Singleton's Unpublished Edition of the Vita Nuova

Abstract

Singleton's Unpublished Edition of the Vita Nuova Igor Candido (bio) Charles Singleton's published essays on the Vita Nuova spanned over just five years (1945–1949), a short period but so important as to lay the foundations for the scholar's career as a dantista.1 Before his major contribution, An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Harvard University Press, 1949; reprinted by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), he had published only two journal articles on the libello: "Vita Nuova XII: Love's Obscure Words" (Romanic Review, 1945) and "The Use of Latin in the Vita Nuova" (Modern Language Notes, 1946). The three items together, surprisingly enough, form the whole corpus of Singleton's scholarly production on the libello as we know it today.2 Not much in comparison with what his scholarship on the Commedia would be; nor could the first two articles alone account for the sudden appearance of the ground-breaking Essay in the academic context of Dante studies in the United States. Indeed, as Steven Botterill put it, Singleton's "magisterial Essay has done more than any other work to expose the Vita Nuova to the sustained attention of English-speaking readers."3 Completed at Harvard and published by the university press there, the book had matured intellectually within the milieu of the faculty of Romance languages at Johns Hopkins, to which Singleton had been affiliated until 1948. In the prefatory note to the Essay, in fact, [End Page 174] he acknowledges "a quite special debt owed to Leo Spitzer, colleague at the Johns Hopkins University—a debt of the kind that is hard to distinguish and hard to declare because contracted through a daily association in scholarship and friendship for over ten years."4 Spitzer too had devoted himself to the study of Dante and his "Bemerzungen zu Dante's Vita Nuova" (1937) is mentioned in Singleton's "The Use of Latin" and his Essay.5 There was nonetheless a century-long tradition of reading Dante's Vita Nuova in the United States which dated back to 1843, when the first American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson decided to translate the libello into English for the first time, a cultural operation that involved a number of New England intellectuals, including Margaret Fuller among others.6 But if Emerson's translation remained unpublished until 1957, Charles Eliot Norton's new version (1867) broadly circulated. Part of Norton's translation had already appeared in The New Life of Dante: An Essay, with Translations (1859), which became a turning point for the appreciation of Dante's Vita Nuova in the States. Almost a century later, Singleton too read Norton's essay with attention and profit, as he reworked Norton's numerical schema of the libello by grouping the components differently in order to reveal the symbolic number of Beatrice – nine – at the center of the libello: 1 - 9 - I - 4 - II - 4 - III - 9 - 1; and more prominently: 1 - 9 - 1 - 9 - 1 - 9 - 1.7 In this exercise, Singleton gave credit to Norton for the primogeniture of this important discovery, whereas Gabriele Rossetti, who had in fact first identified a very similar internal schema, had never disclosed the news, entrusting it only to a letter addressed to Charles Lyell and dated January 1836.8 Given Singleton's relatively small scholarly production on the libello, one could assume that he had fully offered in his Essay (hereafter, E) his own interpretation of the Vita Nuova. In so doing, we would miss a very important piece of the puzzle. It is yet unknown, in fact, that when his book was published in 1949, Singleton was actually working on a new translation and commented edition of the libello. This paper offers the first critical assessment of Singleton's unpublished edition, whose typescript draft (hereafter, T) belongs to the Charles S. Singleton Papers (MS 192) preserved at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library Special [End Page 175] Collections of the Johns Hopkins University.9 Singleton authored both the translation and its first revision, as well as the commentary notes, which were certainly penned after E as the references to the book demonstrate. The authorship of T is out of question: some of the...