The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Banquet (Il Convito), by Dante Alighieri

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Title: The Banquet (Il Convito)

Author: Dante Alighieri

Release Date: July 9, 2004 [EBook #12867]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BANQUET (IL CONVITO) ***

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IL CONVITO

THE BANQUET

OF

DANTE ALIGHIERI

Translated By

Elizabeth Price Sayer

With An Introduction By Henry Morely
LL.D., Professor Of English Literature At
University College, London

1887

INTRODUCTION.

This translation of Dante's Convito--the first in English--is from the
hand of a lady whose enthusiasm for the genius of Dante has made it a
chief pleasure of her life to dwell on it by translating, not his
Divine Comedy only, but also the whole body of his other works. Among
those works the Vita Nuova and the Convito have a distinct place, as
leading up to the great masterpiece. In the New Life, Man starts on
his career with human love that points to the divine. In the Banquet,
he passes to mature life and to love of knowledge that declares the
power and the love of God in the material and moral world about us and
within 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 crowning
work has, of course, had many translators, and there have been
translators also of the book that shows the youth of love. But the
noble fragment of the Convito that unites these two has, I believe,
never yet been placed within reach of the English reader, except by a
translation of its poems only into unrhymed measure in Mr. Charles
Lyell's "Poems of the Vita Nuova and the Convito," published in 1835.

The Convito is a fragment. There are four books where fifteen were
designed, including three only of the intended fourteen songs. But the
plan is clear, and one or two glances forward to the matter of the
last book, wh