5. Wild Beasts And The Slide Into Despair: INFERNO, Canto I, Lines 28 - 66
A gawdy leopard, a roaring lion, and a ravenous she-wolf block our pilgrim on his way up that slope and send him sliding back down to the dark wood . . . where a ghostly presence materializes in front of him.
Our pilgrim is underway! He set out on the way before him. It looked right. It was lit by the rising sun.
Problem is, he’s limping. And there are wild beasts on that slope. They send him falling back to that scary place.
But then a shade, a ghost, a presence, something wild materializes in front of him.
In this passage, we find our first complex allegory. We see our first miracle. And we hear the first words our pilgrim speaks.
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The segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[00:28] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto 1, Lines 28 - 66. If you'd like to read along or start a conversation with me, scroll down this page to find the passage, supplemental materials, and a spot to leave a comment.
[03:12] Our first glimpse of the poem's complexity--that is, a bit about the pilgrim's feet. Our interpretation is sieved through St. Augustine and a commentary by Dante's own son.
[09:19] Three beasts, the terrors on the slope! They've generated seven hundred years of interpretation!
[20:50] The pilgrim slips back down the hill, almost lost, until a figure appears and the pilgrim blurts out his first word . . . in Latin!
[24:29] A final bit about a clue in the passage that helps us date the poem--not in terms of when it was written but when it's taking place: Easter weekend in 1300 CE. March 25, to be exact. Problem is, March 25 didn't fall on Easter weekend in the year 1300.
My rough English translation of INFERNO, Canto I, lines 28 - 66:
After I rested my tired body a little,
I continued my way along the deserted slope,
So that my firmer foot was always the lower one.
Then look out! Near the beginning of the climb
A leopard, light and very fast,
Covered with a spotted coat,
Refused to get out of my face
But so blocked my way at every turn,
That again and again I had to go back.
The time was early morning,
And the sun was rising with those stars
That shone with it when divine love
First set in motion all those gorgeous things.
Because of the hour of the day and the sweet season,
I still held on to hope,
Despite the beast with the gaudy pelt.
But then I was struck with fear
At the sight of a lion that appeared.
He looked as if he was coming right at me,
His head held high with insane hunger
So that the air seemed to tremble at him.
What’s more, a she-wolf, so emaciated
That she seemed stricken with every kind of craving
That had made many to live in wretchedness,
Threw such a heavy weight of terror over me,
Terror that overwhelmed me at the sight of her,
That I lost all hope of getting up that hill.
And like someone who eagerly counts his gains
But weeps and gets sad
When the time comes for him to lose,
So did that restless beast make me feel—
Coming against me, little by little,
Driving me back to where the sun was silent.
While I was falling down the slope toward a low spot,
A figure presented itself before my eyes,
Someone who seemed barely perceptible in that long silence.
When I saw him in that vast wilderness,
I cried out to him “Miserere on me,
No matter what you are, either shade or true man!”
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Two translation issues:
That troubling line 30! In the medieval Florentine, it’s “sì che ‘l piè fermo sempre era ‘l più basso.” If we had to translate it word for word, we’d get something like “so that the foot firm always was the more down.” Notice that “piè” (“foot”) sounds close to “più” (“more”), tying these words together in the line. You might also hear a little threat in the word “basso.” Intriguingly, it’s rhymed with “lasso” (perhaps “lazy”) at line 28 and “passo” (“pass”) at line 26. Given that “passo” may well refer back to that dark wood and “lazy” is not exactly a stellar virtue, “basso” seems to complete the links among some bad stuff! (It’s hard to convey this poetic craft in an English translation.)
There’s a second interesting set of rhymes that I can’t recreate in English. It takes place when we get to those stars, set in motion among the first beautiful things. It starts at line 38: “e ‘l sol montava ‘n sù con quelle stelle” (“and the sun moves up with those stars”). We’re then told that divine love set in motion those first things that were “belle” (“beautiful”) at line 40. But it all crashes down at line 42: The pilgrim still had reason for good hope in spite of “quella fiera a la gaetta pelle” (“the wild animal with the gaudy pelt or fur”). What had been beautiful in the heavens—”stelle,” “belle”—ends with “pelle,” a false beauty. Notice, too, that Dante uses the rhyme to move your eyes from the heavens down to the beast on the ground in front of the pilgrim.
Three interpretive issues:
Here’s the allegory of the three beasts, as understood through generations of commentary: leopard with the gaudy pelt—roaring lion—ravenous, emaciated she-wolf = lust—pride—avarice, all based on I John 2:16 (although you can make arguments to arrange these meanings in a different order). Or leopard—lion—she-wolf = incontinence, malice, and brutishness, based on the map of the three levels of hell that lies way ahead of us in INFERNO XI (although there’s also a reference to that she-wolf even further ahead in PURGATORIO XX that seems to link her to gross avarice). Or leopard—lion—she-wolf = Florence—France—the Papacy, a political interpretation based on an apocalyptic prophecy just ahead of us in this canto on INFERNO. Or if we want to connect them to the pilgrim’s emotional landscape, then leopard—lion—she-wolf = hesitancy—fear—hopelessness. How would you work out this allegory, even if you don’t know the poem ahead? What do you think these three beasts mean?
As I said in the podcast episode, 25 March 1300 CE was not the date of Good Friday. (That would have been 7 April 1300.) It’s important to remember that Dante was writing INFERNO several years later than 1300. And he didn’t have access to a search engine! So he might have forgotten the dating of Easter. Or perhaps he didn’t care. How free are artists to rearrange the facts? Do artists have a responsibility to “reality,” even in a poem that’s clearly about some weird, alternative reality? Where does the balance between “what is” and “what could be” (between the facts and the imagination) lie? Many scholars are so set on protecting Dante from a dating error that they vigorously argue for 7 April, even when it seems Dante intends for this journey up the hill to start on the same date as he would have understood for the creation of the universe, when the stars first shone, March 25.
What does it say for COMEDY—a poem proudly written in the vernacular, in medieval Florentine—that the first word the pilgrim speaks is in Latin: “Miserere” (line 65)? And it’s a storied word, one right out of the Latin Mass, a word still familiar from requiems and musical settings of the Mass. Is this Latin word a comment on the theological nature of the poem or is it a comment on the pilgrim’s emotional or even intellectual state? And if it is a comment on the poem’s theology, what does it say that this Latin prayer is addressed to either a shade or a man, but certainly not to God?
A journaling prompt:
What makes hope give way in your life? And what happens when it does? Where do you find yourself? How do you cope with the loss of hope? Or how can you learn to cope with it?