In Dante’s Lyric Poetry, Teodolinda Barolini offers the first comprehensive English translation and commentary on Dante’s early poems to be published after the celebrated edition by Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde in 1967. Barolini’s work is both accessible, as it aims to bring Dante’s youthful lyrics to a wider audience, as well as scholarly, providing critical guidance with her fresh and exhaustive commentary. In order to reach both audiences, Barolini offers extensive critical readings of Dante’s poems, delivered as “introductory essays” rather than line-by-line annotations, and emphasizes the lyrics’ “teleological direction” toward the Commedia (27). Together with her general introduction, in these essays the scholar details Dante’s “conceptual itinerary” (4) from a courtly love poet to the multifaceted author he became after his exile by touching on Dante’s other works (especially the Vita Nuova) and by making detailed excursuses on the editorial history of his lyrics. The effort to historicize the poems is noteworthy throughout the book; Barolini extracts historical materials especially concerning gender and social behavior, such as the codes that govern social relationships among men, the Florentine conventions of mourning, and the relationships between factions in Italian cities and among different social classes. This comprehensive approach lends the Florentine’s youthful production the intellectual prestige attributed to his later texts by guiding the reader to appreciate the variety and stylistic expansion that characterize Dante’s early poems.

In the absence of Dante’s own ordering, various editorial viewpoints have emerged in the long editorial history of the Rime. The most distinctive feature of this commentary is the decision to analyze the collection of all the lyric poems attributable with certainty to Dante and written in his early Florentine period (1283–92), including the thirty-one lyrics later transcribed in the Vita Nuova. Barolini rejects the traditional Italian definition of the Rime as the poems that Dante did not himself collect in the Vita Nuova or Convivio, declaring such parameters to be unsatisfying and governed by the “cultural capital assigned to the ‘organic’ and ‘unified’ whole that once united by an auctor should never again be fragmented” (22). Barolini draws the majority of her Italian texts from De Robertis’s monumental annotated editions of the Rime (2005) that followed his critical edition (2002), but she expresses reservations over De Robertis’s ordering principle, which is based on the editorial history of the transmission of the poems. Interestingly, the most recent Italian commentary on the Rime, by Claudio Giunta, appeared in an edition of Dante’s complete works outside the Commedia (2011). Therefore, while Giunta follows De Robertis’s order, the poems of the Vita Nuova and Convivio are omitted, but appear within the works in which Dante later placed them. Disagreements arise over De Robertis’s “interpretative licence” (17) in his choice of “Lippo” over “Lapo” in the sonnet “Guido i’ vorrei” (Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I), whereas Barolini adheres to the traditional reading “Lapo”; his lack of transparency in the classification of the eight rime dubbie (doubtful poems) that De Robertis readmits to the canon—for example, “Amore e monna Lagia e Guido ed io” (Guido, lady Lagia, love, and I); and his replacement of the proper name “Lisetta” with the allegorical “Licenza” (license) in “Per quella via che la Bellezza corre” (Along the path that beauty quickly moves).

Richard Lansing’s new and functional blank-verse translations accompany Dante’s Italian lyrics and feed into Barolini’s essays. Due to constraints of space, this edition forgoes endnotes, which would enhance the translator’s choices, as in the case of Manuele Gragnolati’s line notes to the poems, which appear in the Italian edition (2009). Barolini’s commentary, alongside Durling’s translations, projects itself as the English edition of choice by being accessible to the uninitiated reader in its constant striving for clarity, while remaining challenging for the curious scholar. The volume delineates a passionate portrait of Dante and the development of his “craft of writing poetry” (8) by questioning the paradigm of love poetry and experimenting with stylistic and ideological innovations that incorporate a great variety of sources and techniques.