The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  73. the beasts of Fiesole: The Fiesolans themselves.

  89. to show a Lady: Beatrice.

  94-99. twice already . . . well heard: The prophecies of Ciacco (Canto VI) and of Farinata (Canto X) are the other two places at which Dante’s exile and suffering are foretold. Dante replies that come what may he will remain true to his purpose through all affliction; and Virgil turns to look proudly at his pupil uttering a proverb: “Bene as-colta chi la nota,” i.e., “Well heeded is well heard.”

  109. Priscian: Latin grammarian and poet of the first half of the sixth century.

  110. Francesco d’Accorso (Frahn-CHAY-skoe dah-KAWR-soe): A Florentine scholar. He served as a professor at Bologna and, from 1273 to 1280, at Oxford. He died in Bologna in 1294.

  112-13. that one the Servant of Servants . . . Arno to the Bacchiglione etc.: “The Servant of Servants” was Dante’s old enemy, Boniface VIII. Servus servorum is technically a correct papal title, but there is certainly a touch of irony in Dante’s application of it in this context. In 1295 Boniface transferred Bishop Andrea de’ Mozzi from the Bishopric of Florence (on the Arno) to that of Vicenza (on the Bacchiglione). The transference was reputedly brought about at the request of the Bishop’s brother, Tommaso de’ Mozzi of Florence, who wished to remove from his sight the spectacle of his brother’s stupidity and unnatural vices.

  114. unnatural organ: The original, mal protesi nervi, contains an untranslatable word-play. Nervi may be taken as “the male organ” and protesi for “erected”; thus the organ aroused to passion for unnatural purposes (mal). Or nervi may be taken as “nerves” and mal protesi for “dissolute.” Taken in context, the first rendering strikes me as more Dantean.

  121. the green cloth: On the first Sunday of Lent all the young men of Verona ran a race for the prize of green cloth. The last runner in was given a live rooster and was required to carry it through the town.

  Canto XVI

  CIRCLE SEVEN: ROUND THREE

  The Violent Against

  Nature and Art

  The Poets arrive within hearing of the waterfall that plunges over the GREAT CLIFF into the EIGHTH CIRCLE. The sound is still a distant throbbing when three wraiths, recognizing Dante’s Florentine dress, detach themselves from their band and come running toward him. They are JACOPO RUSTICUCCI, GUIDO GUERRA, and TEGGHIAIO ALDOBRANDI, all of them Florentines whose policies and personalities Dante admired. Rusticucci and Tegghiaio have already been mentioned in a highly complimentary way in Dante’s talk with Ciacco (Canto VI).

  The sinners ask for news of Florence, and Dante replies with a passionate lament for her present degradation. The three wraiths return to their band and the Poets continue to the top of the falls. Here, at Virgil’s command, Dante removes a CORD from about his waist and Virgil drops it over the edge of the abyss. As if in answer to a signal, a great distorted shape comes swimming up through the dirty air of the pit.

  We could already hear the rumbling drive

  of the waterfall in its plunge to the next circle,

  a murmur like the throbbing of a hive,

  when three shades turned together on the plain,

  breaking toward us from a company

  that went its way to torture in that rain.

  They cried with one voice as they ran toward me:

  “Wait, oh wait, for by your dress you seem

  a voyager from our own tainted country.”

  Ah! what wounds I saw, some new, some old,

  branded upon their bodies! Even now

  the pain of it in memory turns me cold.

  My Teacher heard their cries, and turning-to,

  stood face to face. “Do as they ask,” he said,

  “for these are souls to whom respect is due;

  and were it not for the darting flames that hem

  our narrow passage in, I should have said

  it were more fitting you ran after them.”

  We paused, and they began their ancient wail

  over again, and when they stood below us

  they formed themselves into a moving wheel.

  As naked and anointed champions do

  in feeling out their grasp and their advantage

  before they close in for the thrust or blow—

  so circling, each one stared up at my height,

  and as their feet moved left around the circle,

  their necks kept turning backward to the right.

  “If the misery of this place, and our unkempt

  and scorched appearance,” one of them began,

  “bring us and what we pray into contempt,

  still may our earthly fame move you to tell

  who and what you are, who so securely

  set your live feet to the dead dusts of Hell.

  This peeled and naked soul, who runs before me

  around this wheel, was higher than you think

  there in the world, in honor and degree.

  Guido Guerra was the name he bore,

  the good Gualdrada’s grandson. In his life

  he won great fame in counsel and in war.

  The other who behind me treads this sand

  was Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, whose good counsels

  the world would have done well to understand.

  And I who share their torment, in my life

  was Jacopo Rusticucci; above all

  I owe my sorrows to a savage wife.”

