Produced by Paul Murray, Marc André Selig and PG Distributed Proofreaders
Translated By
Elizabeth Price Sayer
With An Introduction By Henry Morely
LL.D., Professor Of English Literature At
University College, London
1887
This translation of Dante's Convito—the first in English—is from thehand of a lady whose enthusiasm for the genius of Dante has made it achief pleasure of her life to dwell on it by translating, not hisDivine Comedy only, but also the whole body of his other works. Amongthose works the Vita Nuova and the Convito have a distinct place, asleading up to the great masterpiece. In the New Life, Man starts onhis career with human love that points to the divine. In the Banquet,he passes to mature life and to love of knowledge that declares thepower and the love of God in the material and moral world about us andwithin us. In the Divine Comedy, the Poet passes to the world to come,and rises to the final union of the love for Beatrice, the beatifier,with the glory of the Love of God. Of this great series, the crowningwork has, of course, had many translators, and there have beentranslators also of the book that shows the youth of love. But thenoble fragment of the Convito that unites these two has, I believe,never yet been placed within reach of the English reader, except by atranslation of its poems only into unrhymed measure in Mr. CharlesLyell's "Poems of the Vita Nuova and the Convito," published in 1835.
The Convito is a fragment. There are four books where fifteen weredesigned, including three only of the intended fourteen songs. But theplan is clear, and one or two glances forward to the matter of thelast book, which would have had Justice for its theme, show that allwas to have been brought to a high spiritual close.
Its aim was no less than the lifting of men's minds by knowledge ofthe world without them and within them, bound together in creation,showing forth the Mind of the Creator. The reader of this volume mustnot flinch from the ingenious dialectics of the mediæval reasoner onMan and Nature. Dante's knowledge is the knowledge of his time.Science had made little advance since Aristotle—who is "thePhilosopher" taken by Dante for his human guide—first laid itsfoundations. It is useful, no doubt, to be able in a book like this,shaped by a noble mind, to study at their best the forms of reasoningthat made the science of the Middle Ages. But the reader is not calledupon to make his mind unhappy with endeavours to seize all the points,say, of a theory of the heavens that was most ingenious, but in nopart true. The main thing is to observe how the mistaken reasoningjoins each of the seven sciences to one of the seven heavens, and hereas everywhere joins earth to heaven, and bids man lift his head andlook up, Godward, to the source of light. If spiritual truth couldonly come from right and perfect knowledge, this would have been aworld of dead souls from the first till now; for future centuries, inlooking back at us, will wonder at the little faulty knowledge that wethink so much. But let the known be what it may, the true soul risesfrom it to a sense of the divine mysteries of Wisdom and of Love.Dante's knowledge may be full of ignorance, and so is ours. But hefills it as he can with the Spirit of God. He is not content that mensh