PURGATORIO, Episode 109. The Descent Of The Arno Into Metaphoric Space: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, Lines 43 - 72

Dante has been cagey about where he's from, using periphrastic phrasing to describe the Arno valley without naming it.

It was apparently the wrong thing to do . . . because one of the envious penitents is going to pick up the pilgrim's (and the poet's?) rhetorical games and push them much further into fully metaphoric space that is also somehow prophetic space, a diatribe against Tuscan corruption that borders on the incomprehensible at this moment before the speakers are named in Purgatorio XIV.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we play with truth and metaphor in the increasingly complex landscape of Purgatory.

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

[01:41] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, lines 43 - 72. If you'd like to read along or even continue the conversation about this passage, please scroll down this page.

[04:11] The standard interpretation of the allegory of the Arno valley.

[08:59] One more level of complexity: the personification of the Arno.

[11:02] A third level of complexity: so much periphrasis!

[12:32] A fourth level of complexity: a beast fable added to the rhetorical strategy (hello, Sapía!).

[13:34] A fifth level of complexity: fraud, the end stop of the Arno and INFERNO.

[15:06] A final level of complexity: The Old Man Of Crete in INFERNO XIV.

[16:33] The interpretive or rhetorical muddle after the allegory of the Arno.

[18:18] The bloody nephew's rampage: a metaphoric space.

[26:56] The pay-off of intimacy?

[29:52] Possible blasphemy in the high-level poetics.

And here’s my English translation of Purgatorio, Canto XIV, Lines 43 – 72

“Starting out among brutish pigs, more fit to gorge themselves on acorns

Than any food designed for human purposes,

That river first cuts its impoverished ditch.

“Then as it makes its way down, it finds wild dogs

That snarl more than their abilities justify.

The river twists its snout away from them in disdain.

“It keeps cascading down . . . and the bigger it gets,

The more that cursed and sorrowful trench

Finds that the dogs have morphed into wolves.

“Going on down into deep pools,

It finds foxes, so filled with fraud

That they don’t worry in the least about being caught in a trap.

“I won’t stop talking just because this guy can hear me.

It’ll do that other guy good if he bears in mind

The true spirit that’s unfolding in me.

“I see your nephew. He has become

A hunter of those wolves along the bank

Of that ferocious river. He terrifies every one of them.

“He sells their flesh while they’re still alive.

Then he kills them off like old cattle.

He takes away many a life . . . and any praise for himself.

“All bloodied, he steps out of the sad wood.

He leaves it so that a thousand years from now

It won’t be reforested to how it originally was.”

As at the announcement of horrific news

The face of someone becomes turbulent as if waiting

For some threat to sink its teeth into him from either side,

So I saw the other spirit, who had turned

To have a listen, become uneasy and sad

Once it had collected these words into itself.