winds twenty-two miles round. The moon already
is under our feet; the time we have is short,
and there is much that you have yet to see.”
“Had you known what I was seeking,” I replied,
“you might perhaps have given me permission
to stay on longer.” (As I spoke, my Guide
had started off already, and I in turn
had moved along behind him; thus, I answered
as we moved along the cliff.) “Within that cavern
upon whose brim I stood so long to stare,
I think a spirit of my own blood mourns
the guilt that sinners find so costly there.”
And the Master then: “Hereafter let your mind
turn its attention to more worthy matters
and leave him to his fate among the blind;
for by the bridge and among that shapeless crew
I saw him point to you with threatening gestures,
and I heard him called Geri del Bello. You
were occupied at the time with that headless one
who in his life was master of Altaforte,
and did not look that way; so he moved on.”
“O my sweet Guide,” I answered, “his death came
by violence and is not yet avenged
by those who share his blood, and, thus, his shame.
For this he surely hates his kin, and, therefore,
as I suppose, he would not speak to me;
and in that he makes me pity him the more.”
We spoke of this until we reached the edge
from which, had there been light, we could have seen
the floor of the next pit. Out from that ledge
Malebolge’s final cloister lay outspread,
and all of its lay brethren might have been
in sight but for the murk; and from those dead
such shrieks and strangled agonies shrilled through me
like shafts, but barbed with pity, that my hands
flew to my ears. If all the misery
that crams the hospitals of pestilence
in Maremma, Valdichiano, and Sardinia
in the summer months when death sits like a presence
on the marsh air, were dumped into one trench—
that might suggest their pain. And through the screams,
putrid flesh spread up its sickening stench.
Still bearing left we passed from the long sill
to the last bridge of Malebolge. There
the reeking bottom was more visible.
There, High Justice, sacred ministress
of the First Father, reigns eternally
over the falsifiers in their distress.
I doubt it could have been such pain to bear
the sight of the Aeginian people dying
that time when such malignance rode the air
that every beast down to the smallest worm
shriveled and died (it was after that great plague
that the Ancient People, as the poets affirm,
were reborn from the ants)—as it was to see
the spirits lying heaped on one another
in the dank bottom of that fetid valley.
One lay gasping on another’s shoulder,
one on another’s belly; and some were crawling
on hands and knees among the broken boulders.
Silent, slow step by step, we moved ahead
looking at and listening to those souls
too weak to raise themselves from their stone bed.
I saw two there like two pans that are put
one against the other to hold their warmth.
They were covered with great scabs from head to foot.
No stable boy in a hurry to go home,
or for whom his master waits impatiently,
ever scrubbed harder with his currycomb
than those two spirits of the stinking ditch
scrubbed at themselves with their own bloody claws
to ease the furious burning of the itch.
And as they scrubbed and clawed themselves, their nails
drew down the scabs the way a knife scrapes bream
or some other fish with even larger scales.
“O you,” my Guide called out to one, “you there
who rip your scabby mail as if your fingers
were claws and pincers; tell us if this lair
counts any Italians among those who lurk
in its dark depths; so may your busy nails
eternally suffice you for your work.”
“We both are Italian whose unending loss
you see before you,” he replied in tears.
“But who are you who come to question us?”
“I am a shade,” my Guide and Master said,
“who leads this living man from pit to pit
to show him Hell as I have been commanded.”
The sinners broke apart as he replied
and turned convulsively to look at me,
as others did who overheard my Guide.
My Master, then, ever concerned for me,
turned and said: “Ask them whatever you wish.”
And I said to those two wraiths of misery:
“So may the memory of your names and actions
not die forever from the minds of men
in that first world, but live for many suns,
tell me who you are and of what city;
do not be shamed by your nauseous punishment
into concealing your identity.”
“I was a man of Arezzo,” one replied,
“and Albert of Siena had me burned;
but I am not here for the deed for which I died.
It is true that jokingly I said to him once:
‘I know how to raise myself and fly through air’;
and he—with all the eagerness of a dunce—
wanted to learn. Because I could not make
a Daedalus of him—for no other reason—
he had his father burn me at the stake.
But Minos, the infallible, had me hurled
here to the final bolgia of the ten
for the alchemy I practiced in the world.”