  I would have thrown myself to the plain below

  had I been sheltered from the falling fire;

  and I think my Teacher would have let me go.

  But seeing I should be burned and cooked, my fear

  overcame the first impulse of my heart

  to leap down and embrace them then and there.

  “Not contempt,” I said, “but the compassion

  that seizes on my soul and memory

  at the thought of you tormented in this fashion—

  it was grief that choked my speech when through the

  scorching

  air of this pit my Lord announced to me

  that such men as you are might be approaching.

  I am of your own land, and I have always

  heard with affection and rehearsed with honor

  your name and the good deeds of your happier days.

  Led by my Guide and his truth, I leave the gall

  and go for the sweet apples of delight.

  But first I must descend to the center of all.”

  “So may your soul and body long continue

  together on the way you go,” he answered,

  “and the honor of your days shine after you—

  tell me if courtesy and valor raise

  their banners in our city as of old,

  or has the glory faded from its days?

  For Borsiere, who is newly come among us

  and yonder goes with our companions in pain,

  taunts us with such reports, and his words have stung us.”

  “O Florence! your sudden wealth and your upstart

  rabble, dissolute and overweening,

  already set you weeping in your heart!”

  I cried with face upraised, and on the sand

  those three sad spirits looked at one another

  like men who hear the truth and understand.

  “If this be your manner of speaking, and if you can

  satisfy others with such ease and grace,”

  they said as one, “we hail a happy man.

  Therefore, if you win through this gloomy pass

  and climb again to see the heaven of stars;

  when it rejoices you to say ‘I was’,

  speak of us to the living.” They parted then,

  breaking their turning wheel, and as they vanished

  over the plain, their legs seemed wings. “Amen”

  could not have been pronounced between their start

  and their disappearance over the rim of sand.

  And then it pleased my Mast
er to depart.

  A little way beyond we felt the quiver

  and roar of the cascade, so close that speech

  would have been drowned in thunder. As that river—

  the first one on the left of the Apennines

  to have a path of its own from Monte Veso

  to the Adriatic Sea—which, as it twines

  is called the Acquacheta from its source

  until it nears Forlì, and then is known

  as the Montone in its further course—

  resounds from the mountain in a single leap

  there above San Benedetto dell’Alpe

  where a thousand falls might fit into the steep;

  so down from a sheer bank, in one enormous

  plunge, the tainted water roared so loud

  a little longer there would have deafened us.

  I had a cord bound round me like a belt

  which I had once thought I might put to use

  to snare the leopard with the gaudy pelt.

  When at my Guide’s command I had unbound

  its loops from about my habit, I gathered it

  and held it out to him all coiled and wound.

  He bent far back to his right, and throwing it

  out from the edge, sent it in a long arc

  into the bottomless darkness of the pit.

  “Now surely some unusual event,”

  I said to myself, “must follow this new signal

  upon which my good Guide is so intent.”

  Ah, how cautiously a man should breathe

  near those who see not only what we do,

  but have the sense which reads the mind beneath!

  He said to me: “You will soon see arise

  what I await, and what you wonder at;

  soon you will see the thing before your eyes.”

  To the truth which will seem falsehood every man

  who would not be called a liar while speaking fact

  should learn to seal his lips as best he can.

  But here I cannot be still: Reader, I swear

  by the lines of my Comedy—so may it live—

  that I saw swimming up through that foul air

  a shape to astonish the most doughty soul,

  a shape like one returning through the sea

  from working loose an anchor run afoul

  of something on the bottom—so it rose,

  its arms spread upward and its feet drawn close.

  NOTES

  21 ff. a moving wheel: See Ser Brunetto’s words (lines 37-39, Canto XV).

  37. Guido Guerra (GHEE-doe or GWEE-doe GWEH-rah): (around 1220-1272.) A valiant leader of the Guelphs (hence his name which signifies Guido of War) despite his Ghibelline origin as one of the counts of Guidi. It is a curious fact, considering the prominence of Guido, that Dante is the only writer to label him a sodomite.

  38. the good Gualdrada (Gwahl-DRAH-dah): The legend of “the good Gualdrada,” Guido Guerra’s grandmother, is a typical example of the medieval talent for embroidery. She was the daughter of Bellincione Berti de’ Ravignana. The legend is that Emperor Otto IV saw her in church and, attracted by her beauty, asked who she was. Bellincione replied that she was the daughter of one whose soul would be made glad to have the Emperor salute her with a kiss. The young-lady-of-all-virtues, hearing her father’s words, declared that no man might kiss her unless he were her husband. Otto was so impressed by the modesty and propriety of this remark that he married her to one of his noblemen and settled a large estate upon the couple. It was from this marriage that the counts Guidi de Modigliano (among them Guido Guerra) were said to descend.

