INFERNO, Episode 163. The Case For Ulysses: Inferno, Canto XXVI, Lines 85 - 142

In the last episode of WALKING WITH DANTE, I built a case against Ulysses without using anything but his own words against him. How do we know Ulysses is damned (other than Dante's placing him in the Inferno)? Where does his culpability lie?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for this episode in which I build the case FOR Ulysses. Why does he so stand out among the sinners in hell (and even among the saints above us)? Why has his speech provoked more commentary than any other passage in Dante's COMEDY?

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

[01:42] Once more, my English translation of his speech: Inferno, Canto XXVI, lines 85 - 142. If you'd like to read along or start a discussion about this episode, just scroll down this page.

[05:30] The seven parts of the case against Ulysses. 1. His monologue demands an interpretation because there are few external cues or clues to help us know how to react.

[06:39] 2. Ulysses is a Greek--which means he's part of a world Dante cannot know and desperately wants to explore.

[08:54] 3. Ulysses' story is the definition of talent held in check by (literary) virtue: fully original yet anchored by classical texts.

[10:35] 4. Ulysses uses the loaded word "folle" (folly)--a word so associated with Dante the pilgrim's journey and Dante the poet's COMEDY.

[22:27] 5. We are the children, not of Dante, but of Ulysses, who expresses our hopes and our fears.

[24:20] 6. Ulysses exhorts his men to a higher calling, just as Dante exhorts his readers to a higher calling.

[25:53] 7. Ulysses' speech is so overwhelming that Dante will need a second figure in this evil pouch (this eighth of the malebolge) to balance the poem.

And here is my translation of Inferno, Canto XXVI, Lines 85 – 142

The bigger horn of the ancient flame

Began to quiver, murmuring

As if it were affected by the wind.

Then, shimmering its tip this way and that

As if it itself were a tongue that could speak,

It brought out its voice and said, “When

“I left Circe, who’d kept

Me for more than a year at a spot not far from Gaeta,

Before Aeneas named it that,

“Neither any affection for my son, nor any reverence

Toward my old father, nor the debt of love

I owed to Penelope, which would have pleased her,

“Could vanquish the ardor inside me

That wanted to experience the wide world,

Including all the vices and heroics of humanity.

“So I set out on the deep, open sea

With only one ship and just such few

Companions who had not abandoned me.

“I saw one coast, then another, all the way out to Spain,

Even as far as Morocco, as well as the island of Sardinia

And the other islands that bathe in that sea.

“I and my companions had gotten old and slow

When we made it to the narrow strait

Where Hercules had marked off the warning

“Limits beyond which men shouldn’t venture.

Off the starboard side, I took my leave of Seville

And off the port, I’d already taken my leave of Ceuta.

“‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand

Dangers have made it to the West,

To this last little bit of readiness

“‘That still hangs on in our senses,

Do not deny yourselves the experience

On beyond the sun, of an unpeopled world.

“‘Give full credit to your origins!

You were not created to live like beasts

But to live in the search for virtue and knowledge.’

“I had made my companions so impassioned

With my little speech for the journey ahead,

I could hardly have held them back from it.

“We set our stern toward the sunrise

And turned our oars into wings for our mad flight,

Always gaining our way on the port side.

“All the stars that surround the antipodes

Already glimmered in the night, while our own from back home were so low,

They didn’t even rise above the ocean’s floor.

“Five times we had seen the light

Beneath the moon wax and wane

Since we’d started on this high pass,

“When a mountain rose up, still dim

In the distance. It seemed to me

I’d never seen any taller.

“We let out cries of joy, although they soon morphed into grief.

For a whirlwind came out of that new land

And struck the prow of the ship.

“Three times it spun the ship around in all that water.

At the fourth, our stern reared up to a height

And the prow went plunging down, as it pleased another,

Until the sea shut tight over us.”