And I to the Poet: “Was there ever a race
more vain than the Sienese? Even the French,
compared to them, seem full of modest grace.”
And the other leper answered mockingly:
“Excepting Stricca, who by careful planning
managed to live and spend so moderately;
and Niccolò, who in his time above
was first of all the shoots in that rank garden
to discover the costly uses of the clove;
and excepting the brilliant company of talents
in which Caccia squandered his vineyards and his woods,
and Abbagliato displayed his intelligence.
But if you wish to know who joins your cry
against the Sienese, study my face
with care and let it make its own reply.
So you will see I am the suffering shadow
of Capocchio, who, by practicing alchemy,
falsified the metals, and you must know,
unless my mortal recollection strays
how good an ape I was of Nature’s ways.”
NOTES
10. twenty-two miles: Another instance of “poetic” rather than “literal” detail. Dante’s measurements cannot be made to fit together on any scale map.
10-11. the moon . . . is under our feet: If the moon, nearly at full, is under their feet, the sun must be overhead. It is therefore approximately noon of Holy Saturday.
18. cavern: Dante’s use of this word is not literally accurate, but its intent and its poetic force are obvious.
27. Geri del Bello (DJEH-ree): A cousin of Dante’s father. He became embroiled in a quarrel with the Sacchetti of Florence and was murdered. At the time of the wr
iting he had not been avenged by his kinsmen in accord with the clan code of a life for a life.
29. Altaforte (Ahl-tah-FAWR-teh): Bertrand de Born was Lord of Hautefort. 40-41. cloister . . . lay brethren: A Dantean irony. This is the first suggestion of a sardonic mood reminiscent of the Gargoyle Cantos that will grow and swell in this Canto until even Virgil resorts to mocking irony.
47. Maremma, Valdichiano, and Sardinia: Malarial plague areas. Valdichiano and Maremma were swamp areas of eastern and western Tuscany.
59. the Aeginian people dying: Juno, incensed that the nymph Aegina let Jove possess her, set a plague upon the island that bore her name. Every animal and every human died until only Aeacus, the son born to Aegina of Jove, was left. He prayed to his father for aid and Jove repopulated the island by transforming the ants at his son’s feet into men. The Aeginians have since been called Myrmidons, from the Greek word for ant. Ovid (Metamorphoses, VII, 523-660).
76. in a hurry to go home: The literal text would be confusing here. I have translated one possible interpretation of it as offered by Giuseppe Vandelli. The original line is “ne da colui che mal volentier vegghia” (“nor by one who unwillingly stays awake,” or less literally, but with better force: “nor by one who fights off sleep”).
85. my Guide called out to one: The sinner spoken to is Griffolino d’arezzo (Ah-RAY-tsoe), an alchemist who extracted large sums of money from Alberto da Siena on the promise of teaching him to fly like Daedalus. When the Sienese oaf finally discovered he had been tricked, he had his “uncle,” the Bishop of Siena, burn Griffolino as a sorcerer. Griffolino, however, is not punished for sorcery, but for falsification of silver and gold through alchemy.
125-132. Stricca . . . Niccolò . . . Caccia . . . Abbagliato (STREE-kah, Nee-koe-LAW, KAH-tchah, Ahb-ah-LYAH-toe): All of these Sienese noblemen were members of the Spendthrift Brigade and wasted their substance in competitions of riotous living. Lano (Canto XIII) was also of this company. Niccolò dei Salimbeni discovered some recipe (details unknown) prepared with fabulously expensive spices. “Excepting” is ironical. (Cf. the similar usage in XXI, 41.)
137. Capocchio (Kah-PAW-kyoe): Reputedly a Florentine friend of Dante’s student days. For practicing alchemy he was burned at the stake at Siena in 1293.
Canto XXX
CIRCLE EIGHT: BOLGIA TEN
The Falsifiers
(The Remaining Three Classes:
Evil Impersonators,
Counterfeiters,
False Witnesses)
Just as Capocchio finishes speaking, two ravenous spirits come racing through the pit; and one of them, sinking his tusks into Capocchio’s neck, drags him away like prey. Capocchio’s companion, Griffolino, identifies the two as GIANNI SCHICCHI and MYRRHA, who run ravening through the pit through all eternity, snatching at other souls and rending them. These are the EVIL IMPERSONATORS, Falsifiers of Persons. In life they seized upon the appearance of others, and in death they must run with never a pause, seizing upon the infernal apparition of these souls, while they in turn are preyed upon by their own furies.
