Dante-the-pilgrim and Farinata's talk turns stranger yet as Farinata discusses the end of time and Dante, perhaps the end of his own guilt. Or a misdirected way to talk about his own guilt, not quite clear, not quite evident, and perhaps very human.

Farinata brings us to the end of time itself, after a discussion of how the damned know the future. And then our pilgrim finally repents. But of what? And do his words make sense of his guilt?

This is a fraught passage. Sit back and join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we walk through the final bits of the dialogue with Farinata. Except they’re not the final bits—because this conversation will get referenced twice more in COMEDY, once in PURGATORIO and once in PARADISO. What’s so troubling here that our pilgrim—and maybe our poet—can’t let go of it?

Here is my English translation of INFERNO, Canto X, lines 94 - 121a:

“Okay, and so that your heirs may sometime find rest,”

I entreated him, “please untangle the knot

That has confused my ability to judge rightly.”

 

“If I have heard you right, it seems that you see

In advance what time will bring forward,

Yet the present seems another thing entirely.”

 

“We see things,” he said, “like someone who is standing in a bad light:

Things that are distant from us,

So much does the high guide still illuminate for us.

 

“But when they get close, or even come into being, our minds

Are totally empty. Unless someone brings news,

We don’t have any way of knowing about the state of your human affairs.

 

“Therefore, you can comprehend that our understanding

Will be completely dead at that point

When the door of the future is shut tight.”

 

Then feeling as if I should repent my faults,

I said, “Will you tell the one who fell down beside you

That his son is still joined up with the living?

 

“And please explain my silence:

Tell him that at that moment I was still working

Under the error that you just unknotted for me.”

 

My master was now calling me back,

So without delay I asked the spirit

To let me know who was down in there with him.

 

He said, “Here I lie with more than a thousand:

The second Frederick is inside,

And the cardinal, too. I will be silent about the rest of them.”

 

And then he withdrew.