The New Life (La vita nuova): Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The New Life (La vita nuova), credited to Dante Alighieri, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The New Life (La vita nuova) by Dante Alighieri. (Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.) Read in English by Mary J One of Dante's earliest works, La vita nuova or La vita nova (The New Life) is in a prosimetrum style, a combination of prose and verse, and tells the story of his youthful love for Beatrice. The prose creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante's way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Dante and his poet-friends inherited from the Provençal poets, the Sicilian poets of the court of Frederick II, and the Tuscan poets before them). Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered on the self and more aimed at love as such: he intended to elevate courtly love poetry, many of its tropes and its language, into sacred love poetry. Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love—transparent to the Absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor. - Summary by adapted from Wikipedia by Mary J

Recording facts

• Recording title: The New Life (La vita nuova)
• Author credits: Dante Alighieri
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 12
• Listed recording duration: 2:01:38

Catalogue topics

• love
• translation
• medieval literature
• Italian literature
• lyric poetry
• dante
• courtly love

Track guide

1. 00 - Prefatory Note and Introduction — 11:54
2. 01 - Section 1 — 7:21
3. 02 - Section 2 — 7:33
4. 03 - Section 3 — 10:27
5. 04 - Section 4 — 9:49
6. 05 - Section 5 — 11:26
7. 06 - Section 6 — 8:25
8. 07 - Section 7 — 12:19
9. 08 - Section 8 — 9:44
10. 09 - Section 9 — 13:02
11. 10 - Section 10 — 10:31
12. 11 - Section 11 — 9:07

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.