INFERNO, Episode 141. The Stars, The Seasons, A Peasant, And Dante: Inferno, Canto XXIV, Lines 1 - 21

Poor Virgil, put in his place over and over again, ever since the fourth of the malebolge, the evil pouch of the fortune tellers, when he had to rewrite his own epic, THE AENEID. Four cantos of humiliation!

He's now had his final humiliation (for now) as he's learned that he shouldn't have ever trusted those demons. But the journey must go on! How? In those dear footprints we saw at the end of Canto XXIII, of course.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we begin to figure out way out of the sixth of the evil pouches, the pouch of hypocrisy in the big eighth circle of fraud; and as we make our way to the astonishing landscape of the seventh pouch. We start out in the strangest way: with a gorgeous bit of lyric poetry.

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

[01:20] My English translation of the passage: Inferno, Canto XXIV, lines 1 - 21. If you'd like to read along, just scroll down this page.

[03:34] The sheer beauty of this passage: its structure, rhythm, and classical allusions.

[13:20] The peasant-shepherd who comes out of his hovel? Who exactly is he?

[14:44] The first answer is easy. The shepherd is Dante. Or is he?

[19:32] Who else is this shepherd? Jesus? God? Virgil?

[21:48] Although the peasant doesn't have much to steal, others have a lot--namely, Virgil and Ovid.

[23:03] Three possible interpretations--two common in commentary and the last my own--of this opening passage from Inferno, Canto XXIV.

And here’s my English translation of Inferno, Canto XXIV, Lines 1 – 21

In that part of the year when it’s in its youth,

So much so that the sun cools his curls in Aquarius

And the nights are already about half of the days,

When frost copies her image on the earth

To look like that of her white sister,

Although the quill she uses stays sharp only briefly,

That’s when the villager, whose food stocks are running low,

Gets out of bed, takes a look around, and sees the countryside

Has all whitened. He smacks his thigh in disgust,

Goes back into his house, and complains for a bit,

Like a knave who doesn’t know what he should do—

Until a short while later he goes outside again and hope gets put back in his basket,

Because he’s seen how quickly the world

Changes its aspect. He takes his crook

And drives his little sheep out to find their pastures.

Just so, my master made me practically a coward

When I saw his forehead so troubled.

And just so, the wound got a band-aid very fast—

Because, at the moment we got up to the ruined bridge,

My guide turned back to me with that same sweet look

That I first saw at the foot of the mountain.