INFERNO, Episode 84. Unanswered Questions and Unasked-For Prophecies: Inferno, Canto XV, Lines 46 - 78

Brunetto Latini's got questions. Too bad the pilgrim, Dante, doesn't seem to want to answer them.

Or better, Dante only seems to want to confess to this teacher. (Anybody who has ever been a teacher knows this gambit: ask a question, get the truth, not the facts you were after.)

This is indeed the game that teachers and students play/ Especially when their roles are reversed.

And must they descend to this level of competition between them? If so, Brunetto might well come out on top. He's got a history lesson about Florence and a prophecy for the pilgrim's fate, the exile that Dante the poet already faces.

That said, Brunetto's prophecy is a challenging, rhetorical knot. Should we take it at face value? Should we trust everything Brunetto says? Especially when he uses such coarse language? And vaults (at the same time) to such rhetorical heights.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the hidden agendas and strange twists in this passage. The pilgrim Dante may think he has the upper hand. His teacher, Brunetto, has other ideas.

Here are the segments of this podcast episode:

[01:23] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto XV, lines 46 - 78. If you want to follow along, the text is below.

[04:09] Brunetto's questions and the pilgrim's confession. Dante seems intent on telling Brunetto his plight--using Brunetto's own words and perhaps clarifying exactly what went on in Canto I of INFERNO. Do you need an older writer to help you say what you want to say about yourself? Maybe you do.

[16:45] Brunetto's history lesson and prophecy of the pilgrim's (and poet's) plight. This passage is the oddest mix of vulgar language and rhetorical gamesmanship. Is that the heart of Brunetto's poetics? Because it might also be the heart of Dante's.

[26:35] A little about INFERNO as a whole: it's partly about unlearning what the pilgrim (and maybe the poet) Dante has learned. We've already seen this with Francesca and Farinata. But now we start to see it with the very nature of poetry itself.

Here is my English translation of INFERNO, Canto XV, lines 46 - 78:

He set off like this: “What fate or destiny

Leads you down here before your final hour?

And who is this one showing you the path?”

“There up above, in the bright life,”

I replied, “I lost myself in a valley

Before my years on earth had reached their fullness.

Only yesterday morning I gave my life the cold shoulder.

He appeared, just as I was falling back into that valley

And now takes me along this track toward home.”

And he to me: “If you follow your star,

You cannot fail to get into a glorious port,

If I learned anything for sure in that beautiful life.

“And if I hadn’t gotten to the time of death so soon,

Seeing that the heavens offer you such beneficence,

I would have comforted you in your work.

“But that ungrateful people, malign ones really,

Who came down from Fiesole in the olden times,

And still smell like the mountains and the rocks,

“Will become your enemies, because of all the good you’ve done.

And not without reason—because the bitter crab apples

Stop the sweet figs from coming to fruit.

“The old tales of the world call them blind,

A people given over to greed, envy, and pride.

Make sure you clean yourself up from their customs.

“Your fate holds such honor for you

That one party, then the other will want to eat

You alive. But let the green grass stay a long way away from the goat.

“Let these Fiesolan beasts render each other into chaff

And if anything still grows on their shit heap,

Don’t let them touch the cultivated plant,

“In which still lives the holy semen

Of those Romans who stuck around when

The place became the breeding ground of all that malice.”