Virginia Jewiss
Virginia Jewiss received her PhD in Italian literature from Yale University and taught at Dartmouth, Trinity College’s Rome campus, and Yale before joining Johns Hopkins University, where she is the Associate Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. She has translated the work of numerous Italian authors and film directors, including Luigi Pirandello’s short stories, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Melania Mazzucco’s Vita and screenplays for Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone, and Gabriele Salvatores.
Annelise Brody Morani
Annelise Brody Morani received her laurea in comparative literature at the university of Bologna with a thesis on Dante and the Rossetti family. She received also her MA and Ph.D in Italian literature from the JHU with a thesis on Virginity in Early Italian literature. Annelise then went on teaching as a faculty member at various college institutions joining Washington University in Saint Louis in 2005 where she taught Italian language, literature and cinema at all levels. She also served as language coordinator until 2018. She developed and taught online language courses as a winner of a grant in language and technology research at her institution (2014). She became proficient in using both Blackboard and Canvas platforms. Her main research interest is in Medieval Italian literature and in particular in literature and ethics. She published papers on Petrarch and Boccaccio, presented at numerous conferences. Annelise is also a passionate yoga practitioner and a certified yoga instructor in Hatha yoga and ELDOA 1&2. She has been teaching yoga to dancers, children as well as seniors. Her focus is on improving mobility and spinal health.
ICS FEBRUARY CULTURAL EVENT
Virginia Jewiss presented her translation of “Vita Nuova” by Dante Alighieri – in conversation with Annelise Brody Morani
THE BOOK IS FOR SALE AT THE ICS until the end of March!
Sunday February 26th, 2:30 PM ET at the ICS Headquarters (4833 Rugby Ave. Bethesda, MD). In-person + Zoom Webinar
Prof. Virginia Jewiss in conversation with Prof. Annelise Brody Morani presented “Vita Nuova” by Dante Alighieri, a sparkling translation that gives new life in English to Dante’s Vita Nuova, his transcendent love poems and influential statement on the art and power of poetry, and the most widely read of his works after the Inferno.
Dante was only nine years old when he first met young Beatrice in Florence. Loving her for the rest of his life with a devotion undiminished by even her untimely death, he would dedicate himself to transfiguring her, through poetry, into something far more than a muse—she would become the very proof of love as transcendent spiritual power, and the adoration of her a radiant path into a “new life.”
Censored by the Church, written in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, exploring the courtly love tradition of the medieval troubadours, and employing an unprecedented hybrid form to link the thirty-one poems with prose commentary, Vita Nuova, first published in 1294, represents both an innovation in the literature of love and the work of Dante’s that brings this extraordinary poet into clearest view. This limpid new translation, based on the latest authoritative Italian edition and featuring the Italian on facing pages, captures the ineffable quality of a work that has inspired the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Penn Warren, and Louise Glück, and sustains the long afterlife of a masterpiece that is itself a key to the ultimate poetic journey into the afterlife, The Divine Comedy.
You can purchase the book (signed copy) at the ICS headquarters or online.