INFERNO, Episode 114. Just When You Think You Have Comedy Figured Out, It Breaks You: Inferno, Canto XIX, Lines 64 - 87

In this passage, we get a clearer picture of the guy stuck upside-down in this hole in the third evil pouch, the third of the malebolge, in the eighth circle of Inferno, stuffed with the fraudsters. It's Pope Nicholas III.

But I also want to explore my unspoken assumptions about the poem that COMEDY breaks in this passage.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we talk through a particularly fraught bit of INFERNO, one that seems to argue for a different dating of Dante's writing of COMEDY and helps us better understand the poem's construction, all while damning popes to hell. In other words, there's a lot to unpack!

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

[01:22] My English translation of the passage: Inferno, Canto XIX, lines 64 - 87. If you'd like to see this passage, you can find it under the "Walking With Dante" header on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[03:09] The revelation of Pope Nicholas III in the hole--and a curious little problem without a good answer: How does Nicholas know our pilgrim (and his guide) have come down the slope to learn his name?

[06:17] Who was Pope Nicholas III? And why is Dante is harshest critic?

[10:16] The sin of this pouch is finally named: simony.

[12:50] The problem of the math in the passage. How many years does a pope's feet get cooked?

[14:25] A third pope is on the way: Clement V, the guy who took the papacy to Avignon.

[16:46] Unpacking a difficult passage based on the story in II Maccabees 4: 7 - 26.

[18:46] How my unspoken and even unconsidered assumptions about COMEDY got broken.

And here’s my English translation of Inferno, Canto XIX, Lines 64 – 87

 At that the spirit’s feet both started to kick around.

Then sighing and in a voice laced with tears

He said, “Well then what do you want from me?

“If you want to know my name so badly

That you clambered down that bank for it,

You should know that I was once robed in the great mantle

“And truly was the son of the she-bear.

I was so greedy to promote my cubs

That I lined my pockets just as I fill up this hole.

“Down under my head are crushed the others

Who before me made their living on simony,

All squashed into the fissures in this rock.

“I will get pushed down there when

The one comes who I believed you to be

When I made my abrupt demands.

“But the time I have already cooked my feet

And been suspended upside-down like this is already longer

That he’ll be planted with his reddened feet.

“For after him will come from out west

A shepherd who thinks he’s above the law, whose deeds are even fouler,

And so fit to be a lid over him and me.

“He will be the new Jason, like the one we read about

In Maccabees, the one who the king made much of,

Just the king of France will make much of this one.”