Joseph F. Privitera (1914–2007)

This has an extremely useful grammar and vocabulary of mediaeval Italian, though marred by a few clumsy typographical and layout errors.

However, the section on the "Vita Nova" is a little frustrating. Privitera has deliberately cut out large chunks of the prose passages on the grounds that they are repetitive and stylistically awkward. While this is undoubtedly true, it is not helpful to the serious student to have them omitted. Moreover, his translations are not of the best quality. The translations of the prose passages do not always match precisely with the sections of them that he chooses to keep, and there are some very slipshod errors in the verse translations; for instance, in the very first sonnet he translates "atterzate l'ore" (a third part of the hours) as "three hours". He also has a tendency to add words which are not there in the original. This would be forgivable if he were trying to produce full verse-to-verse translations, where some allowance must be made for the rhyme and metre, but his translations have the appearance of literal prose cribs, and therefore the spurious words are potentially misleading.

With these caveats, the book is still a valuable resource for any student of Dante or of mediaeval Italian in general.… (mehr)