  Unfortunately for the legend, Otto’s first visit to Italy was in 1209, and surviving records show that Count Guido had already had two children by his wife Gualdrada as early as 1202.

  41. Tegghiaio Aldobrandi (Tegh-YEYE-oh Ahl-doe-BRAHN-dee): Date of birth unknown. He died shortly before 1266. A valiant knight of the family degli Adimari of the Guelph nobles. With Guido Guerra he advised the Florentines not to move against the Sienese at the disastrous battle of Montaperti (See Farinata, Canto X), knowing that the Sienese had been heavily reinforced by mercenaries. It is probably these good counsels that “the world would have done well to understand.” This is another case in which Dante is the only writer to bring the charge of sodomy.

  44. Jacopo Rusticucci (YAH-coe-poe Roo-stee-KOO-tchee): Dates of birth and death unknown, but mention of him exists in Florentine records of 1235, 1236, 1254, and 1266. A rich and respected Florentine knight. Dante’s account of his sin and of its cause is the only record and it remains unsupported: no details of his life are known.

  70. Guglielmo Borsiere (Goo-lyELL-moe Bohrs-YEHR-eh): “Borsiere” in Italian means “pursemaker,” and the legend has grown without verification or likelihood that this was his origin. He was a courtier, a peacemaker, and an arranger of marriages. Boccaccio speaks of him in highly honorable terms in the Eighth Tale of the First Day of the D

  ecameron.

  93 ff. that river: The water course described by Dante and made up of the Acquacheta (Ah-kwa-KAY-tah) and the Montone flows directly into the sea without draining into the Po. The placement of it as “first one on the left of the Apennines” has been shown by Casella to result from the peculiar orientation of the maps of Dante’s time.

  The “river” has its source and course along a line running almost exactly northwest from Florence. San Benedetto dell’Alpe is a small monastery situated on that line about twenty-five miles from Florence.

  106. THE CORD. As might be expected many ingenious explanations have been advanced to account for the sudden appearance of this cord. It is frequently claimed, but without proof, that Dante had been a minor friar of the Franciscans but had left without taking vows. The explanation continues that he had clung to the habit of wearing the white cord of the Franciscans, which he now produces with the information that he had once intended to use it to snare the Leopard.

  One invention is probably as good as another. What seems obvious is that the narrative required some sort of device for signaling the monster, and that to meet his narrative need, Dante suddenly invented the business of the cord. Dante, as a conscientious and self-analytical craftsman, would certainly have been aware of the technical weakness of this sudden invention; but Dante the Master was sufficiently self-assured to brush aside one such detail, sure as he must have been of the strength of his total structure.

  Canto XVII

  CIRCLE SEVEN: ROUND THREE

  The Violent Against Art Geryon

  The monstrous shape lands on the brink and Virgil salutes it ironically. It is GERYON, the MONSTER OF FRAUD. Virgil announces that they must fly down from the cliff on the back of this monster. While Virgil negotiates for their passage, Dante is sent to examine the USURERS (The Violent against Art).

  These sinners sit in a crouch along the edge of the burning plain that approaches the cliff. Each of them has a leather purse around his neck, and each purse is blazoned with a coat of arms. Their eyes, gushing with tears, are forever fixed on these purses. Dante recognizes none of these sinners, but their coats of arms are unmistakably those of well-known Florentine families.

  Having understood who they are and the reason for their present condition, Dante cuts short his excursion and returns to find Virgil mounted on the back of Geryon. Dante joins his Master and they fly down from the great cliff.

  Their flight carries them from the Hell of the VIOLENT AND THE BESTIAL (The Sins of the Lion) into the Hell of the FRAUDULENT AND MALICIOUS (The Sins of the Leopard).

  “Now see the sharp-tailed beast that mounts the brink.

  He passes mountains, breaks through walls and weapons.

  Behold the beast that makes the whole world stink.”

  These were the words my Master spoke to me;

  then signaled the weird beast to come to ground

  close to the sheer end of our rocky levee.

  The filthy prototype of Fraud drew n
ear

  and settled his head and breast upon the edge

  of the dark cliff, but let his tail hang clear.

  His face was innocent of every guile,

  benign and just in feature and expression;

  and under it his body was half reptile.

  His two great paws were hairy to the armpits;

  all his back and breast and both his flanks

  were figured with bright knots and subtle circlets:

  never was such a tapestry of bloom

  woven on earth by Tartar or by Turk,