PURGATORIO, Episode 110. Now You Know Who We Are: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, Lines 73 - 96

Dante is nothing but cagey in the rhetorical games he's playing. He's demanding more and more out of his reader. And rightly so, given the complexity of COMEDY up to this point.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look through this passage in which these envious souls reveal who they are and we discover the underlying politics of the passage among the envious on the second terrace of Purgatory proper.

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

[02:15] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, Lines 73 - 96. If you'd like to read along or continue the conversation with me, please scroll down this page.

[04:22] Who is Guido del Duca, a Ghibelline warlord from Romagna?

[06:40] Who is Rinier (or Rinieri) da Calboli, a Guelph warlord from Romagna?

[09:08] Who is Fulcieri da Calboli, the bloody hunter previously mentioned?

[11:13] Two interpretive questions for this passage: Is the political strife between these two healed . . . or being healed? And why are these warlords among the envious?

[13:04] What details in this passage help us to understand its nuances?

[21:21] When exactly does Dante's journey take place?

[25:38] Rereading the scope of PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, from line 10 to line 96.

And here’s my English translation of Purgatorio, Canto XIV, Lines 73 – 96

The words of the one and the countenance of the other

Prompted me to want to know their names.

My request was mixed with my supplications.

For that reason, the spirit who had first spoken to me

Started up again by saying, “You wish that I would stoop

To do the very thing you won’t do for me.

“But since God wills that the sum total of his grace

Shines in you, I won’t cheap out.

So be apprised that I was Guido del Duca.

“My blood was so burned up with envy

That if I saw someone getting happy,

You’d have seen my countenance go livid.

“From this sort of straw, I reap what I sowed.

O human race, why do you fix your hearts

Onto stuff that cannot be shared?

“This one is Rinier. He’s the praise and honor

Of the house of Calboli. No one since

Has become an heir to his valor.

“And it’s not only his blood that’s fallen fallow—

Between the Po and the mountains, between the sea and the Reno—

Where so much good is needed for both truth-telling and courtly games,

“But also that land is so overgrown with venomous thorns inside its borders

That it’s really now too late

For any sort of cultivation to root them out.”