "I felt a spirit of Love begin to stir," in the last line of which sonnet Love is made to assert that the name of Beatrice is Love. Dante appears to have dwelt on this fancy with some pleasure, from what is said in an earlier sonnet (page 38) about "Love in his proper form" (by which Beatrice seems to be meant) bending over a dead lady. And it is in connection with the sonnet where the name of Beatrice is said to be Love, that Dante, as if to show us that the Love he speaks of is only his own emotion, enters into an argument as to Love being merely an accident in substance,—in other words, "Amore e il cor gentil son una cosa." This conjecture may be pronounced extravagant; but the Vita Nuova, when examined, proves so full of intricate and fantastic analogies, even in the mere arrangement of its parts (much more than appears on any but the closest scrutiny), that it seems admissible to suggest even a whimsical solution of a difficulty which remains unconquered. Or to have recourse to the much more welcome means of solution afforded by simple inherent beauty: may not the meaning be merely that any person looking on so noble and lovely a creation, without knowledge of her name, must have spontaneously called her Beatrice,—i.e., the giver of blessing? This would be analogous by antithesis to the translation I have adopted in my text.