55. The Dazzle of Beatrice, The Stench Of Hell: INFERNO, Canto X, Line 121b, through Canto XI, Line 15
Dante leaves Farinata—maybe hesitantly.
After that, Virgil makes our pilgrim a promise. A woman with beautiful eyes will one day explain your life to you.
Too bad this promise is never fulfilled!
For now, let’s walk to the edge of the abyss and get a whiff of lower hell, the place the poet Vergil and his hero Aeneas could never go, the place our poet sees as his mission.
This passage has popes and bishops, Beatrice and the abyss, Dante’s will and Virgil’s promise. It shows us how crafted Canto X is and gives us a glimpse of what’s ahead in Canto XI.
The segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[01:00] More about Dante-the-pilgrim and Farinata.
[03:17] My English language translation of INFERNO: Canto X, Line 121b, through Canto XI, Line 15. If you’d like to read along, drop a comment about this passage, or find a deeper study guide, just scroll down this page.
[05:38] The first knotty problem in this passage: Dante's (well) disobedience. Virgil has signaled him to move on. He hasn't. In fact, he asked more questions of Farinata.
[14:50] Virgil makes Dante a promise about a beautiful woman's eyes. Who is this woman? And why is this promise never fulfilled in COMEDY?
[19:48] A bit of the plot: the stench of lower hell and our first glimpse of the abyss.
[22:00] A tomb with an inscription--to a pope! With maybe a bishop in tow! Who are these people? Might there be a writerly answer to this garbled passage?
My English translation of INFERNO, Canto X, line 121b, through Canto XI, line 15:
. . . I willed my steps
Over to the ancient poet, rehashing
Those words that had seemed to be filled with harm for me—
At which he started out, and then as we were going along,
He said to me, “Why are you so lost?”
And I gave him the full satisfaction of what he’d asked.
“May your memory preserve what you’ve heard
Against you,” the wise one implored,
“And listen to have I’ve got to say.” Then he raised his finger.
“When you will finally be in front of the sweet dazzle
Of the woman whose beautiful eyes see everything,
You will fully comprehend the journey of your life.”
With that he footed off to the left.
We left the wall and hiked toward the middle
On a path that led straight down into a valley
Whose stench turned our stomachs even up there.
----- [canto XI]
As we got to the edge of a high embankment
That had been made by a circle of broken rocks,
We looked down on an even crueler mob scene.
Here, because of the horrible stench
Of putrification that was belched up from the deep abyss,
We pulled back a bit and took cover under the lid
Of a monumental tomb, on which I saw some writing
That said, “I hold onto Pope Anastasius,
The one who Photinus seduced from the straight way.”
“Our descent has to be postponed a bit,
So that our senses get used to the foul smell—
Only then we can forget about it a bit.”
So spoke my master. And I said to him, “Find a compensation,
So that the time won’t be lost.”
And he: “You see that I am already thinking about it.”
FOR DEEPER STUDY
Two translation issues:
When the pilgrim returns to Virgil, the text says, e io inver l’antico/ poeta volsi i passi . . . (literally, “and I toward the old/ poet turned the steps—Canto X, lines 121a - 121b). I translated this as “I willed my steps,” which perhaps seems louder than “I turned.” However, I think the force of the verb volsi is strong, particularly with the notion that certain words bode ill for the pilgrim. I sense a more directed movement here.
But do those words bode ill? There’s some wiggle room in the passage: a quel parlar che mi parea nemico (literally, “at that speech that to me seemed hostile”—Canto X, line 123). The wiggle room is in that word “seemed,” which may offer breathing space. Maybe the speech (which one? Farinata’s or Cavalcante’s?) seemed hostile at first, although it won’t prove so in the long run. If the poet is referring to Farinata’s “prophecy” of exile, perhaps that exile is not so bitter. After all, on the run Dante will be fed and housed by some of the most powerful families in the northern part of the Italian peninsula.
Five interpretive issues:
When I went off on the notion of finding common ground with Farinata without necessarily excusing him, I was making a tacit reference to the nineteenth-century cult of sympathy, a rubric or meta-narrative still in force today (although not in Dante’s day). Sympathy is, of course, “feeling along with someone” or “feeling as someone does.” During and after the Romantic movement in the West, it became the paramount human virtue. It also became key to the artistic process. An artist both feels what another human feels and offers the reader/listener/viewer the experience of feeling the emotions the artist has felt. Consider how in the modern world one of the most pressing questions of a story is whether the main character is likeable. What we mean is whether the reader can find sympathy for this character. Sympathy has so infused our thought patterns that we also see it as the resolution (or at least the medium of the resolution) for political reckonings, social restitution, and personal pain. But is it?
At Canto X, line 126, the pilgrim claims to fully answer Virgil. Problem is, what he says is dropped from the poem. Does he talk about his own looming exile? Does he say something about Cavalcante’s pain? Or both? Why would the poet leave this crucial bit of information out of his poem?
I also claimed that there’s an implicit confession in line 126, particularly after the loaded, theological word “lost” (smarrito—line 125). But that’s my interpretation. Line 126 doesn’t have to indicate a confession. What else could the pilgrim have said?
The lady’s dazzling eyes may offer a twist on the already complicated notions of sensory impressions in medieval thought (Canto X, lines 130 - 131). First off, she’s said to tutto vede (“see all”). If we accept Aristotelian notions of sensory impressions (as Aquinas does), we would believe that sensory impressions create images in the mind. Given that, the lady must see the pilgrim’s life as a set of impressions. But they don’t stay static. Instead, they turn around to become dolce raggio (“sweet rays”) that beam out of her eyes and (eventually) into the pilgrim’s. So his primary, sensory impressions about his own life are created out of her eyes’ dazzling rays, not necessarily from his experiences. Or how’s this? Her sweet rays trump his own sensory impressions of his life. At the redemptive moment described here, the primary seer is the lady; the secondary seer is the pilgrim (who sees his own life second-hand from her and learns the truth of his “journey”).
Anastasius’ tomb is more of a problem than I made it out to be (see Canto XI, lines 8 - 9). First, Farinata’s tomb is crowded, but is Anastasius alone in his? Second, does Farinata’s tomb have writing on it that labels its inhabitants? (Probably not because the pilgrim asks who else is down there. So why does Anastasius get the royal treatment? Because he was a pope . . . maybe?) And finally, Anastasius’ tomb stands as a silent witness to heresy, something rather new in COMEDY. In other cases, we’ve had damned souls step out and talk . . . or at least we’ve seen them running after empty flags or blowing about on the winds of lust. Here, we don’t have a human soul at all, just the inanimate cage to hold the soul. And it all seems a warning of some sort, right? But to and for whom? To the heretics? Do they need further warnings? Would they wander past this tomb? Or does it warn other travelers coming down the slopes of hell? But who would they be? For what it’s worth, this notion of inanimate witnesses and warnings will find a fuller development long down the line in PURGATORIO when the penitent gaze at ornate carvings or wander past weird trees, all of which remind them of their failings.
One journaling prompt:
Can you share common ground with someone without also finding a sticky sympathy as your bond with them?