Inferno: Canto XXXIII

From the fell repast that sinner raised his mouth, wiping it upon the hair of the head he had laid waste behind.

Then he began: “Thou willest that I renew desperate grief, which wrings my heart, even at the very thought, before I tell thereof.

But if my words are to be a seed, that may bear fruit of infamy to the traitor whom I gnaw, thou shalt see me speak and weep at the same time.

I know not who thou mayest be, nor by what mode thou hast come down here; but, when I hear thee, in truth thou seemest to me a Florentine.

Thou hast to know that I was Count Ugolino, and this the Archbishop Ruggieri; now I will tell thee why I am such a neighbour to him.

That by the effect of his ill devices I, confiding in him, was taken and thereafter put to death, it is not necessary to say.

But that which thou canst not have learnt, that is, how cruel was my death, thou shalt hear—and know if he has offended me.

A narrow hole within the mew, which from me has the title of Famine, and in which others yet must be shut up,

had through its opening already shewn me several moons, when I slept the evil sleep that rent for me the curtain of the future.

This man seemed to me lord and master, chasing the wolf and his whelps, upon the mountain for which the Pisans cannot see Lucca.

With hounds meagre, keen, and dexterous, he had put in front of him Gualandi with Sismondi, and with Lanfranchi.

After short course, the father and his sons seemed to me weary; and methought I saw their flanks torn by the sharp teeth.

When I awoke before the dawn, I heard my sons [who were with me, weeping in their sleep, and] asking for bread.

Thou art right cruel, if thou dost not grieve already at the thought of what my heart foreboded; and if thou weepest not, at what art thou used to weep?

They were now awake, and the hour approaching at which our food used to be brought us, and each was anxious from his dream,

and below I heard the outlet of the horrible tower locked up: whereat I looked into the faces of my sons, without uttering a word,

I did not weep: so stony grew I within; they wept; and my little Anselm said: ‘Thou lookest so, father, what ails thee?’ But I shed no tear, nor answered all that day,

nor the next night, till another sun came forth upon the world.

When a small ray was sent into the doleful prison, and I discerned in their four faces the aspect of my own,

I bit on both my hands for grief. And they, thinking that I did it from desire of eating, of a sudden rose up,

and said: ‘Father, it will give us much less pain, if thou wilt eat of us: thou didst put upon us this miserable flesh, and do thou strip it off.’

Then I calmed myself, in order not to make them more unhappy; that day and the next we all were mute. Ah, hard earth! why didst thou not open?

When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself stretched out at my feet, saying: ‘My father! why don’t you help me?’

There he died; and even as thou seest me, saw I the three fall one by one, between the fifth day and the sixth: whence I betook me,

already blind, to groping over each, and for [two] days called them, after they were dead; then fasting had more power than grief.”

When he had spoken this, with eyes distorted he seized the miserable skull again with his teeth, which as a dog’s were strong upon the bone.

Ah, Pisa! scandal to the people of the beauteous land where “si” is heard, since thy neighbours are slow to punish thee,

let the Caprara and Gorgona move, and hedge up the Arno at its mouth, that it may drown in thee every living soul.

For if Count Ugolino had the fame of having betrayed thee [of] thy castles, thou oughtest not to have put his sons into such torture:

their youthful age, thou modern Thebes! made innocent Uguccione and Brigata, and the other two whom my song above has named.

We went farther on, where the frost ruggedly inwraps another people, not bent [down]wards, but all reversed.

The very weeping there allows them not to weep; and the grief, which finds impediment upon their eyes, turns inward to increase the agony:

for their first tears form a knot, and, like crystal vizors, fill up all the cavity beneath their eyebrows.

And although, as from a callus, through the cold all feeling had departed from my face,

it now seemed to me as if I felt some wind; whereat I: “Master, who moves this? Is not all heat extinguished here below?”

Whence he to me: “Soon shalt thou be where thine eye itself, seeing the cause which rains the blast, shall answer thee in this.”

And one of the wretched shadows of the icy crust cried out to us: “O souls, so cruel that the last post of all is given to you!

remove the hard veils from my face, that I may vent the grief, which stuffs my heart, a little, ere the weeping freeze again.”

Wherefore I to him: “If thou wouldst have me aid thee, tell me who thou art; and if I do not extricate thee, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice.”

He answered [therefore]: “I am Friar Alberigo, I am he of the fruits from the ill garden, who here receive dates for my figs.”

“Hah!” said I to him, “then art thou dead [already]?” And he to me: “How my body stands in the world above, I have no knowledge.

Such privilege has this Ptolomæa, that oftentimes the soul falls down hither, ere Atropos impels it.

And that thou more willingly mayest rid the glazen tears from off my face, know that forthwith, when the soul betrays,

as I did, her body is taken from her by a Demon who thereafter rules it, till its time has all revolved.

She falls rushing to this cistern; and perhaps the body of this other shade, which winters here behind me, is still apparent on the earth above.

Thou must know [it], if thou art but now come down: it is Ser Branca d’Oria; and many years have passed since he was thus shut up.”

“I believe,” said I to him, “that thou deceivest me: for Branca d’Oria never died; and eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and puts on clothes.”

“In the ditch above, of the Malebranche,” said he, “there where the tenacious pitch is boiling,

Michel Zanche had not yet arrived, when this man left a Devil in his stead in the body of himself, and of one of his kindred who did the treachery along with him.

But reach hither thy hand: open my eyes”; and I opened them not for him: and to be rude to him was courtesy.

Ah, Genoese! men estranged from all morality, and full of all corruption, why are ye not scattered from the earth?

for with the worst spirit of Romagna, found I one of ye, who for his deeds even now in soul bathes in Cocytus, and above on earth still seems alive in body.