[log in to unmask] wrote:

>  dusty Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Confucious texts.

Dante is worth spending some time on. (In one of his prefaces
Marx referred to Dante as 'The great Florentine' and quoted
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti" as his own maxim at the
end of the Preface to the first edition of *Capital* -- so Dante
isn't just for the religious.) You need two or three different
translations though. For ultimate enjoyment, the same one
Pound recommended 60 years ago, the Binyon translation.
For an introduction to the poem the Huse translation. (It is in
prose but printed in tercets so you get the structure, with
"notes" interspersed in the poem. Though I usually read Binyon
I still find the Huse useful for some purposes. Then the Singleton
text with commentary for more extensive notes. This will never
make you a Dante scholar, but again if you are patient and
relaxed, the day will come when you find you are learning a lot
from it. The notes are interesting in themselves because you are
exploring into such a different world. I also own the Mandelbaum,
Ciardi, and Dorothy Sayers translations, but never use them much.
Sayers has useful notes but I find her personally irritating -- partly
because her Wimsey detective stories are politically as insufferable
as Pound without any of his compensations.

I was interested to find that another also sees the poem as teaching
itself. The long complex novels of Dickens, incidentally, will also
teach themselves through relaxed re-reading.

Carrol Cox