PURGATORIO, Episode 108. The Many Textures Of Envy: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, Lines 22 - 42

Dante has started a conversation with two envious penitents . . . a conversation he might not be ready for. They prove more than his rhetorical match. They also muddy the theology of Purgatory itself. Is that intentional? Or are we expected to understand their still-fallen state?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore more about the two envious souls who interrupt Dante's journey around the second terrace of Purgatory proper.

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

[01:23] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, lines 22 - 42. If you'd like to read along or continue the conversation, please scroll down this page.

[03:23] Dante's cagey periphrasis about the Arno may not have paid off.

[07:00] The first envious penitent is bestialized as he fastens his teeth into the meat of Dante's intentions.

[09:49] These penitent shades have lots of debt, even though one soul launches into a typical Dantean diatribe against Tuscany.

[14:43] How can good things happen in a fallen world? Only by moving the fence.

[16:55] Two inset tercets show the changing nature (or fence?) of COMEDY from a theological poem to an encyclopedic one.

[21:59] This passage contains the third and final use in COMEDY of a word for "snake."

[25:55] The problem with the diatribe is that is seems to remove culpability from humans . . . or at least, Tuscans.

[28:55] Rereading the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, lines 22 - 42.

And here’s my English translation of Purgatorio, Canto XIV, Lines 22 – 42

“If with my natural intelligence I have fastened my teeth

Into your intentions,” replied the one

Who’d spoken first, “you’re talking about the Arno.”

The other guy said to him, “Why did this one hide

The name of that river,

The way one does with a horrible thing?”

And the shade who was asked that question

Repaid the debt like this: “I don’t know, but it’s fitting

That the name of that valley should perish.

“From its start in the high mountain chain,

From which Pelorus is broken off,

It’s so swollen with water that few others can surpass it,

“Right on down to the very spot where it returns

To the sea the stuff the sky has been dried out of it,

So that other rivers get their due as well.

“In that place, everyone runs away from virtue as if it were an enemy,

As if it were a snake . . . whether because of bad curses on the place

Or bad habits that prod them on.

“The inhabitants of that wretched valley

Have so changed their natures

That Circe might as well be keeping them in her pastures.”