Humanities in the Village: A New Life For Dante's "Vita Nuova"

Description

Virginia Jewiss and Bill Egginton will discuss Jewiss' new translation of Dante's Vita Nuova, published by Penguin Classics in March 2022. The book is available on Amazon.

The Vita Nuova tells the story of Dante's young love for Beatrice while simultaneously tracing his growth as a poet. A startling combination of poetry and prose, this early work contains the seeds of his mature masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.

This event is part of the Humanities in the Village series hosted by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, the Ivy Bookshop, and Bird in Hand.

Virginia Jewiss is the associate director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI) and teaching professor in the humanities. She joined Johns Hopkins from Yale, where she served for many years as assistant to the director of the Whitney Humanities Center. A medievalist with extensive experience both within and beyond academia, she practices the humanistic teaching and scholarship that is central to AGHI's mission. She designed and directed the Yale Humanities in Rome program, crafted numerous innovative, interdisciplinary courses, and was a core faculty member for Directed Studies, Yale's great books program. A noted translator, she helped launch the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press and continues to serve on the advisory board. Her own translations include Dante's Vita Nuova, Luigi Pirandello's short stories, Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, and Melania Mazzucco's Vita. A longtime resident of Rome, she collaborates with Italian directors Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone, adapting their screenplays in English for filming. Jewiss, who earned her Ph.D. in Italian at Yale, has also taught at Dartmouth College and Trinity College/Rome.