The New Life
  • Published: 15 November 2016
  • ISBN: 9781681370514
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $34.00

The New Life

Formats & editions
Paperback
9 Apr 2024
Tr. Paperback
24 Jan 2023
Paperback
15 Nov 2016
Hardback
23 Jan 2023
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One of the most celebrated translations of Dante Alighieri's great love poem, a primary inspiration behind The Divine Comedy, now repackaged in a lovely pocket-sized edition perfect for the devoted Dantisti or the casual poetry lover.

The New Life is the masterpiece of Dante’s youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death. An allegory of the soul’s crisis and growth, combining prose and poetry, narrative and meditation, dreams and songs and prayers, The New Life is a work of crystalline beauty and fascinating complexity that has long taken its place as one of the supreme revelations in the literature of love.  

The New Life is published here in the beautiful translation by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an inspired poetic re-creation comparable to Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a classic in its own right.
  • Published: 15 November 2016
  • ISBN: 9781681370514
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $34.00
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About the author

Tom Crewe

TOM CREWE was born in Middlesbrough in 1989. He has a PhD in nineteenth century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he contributes essays on politics, art, history and fiction.

The New Life is his first novel. Crewe says:
'This is the book I knew I wanted to write long before I actually wrote it. I hope it reveals to readers an unfamiliar Victorian England that will surprise and provoke, inhabited by a generation in the process of discovering the nature and limits of personal freedom, struggling to create a better world as the twentieth century comes into view.'

Praise for The New Life

“Rossetti made a remarkable translation of the Vita Nuova, in some places improving (or at least enriching) the original. He was indubitably the man ‘sent,’ or ‘chosen,’ for that particular job.” —Ezra Pound   “[Rossetti’s translation is] the fruit of countless hours of brooding over Italian painting, Italian images, Italian sounds and thoughts.” —John Wain