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| Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, oil on cnavas, Tate Britain, 1864–1870 |
For those unfamiliar
with the work, Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova—The New Life—is a
medieval text on courtly love with the poet using the prosimetrum form (a
combination of prose and verse) to explore his desire for an Italian woman. While
Dante and his love interest Beatrice di Folco Portinari married different
people, the former maintained a deep connection to the latter even after her
death in 1290.
Written some four years—give or take—after
Beatrice’s passing, La Vita Nuova alternates between verse and prose
commentary as Dante examines divine love, memory, romance, and inspiration. As
I read his sonnets, I listened for Beatrice and failed to find her voice
between the mediating layers of the poet’s tone and Dante Rossetti’s
translation. I keep willing her to appear because I love this woman ugly. Yet I
couldn’t reconstruct her desires, her agency, or her personality from Dante’s
poems.
My
Beatrice stalks me through paper &
envelops,
writes poems on bark that
shear
off in wind. How I love thee
let
me count the ways suggests a new
measure
of culpability. Beatrice invents
new
methods for quantifying love since
she
is never present. I package her
memories
into aphorisms since I am
prone
to forgetting. She is a great teacher
even if she kills her pupils. Through memory
we travel against time, through the space
of forgetfulness we follow its course. I speculate
on a past & cash on an ace
future, but I am
too punctual & no one is around to see it.
Honestly,
I find La Vita Nuova too jarring to my twenty-first century sensibilities.
Dante’s interest in Beatrice borders on an unhealthy fixation, but perhaps I
misunderstand him. The memory of this woman seems more exciting to him, his readers
and—if I’m truthful—to me as well. Beatrice serves all of us as a literary prop
but, in another time, I’m sure Dante’s admiration was considered both divinely
inspired and respectful.
To be fair, my reading of La Vita Nuova
isn’t meant to be generous to either Dante or to myself. my beatrice shouldn’t
be taken as an objective scholarly exploration of Dante’s work. Nor is it a
nuanced reading of romantic consent and the male gaze. I understand Beatrice
less as a historical person and more as a literary object that propels
Dante’s—and my own—explorations into asexual desires in nonsexual spaces. My beatrice
is a tool for thinking through spatio-temporalities of an asexual body that has
lost its narrative of migration and containment.
My Beatrice & I watch the
primary
debates because we are monstrous
fictions.
This, excites Beatrice, is the
moment when
the evil Brain arrives from
Planet Arous.
I look backward to the nuclear
sequence
where everyone is incinerated.
Then it is
three minutes to midnight. A
woman without
perfume refuses Dante’s future.
I believe in
demons & sprites. I believe
in canopies
so tired from painful touching.
There is
little difference between
twilights & mourning.
Beatrice, some days her muse
will ace her desire.
“If you’re ever going to love
me,” put on the drier.
I will deliver her punchline
after I forget my joke.
Like La Vita Nuova, I use the
prosimetrum form to mix spatio-temporal scales and to play with the intimate
present and a remote past. Dante’s sonnets consistently fail to collect
themselves. His prose form is meant to frame forcefully his narrative while
providing autobiographical commentary on the poems. In other words, Dante’s prosa
is always pointing, always interpreting and explaining his literary choices
in the metrum. After one sonnet, beginning with the line “A day agone,
as I rode suddenly,” Dante explains: “This sonnet has three parts.”
In the first part, I
tell how I met Love, and of his respect. In the second, I tell what he said to
me, although not in fill, through the fear I had of discovering my secret. In
the third, I say how he disappeared.” (16)
He goes on as if to
say to his readers: “This is what I did. I wrote this poem. Look. Look.” For a
contemporary audience, this mode of explanatory address feels distrustful, but
it is also instructive for the way that Dante’s divisions between prose and
verse are not cleanly cleaved. The prose is as embodied as the sonnets. The
sonnets are as leaky and wet as the prose. Throughout, Beatrice ghosts across
the imagined borders of La Vita Nuova.
Maybe I misread Dante, but I wish he
could have loved ugly an idea of Beatrice as much I do. With more carelessness
and error, with less craft and more ambiguity. With more open spaces, strange
sonnets, and slanted blessings on his alien projection.
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
And the sonnet was this:—
this this this this this:
Works
cited:
Alighieri,
Dante. The New Life. Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Preface by
Michael Palmer. NY: NYRB, 2002.
Orchid Tierney
is an Aotearoa New Zealand poet and scholar, currently living in Gambier, Ohio,
where she teaches at Kenyon College. She is the author of a year of
misreading the wildcats (Operating System, 2019) and Earsay
(TrollThread 2016), and chapbooks my beatrice (above/ground, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX 2019),
blue doors (Belladonna* Press), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF
2017), the world in small parts (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and Brachiaction
(Gumtree, 2012). Other poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Jacket2,
Journal of Modern Literature, and Western Humanities Review, among
others. She is a consulting editor for the Kenyon Review.