PURGATORIO, Episode 114. Playing Around With The Sun: PURGATORIO, Canto XV, Lines 1 - 24

Dante and Virgil pass on beyond the envious along the second terrace of Purgatory proper. As we enter the first of the middle three canti of all of COMEDY, Dante is blinded by the sun, about as we're blinded by his increasingly complex poetics.

These passages begin the brilliant fun of the second half of the poem. Dante begins to play with meaning, poetics, and metaphor as never before, challenging us and pushing us into a spot of disorientation, all the while bringing us to a spot of revelation.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we see the sun as never before in the opening lines of PURGATORIO, Canto XV.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:19] My English translation of this passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XV, lines 1 - 24. If you'd like to read along or to continue the conversation with me, please scroll down this page.

[03:37] PURGATORIO Canto XV is a liminal canto, existing between disorientation and revelation.

[13:58] Two unique words in COMEDY in this opening passage (that is, two hapax legomena).

[17:19] Telling time by the sun and playing around with it, as it plays around in the sky.

[22:18] The sun and blindness at the opening and closing of our time on the terrace of the envious.

[24:56] Medieval science that can reformulate the plot into poetic language.

[28:30] Rereading the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XV, lines 1 - 24.

And here’s my English translation of Purgatorio, Canto XV, Lines 1 – 24

As much as between the end of the third hour

And the first one of daylight, there appears a sphere

That plays around as a little boy would do,

Just so the sun still seemed to have as much

Of its course still before it before evening.

It was vespers there and midnight here.

The sun’s rays were walloping us right on the nose

Because we’d circled so much of the mountain

That we were now walking exactly due west.

That’s when I felt my forehead weighed down

By sheer brightness, more so than in the past.

I was stupified by the things I didn’t understand.

So I raised my hand up to the ridge

Of my eyebrows to make a sunshade

And pare down that excessive light.

As when from water or a mirror

The light jumps in the opposite direction,

Lifting up in a compensatory manner

From its descent, as if it moved away

From a dropped stone at an equal angle,

As is demonstrated by both experiments and theory,

So it seemed to me that the refracted light

Ahead of me was buffeting me so hard

That my sight tried to hurry away from it.