The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is, I suspect, not much read these days, but almost everyone can still quote from it the lines "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou" (which is not quite accu- rate as a quote from FitzGerald's translation, though close enough). But isn't there something wrong with that picture? One firm principie of Islam is that alcohol is strictly prohibited to believers (see the Koran [24]); so what is Omar Khayyam doing invoking the pleasures of wine? The answer is that Islam (except in the ferocious fundamentalist form that is ali too common in our own time) has generally made allowances for human frailty; alcohol is prohibited, but some people might nevertheless take a drink—and the fate of their souls is, as always, entirely in the hands of the only and omnipotent God. Indeed in the traditional Islamic world there was a long and tolerant association of wine and poetry; the Ottoman sultans strictly regulated coffee-houses as hotbeds of political dissent, but allowed taverns to open unmo- lested, as the haunts of harmless poets. (There was also a pious fiction that poets might use wine as a metaphor for the intoxica- tion of romantic, or even of divine, love, without actually taking a sip of the stuff themselves.) And so wine and love and roses are used by Omar Khayyam to make a profound statement: that life is indeed full of pleasures, to be enjoyed to the full; but if one loves life, so one should not shrink from death—the one and the other alike are in the hands of God.
The Rubaiyat of Ornar Khayyam is a sort of miracle, a col- laboration between a gifted poet and a brilliant translator, bridging great chasms of time and cultural distance. The Persian mathematician and the Victorian Orientalist have together produced a book of verses that sing as sweetly in our own time as ever.
J.S.M.
30
DANTE ALIGHIERI
1265-1321
The Divine Comedy
Like his era, the life of Dante was disordered, but his master- piece is the most ordered long poem in existence. During his lifetime his native Florence, and indeed much of Italy, was divided by factional strife. In this struggle Dante, as propagan- dist and government official, played his part. It was not a suc- cessful part, for in 1302 he was banished. To the day of his death, almost twenty years later, he wandered through the courts and great houses of Italy, eating the bitter bread of exile.
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.
The Three Kingdoms Period, as it is called, lasted for only forty-five years—the kingdoms collapsed in 265, leading to an even longer and more chaotic period of disunion—but those years of turmoil and warfare left a disproportionate and indeli- ble imprint on the Chinese imagination ever afterwards. The history of those competing realms—the Kingdom of Wei in the north, the Kingdom of Wu in the southeast, and the Kingdom of Shu Han in the west—was in due course formally recorded in a dynastic history, one of the series of histories modeled on Ssu-ma Ch^en^ Records of the Grand Historian [18]. But it seemed that the tone of a sober official history was not up to the task of conveying the stories of the heroes and villains, assaults and narrow escapes and clever stratagems, that flowed from those tumultuous times. (The Chinese title of the novel means "Supplementary Narratives to the History of the Three Kingdoms," implying that it contains ali the good stories left out of the official version.) Over the centuries storytellers and writers of popular dramas and operas mined the semilegendary tales of the Three Kingdoms for new material with which to entertain their audiences. (This process is not unlike what hap- pened in South Asia with the Mahabharata [16]; well see it at work again with Journey to the West [36].) Gradually these stories were collected, and by around 1250 an early version of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms had probably come into being. The novel as we now have it was written a century later by a scholar named Luo Kuan-chung [Luo Guanzhong]; the oldest known printed copy dates only from the mid-sixteenth century.