Many of the authors in Pacey's list are represented in Grove's library. While Dante's Vita Nuova is not amongst these books, the Divina Commedia is and was read, annotated, and reflected upon in Grove's correspondence as well. On two occasions in early 1927, he quotes the famous line from the Inferno, "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate", once in a context of finding relief from his back pains. [8]

It is a time of intense preoccupation with his past: the first Prairie novel Settlers of the Marsh has come out in October, 1925, and the first autobiographical book A Search for America is in preparation for October, 1927. "Dante stands very high for me", he states, although he places him beneath his favourite trio of luminaries, namely Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe (Letters, p. 56). In October, 1928, he uses a line from the Paradiso (III, 85) as an opening in a letter to his wife: "In la sua volontade è nostra pace", and continues: "(Italian -- Dante) = In His will is our peace -- which means a great deal. I often quote it to prove the impossibility of translation. It's just a sentence in English; in Italian, it is a world" (Letters, p. 165). By then, the Groves have lost their only child Phyllis May a little over a year ago,[9] and Grove has been working like a maniac ever since. As letters to his wife attest, he is also flying high on the success and acclaim of his coast-to-coast lecture tour, as a side-effect of which his only known Canadian translation, Gustav Amann's Sun Yatsens Vermächtnis describing the 1912 Chinese revolution, is very quietly in the making.[10]

Though relatively fleeting, these comments or references regarding Dante suggest that Grove maintained some sentimental ties with the author of his earliest translation efforts. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding Greve's first known attempt at a German adaptation.[11] In late 1901, Greve wrote to Karl Wolfskehl:

"Übrigens fand ich dieser Tage unter meinen Papieren eine im Jahre 1898 verfasste Übersetzung der Vita Nuova Dantes, aus der ich Ihnen gelegentlich etwas mitteilen möchte, da ich sie nicht für ganz verfehlt halte. Der Wilde schreitet rüstig fort..."[12]

In 1898, Greve was a student at Bonn University, and according to an important biographical account he submitted for Brümmer's literary lexicon in 1907 -- it reads essentially like a blueprint to Grove's self-representations -- he did not start translating "by mere accident" until his Munich days three or four years later.[13] His initial approach to the prestigious publishing house Die Insel occurred in August, 1902, with explicit reference to "[his] friend Karl Wolfskehl" who had apparently suggested that Greve try this avant-garde establishment. The Insel was to become, with the publishing house Bruns in Minden, the major agency for Greve's numerous translations.

Wolfskehl, a close collaborator of the influential poet Stefan George, is still remembered as the "Zeus of Schwabing", Schwabing being Munich's Greenwich Village. His hospitable household was the uncontested centre of artistic and literary circles, including, for instance, artists like Kandinsky at the dawn of international fame.[14] No matter how hard Greve tried to ingratiate himself with this central authority figure shortly after he established residence in Munich in the Fall of 1901, he was viewed with not unfounded suspicion. He was at the time so engrossed with Oscar Wilde that he tried to BE like him.[15] Already by early February, 1902, Wolfskehl deemed it necessary to warn his close ally Gundolf of Greve's escapades which he considered to have reached such alarming degrees that he questioned his sanity:

"Es scheint, daß unseres gemeinsamen Bekannten FPGs Münchhausiaden sehr bedenkliche Grade erreichen und daß es erlaubt sein muß Freunden zu sagen wie wenig weit man irgendwelche Pfade des Zutrauens zu ihm wandeln darf. Hier scheint er vieles verwirrt zu haben und es haben die Besten nicht in Frieden leben können vor ihm. Ob er krank ist?"[16]

And more than thirty years later, he calls him aptly and originally, with reference to Greve's love for aliases and pseudonyms, "jenen Pseudologen der Frühzeit" in the context of Greve's roman-à-clef Fanny Essler of 1905.[17] Strangely enough, Greve himself drew attention to his megalomanic tendencies in his autobiographical submission to Brümmer. He even seemed to consider them an asset, although his dandy-like pretenses had led to a grievous downfall in guise of a year-long prison term for fraud in 1903/4. Forty years later, Grove again admits explicitly to being megalomanic at times.[18]

