INFERNO, Episode 183. Watch Out For Those Impersonators: INFERNO, Canto XXX, Lines 34 - 45

We've been to Thebes and Troy. We've seen two rabid souls arrive to tear up old Capocchio and maybe the other alchemist. But who are these rabid pigs?

Impersonators. People who pretend to be who they're not. You know, most of the modern world.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look closely at the two impersonators in the last of the evil pouches (the "malebolge") of fraud in the giant eighth circle of Dante's INFERNO.

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

[01:27] My English translation of the passage: INFERNO, Canto XXX, lines 34 - 45. If you'd like to read along or drop a comment about this episode, just scroll down this page.

[03:03] The first rabid soul: Myrrha, a figure of incestuous love from Ovid's METAMORPHOSES.

[07:30] The second rabid soul: Gianni Schicchi, a connection to the Donati family (from whom Dante's wife, Gemma, comes).

[11:50] Two structural points: 1) There's so much twinning in the tenth evil pouch (or the tenth of the malebolge) of the falsifiers in INFERNO.

[14:04] 2) There's a reference to the Gospel of Matthew 8: 28 - 34 running under this passage.

[16:57] Two speculative questions: 1) Why are there so few women in hell?

[23:14] 2) Why is impersonating someone such a terrible sin?

[25:41] Maybe modern narratives need non-fluid characters to work.

And here is my English translation of Inferno, Canto XXX, Lines 34 – 45

“Oh!” I said to him. “And so the other may not

Sink his teeth into you, grant me the favor

Of telling me who that one is before it hurries off.”

And he to me, “That’s the old soul

Of the debased Myrrha, who became her father’s lover,

Well beyond the bounds of proper love.

“That one came into sin with him

By falsifying herself into the shape of another,

Just like that one venturing off over there, who,

“To win the queen of the herd,

Falsified himself as Buoso Donati

To make a last will and testament that was perfectly legal.”