Contemporary Translations of the Vita Nuova Cervigni and Vasta, Frisardi, and Slavitt

This chapter engages in a comparative analysis of editorial choices, translational strategies, and results in three English Vita nuova editions that were published over the last 25 years by Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta in 1995, David R. Slavitt in 2010, and Andrew Frisardi in 2012. While Cervigni and Vasta’s was a bilingual and philologically innovative edition whose plain layout aimed to restore a pristine and ‘oral’ experience of the text (obfuscated by fictitious layouts and textual divisions), Frisardi’s restored an internal division by adopting Guglielmo Gorni’s organisation of the Italian text and included a large scholarly apparatus that granted readers maximum transparency about translation and editorial choices. In contrast to these scholarly editions Slavitt approached Dante’s text with a domesticating and creative attitude without commentary or annotations, which led to controversial translation choices.