Many English-speaking people who want to be educated try to read
Dante, the 'best known, least read' of all the classical poets, and
find him impossible. In my thirties I did just that: 'Where do I
begin?' The library yielded a translation of 'The Divine Comedy' -
a great fat epic in three volumes. Wading into the Inferno, I
struggled through a couple of sections and decided this wasn't for
me. Too gloomy, too stilted, too difficult to grasp - and above all
- too many words. I gave up almost at once. I cannot be the only
one who as a result of that kind of experience thinks the work of
this great Master is exclusively about Hell. 'Dante? - oh, you mean
Dante's Inferno!' they say. NO! That's not it. There's far, far
more. Dante wrote in Italian in order to reach ordinary people who,
like me, needed the story itself. He wrote in the vernacular about
the famous of the time - well-known entertainers and politicians,
poets and artists, churchmen and musicians, the great and the
awful. He wanted to be understood by everyone, including those not
too well-versed in Latin. 'What a story this is,' I thought, when
finally I was properly introduced to it. 'Why don't we all know
this story? Dante is so warm-hearted, so exciting, so full of hope
and humour, justice and joy - but, like me, my friends hardly ever
get into Hell, let alone out of it and on.' My aim is to tell
Dante's story in the way I remember it - not primarily for its
history, or its theology, or even its most gracious poetry, but for
the unfolding journey he made through those amazing landscapes. It
was all in his imagination, yet so vividly brought to life in his
poem that irresistibly it invites us to accompany him on a
life-changing, life-saving adventure of our own. The tale begins
when, depressed and lost in a Dark Wood, Dante meets Virgil, his
hero among much earlier poets. At the request of Beatrice - his
great love, now in Heaven - Virgil has come from Limbo to guide him
on a huge journey. Sure enough, they start by going down through
Hell; but they emerge, ascend the Mountain of Purgatory through
many adventures, and rise to the threshold of Paradise. There,
human knowledge fails and Virgil leaves him. Meeting people all the
way, he flies on into Heaven with Beatrice, and up through the
stars to God. I hope that by travelling with him, we too may come
to find in the poetry something of the depth of the vision. I hope
we may come to love Dante as a person, with all his directness, his
immense compassion for those he meets on the way, and his chuckling
ability to laugh at himself. I hope we shall rejoice that his
passion for Beatrice, who leads him through Heaven, is at last so
blissfully fulfilled in the divine. May our own landscape of the
mind be enhanced - even transformed - by the journey.
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