The New Lifetime Reading Plan

To our modern view his emotional life seems no less unbal- anced. He tells us that when he was nine he first saw the little girl, Beatrice; and then nine years later saw her again. That is the extent of his relationship with the woman who was to be the prime mover of his imagination and whom, in the last canto of the Paradiso, the third part of The Divine Comedy, he was to place beside God.

Dante called his poem a comedy (the adjective divine was added by later commentators) because it began in Hell, that is, with disaster, and ended in Heaven, that is, with happiness. To the beginning reader it at first seems almost impenetrable. To daunt us, there is first its theology, derived from the great thinker Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274). There is its complex

system of virtues and vices, in part stemming from Aristotle [13]. There is the fact that, as Dante tells us, the poem is writ­ten on four leveis of meaning. There is its constant use of alle- gory and symbol, not a mere device with Dante, but part of the structure of his thought. And, finally, the poem is stuffed with contemporary references, for Dante was one of the few great writers who constantly worked with what today we would call the materiais of journalism.

Despite these and many more impediments, Dante can still move the nonscholarly reader. Perhaps it is best, as T. S. Eliot [116] advises in his famous essay, to plunge directly into the poem and to pay little or no attention to the possible symbolic meanings. Its grand design can be understood at once. This is a narrative, like Bunyan's Pilgrim⁹s Progress [48], of human life as it is lived on earth—even though Dante has chosen to make our earthly states vivid by imagining a Hell, a Purgatory, and a Paradise. We, too, live partly in a state of misery, or Hell. We, too, are punished for our sins and may atone for them, as do the inhabitants of Purgatory. And we, too, Dante fervently believed, may, by the exercise of reason—personified in Dante's guide Virgil [20]—and faith, become candidates for that state of felicity described in the Paradiso. Dante's moral intensity, though exercised on the life of his time and within the framework of the then-dominant scholastic philosophy, breaks through to the sensitive reader of our own century. Dante is as realistic, as true to human nature, as any modern novelist—and far more unsparingly so.

Furthermore, the poem is open to us as a poem. The great- est poetic imaginations are not cloudy, but hard and precise. Concision and precision are of the essence of Dante's imagina- tion. He is continually creating not merely vivid pictures, but the only vivid picture that will fully convey his meaning. These we can ali see and feel, even in translation: Dante is a great painter. Similarly we can ali sense the powerful, ordered, sym- metrical structure of the poem: Dante is a great architect.

One last word. I would qualify Eliot's advice to this extent:

no harm, and much good, will result from a reading of the introduction to your edition, for Dante's poem and his life and time are inextricably interwoven. Furthermore, most editions contain notes explaining the major references. A good way of trying Dante is to read a canto (there are one hundred in ali) without paying any attention to the notes. Then reread it, using the notes. Do not expect to understand everything—eminent scholars are still quarreling over Dante's meanings. You will understand enough to make your reading worth the effort. A good modern translation is that of Allen Mandelbaum, in an edition that gives the translation and the original Italian on fac- ing pages.

C.F.

31

LUO KUAN-CHUNG

ca. 1330-1400

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Han Dynasty of China, founded in 206 b.c.e., was roughly contemporary with, and controlled an area even larger than, the Roman Empire. (Interestingly, China and Rome flourished on opposite ends of Eurasia in almost total ignorance of each other, an ignorance energetically promoted by the Central Asian oбsis kingdoms that grew rich as intermediaries in the silk trade between the two.) Like Rome, the Han Dynasty eventually and inevitably declined and fell; after decades of corruption, factionalism, and popular rebellion, the dynasty collapsed in 220 c.e. But the succession to the Mandate of Heaven (see Mencius [14]) was unclear, and instead of one new dynasty arising to rule a revived and reunited China, the empire split into three competing kingdoms.