Without a doubt, this is one of the toughest passages in all of COMEDY, even including the dense theological difficulties will hit in the road ahead in PURGATORIO and PARADISO. It’s tough because lines are garbled, because characters misunderstand each other, and because it’s structure is so very strange.

To wit, Farinata has been speaking in all his Greco-Roman splendor. But he’s suddenly interrupted by a man who is 1) his political rival, 2) his in-law (he married his daughter to this man’s son), 3) who is the father of one of Dante’s own poetic rivals, and 4) a man who humanly just wants to know where his son is, even here in the fires of hell.

In the end, our poet is brave enough to own up to something horrible: his own role in the suffering caused by Florentine factionalism. This passage is complicated, dense, garbled (at times), and finally very rewarding. Maybe that’s the point, as you’ll here. Maybe our poet is offering us poetry that allows us for a few minutes to experience the pleasures of figuring it out. In other words, the pleasures of the contemplative life.

There’s so much here, maybe you’d like to start a discussion. Drop a comment. Let’s chat! Or at least get to know each other.

Here’s my English translation of INFERNO, Canto X, lines 52 - 72:

Then another shade, just beside him, rose

In the open sepulcher, just visible from his chin up.

I believe this one had raised himself to his knees.

He look around me, as if he was worried

About seeing someone else with me—

And when his halfway hopes were dashed,

He started crying and said, “If it is because of your high genius

That you are able to walk through this blind prison,

Then where is my son? And why is he not with you?”

I to him, “I do not come under my own steam.

The one who is with me over there leads me,

Maybe to someone your Guido held in disdain.”

His words and the methodology of his pain

Had already read me his name:

This is the reason I gave him a spot-on reply.

Straightening up all of a sudden, he wailed, “What?

Did you just say ‘held’? Is he no longer alive?

Does not the sweet sunlight still fire up his eyes?”

When he noticed a certain hesitancy

I made before giving him an answer,

He fell down flat and was no longer visible.