Evil Counselors, Ulysses
Be glad, Florence, for you are so great
That over sea and land you flap your wings
And throughout all of hell they spread your name.
Among the thieves I found five citizens
5 Of yours — I am ashamed of who they were —
And you are not raised to any heights of honor.
But if near dawn the dreams we have are true,
Then you shall feel, a little while from now,
What Prato and the others crave for you.
10 If it already happened it should not be
Too soon; I would it had, since it must be so!
The longer my wait, the heavier my burden.
We left there, and up by the jutting rocks
That served as stairs for our descent
15 My guide climbed once more and pulled me after.
And we followed along our solitary way
Among the crags and rockpiles of the ridge;
Without our hands our footing would have failed.
It grieved me then and now again it grieves me
20 When I direct my mind to what I saw
And more than usually I curb my talent
Lest it rush in where virtue fails to guide;
So, if a friendly star or something better
Has given me the gift, I don’t gainsay it.
25 As many fireflies as the peasant — who
Rests on a hillside in the season when
The one that lights the world hides his face least
And when the flies make way for the mosquitos —
Sees glittering below him in the valley
30 Where perhaps he harvests grapes and plows,
So many flames everywhere enkindled
The eighth pocket, as I myself perceived
As soon as I was there where one sees bottom.
And just as he who avenged himself with bears
35 Beheld Elijah’s chariot departing
With the rearing horses rising up to heaven,
But never could have followed it with his eyes
Except for the one flame that he kept watching
Just like a little cloud sailing skyward:
40 In this way each flame moved through the throat
Of that deep ditch, none showing what it stole,
Though every flame secreted its own sinner.
I stood straight, then leaned out on the bridge
To look — had I not grabbed a jutting rock
45 I would have toppled off without a push!
And my guide, seeing me so attentive,
Said, "Within those fires there are souls,
Each one swathed in its self-scorching torment."
"My master," I replied, "by hearing you
50 I’m even surer, but already I’d concluded
It was so, and wanted to ask you this:
"Who’s inside that approaching flame so split
On top that it seems to rise out of the pyre
Where Eteocles lay beside his brother?"
55 "Within that flame Ulysses and Diomede
Suffer tortures," he told me; "they go together
In punishment as once they went in wrath;
"And there inside their flame they grieve the ruse
By which the horse became the gate through which
60 The Roman’s noble seed has issued forth.
"There they mourn the trick that makes the slain
Deidamia still weep for Achilles,
And there they pay for the Palladium."
"If it is possible for them to talk
65 From within these flames," I said, "master, I pray
And pray again (may my prayer count a thousand!)
"That you will not deny my waiting here
Until the flame with two horns comes this way:
You see how I bend toward it with a passion!"
70 And he said to me, "Your request deserves
High praise, and for that reason, it is granted.
But you be certain to restrain your tongue.
"Allow me to talk to them: I comprehended
What is your wish, but they may show disdain,
75 Since they were Greeks, for your speaking to them."
After the flame had come to us, my guide,
Judging the time and place now to be ripe,
Spoke, and these are the words I heard him say:
"O you who here are two within one fire,
80 If I merited from you while I was living,
If I merited from you much praise or little
"When in the world I wrote my lofty lines,
Do not leave, but let one of you tell where,
By his own doing, he lost his way and died."
85 The greater of the horns of ancient flame
Started so to tremble, murmuring,
That it seemed like a flame breasting the wind.
And then, shaking the tip this way and that,
As if it were a tongue about to talk,
90 It launched outward a voice that uttered, "When
"I set sail from Circe who had ensnared me
For more than a year there near Gaëta —
Before Aeneas had given it that name —
"Not fondness for my son nor sense of duty
95 To my aged father nor the love I owed
Penelope to bring her happiness
"Could overmaster in me the deep longing
Which I had to gain knowledge of the world
And of the vices and virtues of mankind.
100 "I embarked on the vast and open sea
With but one boat and that same scanty crew
Of my men who had not deserted me.
"On one shore and the other I saw as far
As Spain, far as Morocco, Sardinia,
105 And the other islands the sea bathes about.
"I and my shipmates by then were old and slow
When we came at long last to the close narrows
Where Hercules had set up his stone markers
"That men should not put out beyond that point.
110 On the starboard I now had passed Seville
And on the port I already passed Ceuta.
" ‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand
Dangers have reached the channel to the west,
To the short evening watch which your own senses
115 " ‘Still must keep, do not choose to deny
The experience of what lies past the sun
And of the world yet uninhabited.
" ‘Consider the seed of your generation:
You were not born to live like animals
120 But to pursue virtue and possess knowledge.’
"I rallied my shipmates for the voyage
So sharply with this brief exhortation
That then I could have hardly held them back.
"And turning our stern toward the morning,
125 Of oars we made wings for that madcap flight,
Always gaining on the larboard side.
"Night by now gazed out on all the stars
At the other pole, and our stars sank so low
That none rose up above the ocean floor.
130 "Five times the light that spread beneath the moon
Again shone down and five times more it waned
Since we had entered that deep passageway
"When a lone mountain loomed ahead, dark
In the dim distance, and it looked to me
135 The highest peak that I had ever seen.
"We leaped for joy — it quickly turned to grief,
For from the new land a whirlwind surging up
Struck the foredeck of our ship head on.
"Three times it spun us round in swirling waters;
140 The fourth round it raised the stern straight up
And plunged the prow down deep, as Another pleased,
"Until the sea once more closed over us."
