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La Vita Nuova an unusual book: written in alternating prose and poetry, it is part ode, part autobiography, part literary analysis, part metaphysical exploration. It is historically important as it provides much of the background to Dante’s life, especially his relationship with his distant love and muse, Beatrice.

My attempt to brush up on my Italian with this dual-language edition of the book was a bit of a failure. While the language has remained incredibly static over the past 700 years, Dante’s Italian is different enough to be a challenge to my moderate abilities. Additionally, his prose style is quite complex, employing long sentences with cascading dependent clauses, and his poetry takes many freedoms with the language, such as inversion of word order and a lot of elided letters, all of which make it difficult to follow.

I would, however, still recommend this dual-language edition to anyone reading La Vita Nuova, even if they have no understanding of Italian. The poems must be read in Italian, even if one relies on the English translations for the meaning. Italian is a language that is made for poetry. Of course the gendering and inflection allow rhymes to flow much more easily than in English, but simply the sound, the cadence of Dante’s metre (which I always naturally read with a lowering of pitch on the final syllable), takes on this wonderful, lugubrious tone, which you just can’t get in English.