[Don Jones]

Vendler’s “review” is really her take on La Vita Nuova (not, mind you, La Vita Nova to which she gave scant attention), saying rather oddly that Dante’s earlier work is really so much less satisfying when compared to the Commedia.

Her thesis that this earlier work by Dante doesn’t quite succeed, and consequently remains “untranslatable,” is itself unconvincing. Above all, she wrongfully compares this early work to his most read masterpiece on the account that Dante noted in his Convivio that La Vita Nova is a less mature work. Allowing Dante his own extreme demands of himself as an artist and that one shouldn't always accept how a writer judges his/her own work, maturity doesn’t mean the same thing among all artists. It would be like saying Dubliners is an inferior work because it is earlier (i.e. less mature) than Ulysses. It simply doesn’t follow. The works are only different in kind, not in terms of genius in a thoroughly realized work.

Vendler might as well have called La Vita Nova a literary Frankenstein. Near the outset she claims:

The narrative as a whole tells of the poet’s attachment to the lady Beatrice, and the poems, as printed, appear to be responses to, or illustrations of, the narrative. But this appearance of the book is deceiving: the poems were in fact written first, beginning when Dante was eighteen. Only a few years later—after Beatrice had died and Dante had undertaken the study of philosophy—was the frame-story written to surround those earlier lyrics. The “fit” between the narrative and the poems is consequently uneasy: Beatrice is already dead when the prose narrative begins, but as Dante recollects his youth the “inserted” poems themselves record the ongoing life-chronology of love followed by mourning.

Vendler uses a fact outside the work to call into question the nature of the work itself. That the poetry was written first and the prose second is of no more relevance than to know that a writer wrote chapter 16 before Chapter 9. If she would only point to the areas where the work becomes “uneasy” I would like to know. To this reader and to many others, Dante’s La Vita Nova is a convincing and highly unusual meld of prose and poetry. Not at all devoid of drama.

As for not enough imagery in this work compared to the Commedia, she herself in her book The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets noted that the poet used less imagery than in his plays, at times being quite abstract. Why can't such allowance be made for Dante's work?

Even more odd, Vendler barely disguises her curious disdain for the period in which Dante wrote and lived:

As Frisardi warns us, Dante draws on a vocabulary that is Aristotelian in origin but modified by Christian philosophy from Augustine through Aquinas, a vocabulary as foreign to the modern reader as are the special meanings of the topics it discusses...

Did Andrew “warn” us? Why a warning? I know Vendler is winking at the audience and not being literal. But the wink is telling. As another example, she seems bemused by Dante’s obsession with the number 9 as it relates to Beatrice. But metrical poets and arithmetic are never far apart and why not make allowance for Dante's time and place to take his thought seriously rather than belittle as quaint?

Then this oddest thing of all coming from an academic:

Dante’s fantastic reasoning requires pages of annotation, which Frisardi, drawing on a number of commentators, furnishes to the bewildered reader....

That doesn’t keep me from enjoying the read. She is being patronizing. “Bewildered reader” indeed. The type of person who would likely read La Vita Nova is the kind of person who would likely read La Vita Nova.

One more example:

Poems with defined arguments, plain narratives, or clear images are more readily rendered into another language, because a lyric putting forth an argument or a story, clarified by a montage of realistic images (as in Miłosz), can be substantially carried over into another set of words—or at least its arguments, narratives, and images can. But what of poems with a ghostly narrative, few images, an abstract line of argument, and an aspiration toward transcendent language?

The “ghostly” part? How? And if so, what of it? For someone so, and rightfully, enamored of the Modernists, among whom linearity of thought and argument be damned, Vendler should be more than able to handle whatever obstacles there are in reading Dante’s early work. She isn’t being truthful here. In fact, if you didn’t notice, she goes on about her favorite poets to “show up” the work under discussion. All Andrew’s efforts and success are for Vendler a springboard to discuss her favorite poets and their relationship to Dante. It is that agenda above all that should give Andrew umbrage.

As for archaisms, I believe Andrew was after a contemporary English, not a casual one ill suited to Dante’s layers of thought. Contrary to Vendler's claim, “woman” wouldn’t work as it is a generic term for any adult female human being. I want to hear Dante say “Lady” because it rings true of his time, its ethos, its mores, and its historical situation. “Run away” rather than “flee”? “Flee” is hardly archaic. She claims, One cannot imagine a native American speaker referring to his heart’s demolished core. But then one can’t imagine anyone but a poet who would. "Demolished" is quite urban, even global these days. It conveys both physical and mental/emotional breakdown.

Take heart, Andrew. And it's truly true that no press is worse than bad. Those who know better will stand by your enormous and generous effort. And, as has been said, Vendler "don't pick on just nobody."