Greve's remark to Wolfskehl about Dante seems to imply that he had translated the entire complex of the Vita Nuova, whereas no more than six sonnets in tidy manuscript form have been found to date.[19] It is an early, autobiographical and confessional account of Dante's unattainable love and admiration for Beatrice until and after her death in 1290. Along with Virgil as Reason, she later guides the protagonist allegorical Grace in the Divina Commedia on his voyage through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Written in the courtly tradition of the Troubadours and initiating what is known as the "dolce stil nuovo", the Vita Nuova is remarkable and innovative in combining verse and narrative in an intricate structure. Twenty-four sonnets, one ballad, and five canzones are interspersed with forty-one prose texts which usually describe the events having inspired the poems, and analyse and gloss them at the same time.

Greve's choice represents one fourth of the sonnets in the original complex, and they correspond to the numbers 41, 3, 9, 21, 38 and 35. While Dante invariably combines the quatrains and the tercets in a dual-block structure, Greve uses in five out of six cases the later, typically Petrarchan sonnet-form. He also consistently applies the "Kleinschreibung", a characteristic affectation of the "George-Mache".[20] Greve's sonnets will be shown here next to their Italian originals for convenient comparison.[21]

1. The final sonnet of Dante's work which opens Greve's mini-cycle shows the lover's suffering soul on its ascent to heaven where the luminous mistress enlightens him with words he cannot understand, yet intuitively grasps. Beatrice and the ladies to whom the poet describes his state of mind remain unnamed in the translation.

2. Dante's third sonnet records a dream in which Amor holds the poet's heart in his hands, and orders the beloved lady (Beatrice) to devour it:

4. Sonnet 21 is a praise of Beatrice's heavenly virtues and her irrestibable effect on all who see her.

5. In sonnet 38, the poet's heart and soul engage in a dialogue about the power of love which a new lady has gained over him. This translation I consider particularly successful:

6. In sonnet 35, this very lady, who has pitied his sad condition as she watched him from a window, captures his heart, so that he can stop weeping about Beatrice:

Despite some daring liberties and omissions, Greve's translation remains overall quite close to the original text, and can be considered elegant. He also succeeds in conveying the simple, narrative aspects of Dante's poems, and avoids in most instances the insufferably twisted syntax usually favoured by the Stefan George school, and also practiced in Greve's often precious creations gathered Wanderungen.[22] He had it privately published about six weeks after he announced his Dante translations to Wolfskehl. The final poem "Irrender Ritter (Errant Knight)" was discussed in their correspondence in late January, 1902, and it's medieval tone and setting is clearly related to Greve's simultaneous preoccupation with these Dante-sonnets.[23]

These recreations are also, if indirectly, reflected in the beautifully crafted complex of the seven poems which were serially published in Die Freistatt, 1904/5, under the joint pseudonym Fanny Essler -- which name also was the title of Greve's first novel about his companion Else's life.[24] Composed in a structure imitating  medieval wing-altar triptychs, Fanny/Else reflects on her love for the ever-absent Greve in a double, North/South and Before/After dichotomy. In the centre, three sonnets called "a portrait"[25] focus on her object of adoration in the timeless and static fashion of the Petrarchan tradition. The canon of addressing individual physical traits of the beloved woman is clearly followed in devoting one sonnet each to the lover's eyes, mouth, and hands. While the emotional content of Fanny Essler's is definitely Else's and there is convincing evidence that she actually wrote poems of her own about her experiences with Greve,[26] there can no doubt about it that the formal perfection and artful intertextuality displayed are his trade-mark. Petrarca [1304-1374], of course, followed in Dante's footsteps by celebrating in the Canzoniere his beloved Laura in Troubadour and Dolce Stil Nuovo convention.[27]