Dante Alighieri

Mark Musa

Vita Nuova (Oxford World's Classics)

Julia Conaway Bondanella

A single volume introduction to the major writers of the Italian Renaissance—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, della Mirandola, da Vinci, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Buonarroti, Guicciardini, Cellini, and Vasari.

The Italian Renaissance Reader

Francesco Petrarca

After Laura's Death

Presents an exciting and comprehensive selection of writings that represents the most influential works of 11 great Ranaissance Italians.

A small book which relates in prose and often very beautiful verse the story of the youthful Dante's love for Beatrice. The essay which follows the translation provides new insights into this puzzling thirteenth-century work. Musa regards Dante's intention in this so-called "Book of Memory" as a cruel and comic commentary on the youthful lover. He argues that Dante, using the tradition of love poetry current in his time, points up the foolishness and shallowness of his protagonist, a self-centered and self-pitying youth who only occasionally in the progress of his suffering catches even a glimpse of the true nature of Love, or his beloved. "The sensitive man who would realize a man's destiny must ruthlessly cut out of his heart the canker at its centre [i.e. self-pity], the canker that the heart instinctively tends to cultivate." According to Musa, this is one of Dante's central ideas. Dante scholars, libraries and students of the Italian classics will welcome this distinguished translation and its provocative commentary. [Back cover].

A Translation and an Essay

Dante's Vita Nuova

Essays on Dante

Distinguished Professor of Italian Mark Musa

A long Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Advent at the Gates: Dante's Comedy

Dante's Inferno

Richard M. Powers

Dante's Inferno. Translated, with Notes and Commentary, by Mark Musa. (Illustrations by Richard M. Powers.).

"The Portable Petrarch" features new translations of the essential writings of the poet who perfected the sonnet form.

The Portable Petrarch

"Mark Musa, in editing and translating Petrarch’s Canzoniere, has performed a wonderful service to the English-speaking reader. Here, in one volume, are included the poet’s own selection of the best lyric verse he wrote throughout his life, accompanied by brief but useful notes... " —Chronicles "As well as skillful and fluent verse renderings of the 366 lyrics that make up this milestone in the development of Western poetic tradition, Musa offers copious and up-to-date annotation to each poem... along with a substantial, sensitive, and intelligent introduction that is genuinely helpful for the first-time reader and thought provoking for Petrarch scholars and other medievalists." —Choice The 366 poems of Petrarch’s Canzoniere represent one of the most influential works in Western literature. Varied in form, style, and subject matter, these "scattered rhymes" contains metaphors and conceits that have been absorbed into the literature and language of love. In this bilingual edition, Mark Musa provides verse translations, annotations, and an introduction co-authored with Barbara Manfredi.

Mark Musa

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