In our last passage, Ciacco seemed to have come to a halt in his conversation with the pilgrim--who has clearly not had enough! So Dante-the-pilgrim prompts this damned shade for more. And more. Until he finds out the future of Florence. That is, the very near future, just weeks after his journey across the known universe and extending on for the next couple of years.
Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I walk slowly through Dante's masterwork, COMEDY. We're in canto VI of INFERNO, in the third circle of hell, the one that holds the gluttons--where Dante-the-pilgrim just can't seem to get enough of a fellow named Ciacco who has come up out of the muck.
Here are the segments of this episode:
[00:43] My English translation of the passage from INFERNO: Canto VI, lines 58 - 93.
[03:13] Dante's second set of questions for Ciacco. (He already asked his first question in the last passage--and so in the last episode of this podcast.) There are some crucial interpretive knots here, including the question of why the pilgrim needs to ask the damned for more.
[09:34] Ciacco's second set of answers. (Again, his first set were in the last passage and episode.) Ciacco responds with a Florentine prophecy about the city's coming troubles (although they happen after the date of the walk across the universe, they have already happened by the time Dante-the-poet is writing this passage.) I'll give you a brief overview of the history that Ciacco is recounting in his elliptical way--and explain a couple of the stranger references in the glutton's prophecy.
[22:59] Dante-the-pilgrim's third set of questions for Ciacco (really, the pilgrim's "ubi sunt"), including the naming of people the pilgrim has known back up on the surface.
[31:00] Ciacco's third set of answers--and a plea: remember me! A plea that reinforces some of the darker ironies of this passage (since we can't pin down who exactly Ciacco is).
[35:36] A rereading of this rather complicated passage.