Next the Poets encounter MASTER ADAM, a sinner of the third class, a Falsifier of Money, i.e., a COUNTERFEITER. Like the alchemists, he is punished by a loathsome disease and he cannot move from where he lies, but his disease is compounded by other afflictions, including an eternity of unbearable thirst. Master Adam identifies two spirits lying beside him as POTIPHAR’S WIFE and SINON THE GREEK, sinners of the fourth class, THE FALSE WITNESS, i.e., Falsifiers of Words.
Sinon, angered by Master Adam’s identification of him, strikes him across the belly with the one arm he is able to move. Master Adam replies in kind, and Dante, fascinated by their continuing exchange of abuse, stands staring at them until Virgil turns on him in great anger, for “The wish to hear such baseness is degrading.” Dante burns with shame, and Virgil immediately forgives him because of his great and genuine repentance.
At the time when Juno took her furious
revenge for Semele, striking in rage
again and again at the Theban royal house,
King Athamas, by her contrivance, grew
so mad, that seeing his wife out for an airing
with his two sons, he cried to his retinue:
“Out with the nets there! Nets across the pass!
for I will take this lioness and her cubs!”
And spread his talons, mad and merciless,
and seizing his son Learchus, whirled him round
and brained him on a rock; at which the mother
leaped into the sea with her other son and drowned.
And when the Wheel of Fortune spun about
to humble the all-daring Trojan’s pride
so that both king and kingdom were wiped out;
Hecuba—mourning, wretched, and a slave—
having seen Polyxena sacrificed,
and Polydorus dead without a grave;
lost and alone, beside an alien sea,
began to bark and growl like a dog
in the mad seizure of her misery.
But never in Thebes nor Troy were Furies seen
to strike at man or beast in such mad rage
as two I saw, pale, naked, and unclean,
who suddenly came running toward us then,
snapping their teeth as they ran, like hungry swine
let out to feed after a night in the pen.
One of them sank his tusks so savagely
into Capocchio’s neck, that when he dragged him,
the ditch’s rocky bottom tore his belly.
And the Aretine, left trembling by me, said:
“That incubus, in life, was Gianni Schicchi;
here he runs rabid, mangling the other dead.”
“So!” I answered, “and so may the other one
not sink its teeth in you, be pleased to tell us
what shade it is before it races on.”
And he: “That ancient shade in time above
was Myrrha, vicious daughter of Cinyras
who loved her father with more than rightful love.
She falsified another’s form and came
disguised to sin with him just as that other
who runs with her, in order that he might claim
the fabulous lead-mare, lay under disguise
on Buoso Donati’s death bed and dictated
a spurious testament to the notaries.”
And when the rabid pair had passed from sight,
I turned to observe the other misbegotten
spirits that lay about to left and right.
And there I saw another husk of sin,
who, had his legs been trimmed away at the groin,
would have looked for all the world like a mandolin.
The dropsy’s heavy humors, which so bunch
and spread the limbs, had disproportioned him
till his face seemed much too small for his swollen paunch.
He strained his lips apart and thrust them forward
the way a sick man, feverish with thirst,
curls one lip toward the chin and the other upward.
“O you exempt from every punishment
of this grim world (I know not why),” he cried,
“look well upon the misery and debasement
of him who was Master Adam. In my first
life’s time, I had enough to please me: here,
I lack a drop of water for my thirst.
The rivulets that run from the green flanks
of Casentino to the Arno’s flood,
spreading their cool sweet moisture through their banks,
run constantly before me, and their plash
and ripple in imagination dries me
more than the disease that eats my flesh.
Inflexible Justice that has forked and spread
my soul like hay, to search it the more closely,
finds in the country where my guilt was bred
this increase of my grief; fo
r there I learned,
there in Romena, to stamp the Baptist’s image
on alloyed gold—till I was bound and burned.
But could I see the soul of Guido here,
or of Alessandro, or of their filthy brother,
I would not trade that sight for all the clear
cool flow of Branda’s fountain. One of the three—
if those wild wraiths who run here are not lying—
is here already. But small good it does me
when my legs are useless! Were I light enough
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