There has been quite a lot written about Dante’s figure of Bruno Latini, who he places in the Seventh Circle of Hell in Inferno Canto XV as a sodomite. Latini had been Dante’s teacher, and there are number of publications pointing out that Dante is irather sympathetic to Latini. So, sodomites in Hell – nothing new there.
So I was interested some years ago to find that in Purgatorio Canto XXVI Dante makes a completely clear distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals, and *includes both* among the saved. To be clear, although Dante has a tripartite division of the after like – Hell, Purgatory, Paradise – the people in Purgatory are all saved. I repeat, Note, Dante is criticising Lust (=excessive sexual desire) but all those in Purgatory are necessarily among the saved, and know they are saved, and thus are happy despite the purgation process. Although Dante does not, and could not, use the words homosexual or heterosexual (both invented many centuries later), he does make a biinary distinction by having those with heterosexual lust go one way around the mountain and those with homosexual lust go the other way. Both groups are saved.
Here is Mark Musa's translation.
But please-so may what you desire most
be quickly yours, and Heaven's greatest sphere
shelter you in its loving spaciousness- 63
tell me, who are you? Who are those that run
away behind us in the other group?
I shall record your answers in my book." 66
No less dumbfounded than a mountaineer,
who, speechless, gapes at everything he sees,
when, rude and rustic, he comes down to town, 69
were all those shades there judging from their looks;
but when they had recovered from surprise
(which in a noble heart lasts but a while), 72
the same soul who had earlier questioned me
began: "Blessed are you, who from our shores
can ship experience back for a better death! 75
The shades that do not move with us were marked
by that same sin for which Caesar as he
passed in triumph heard himself called a 'Queen'; 78
and that is why you heard 'Sodom! ' cried out
in self-reproach, as they ran off from us;
they use their shame to intensify the flames. 81
And ours was an hermaphroditic sin,
but since we did not act like human beings,
yielding instead, like animals, to lust, 84
when we pass by the other group, we shout
to our own shame the shameful name of her
who bestialized herself in beast-shaped wood. 87
Now you know what our guilt is. Should you want
to know our names, I do not know them all,
and if I did, there still would not be time. 88
***
And here Kirkpatrick’s translation XXVI:63-91
tell me, so I may rule a page for this,
64 who might you be, and who’s within that crowd
that’s going on its way behind your backs?’
These shadows in appearance now all stood
67*as mountain yokels stand - no differently ?
in dumbstruck stupefaction, staring round,
when, red-necked, rough, they make it, first, to town.
70 But once they’d set astonishment aside
(it’s quickly blunted in a noble heart),
‘Blessèd be you, who round our border lands,’
73 the shade who first had questioned me began,
‘haul in experience for your better death!
Those folk who do not follow in our track
76* offended as did Caesar - who once heard
‘‘You queen!’’, when triumphing, yelled out at him.
Then they, as they depart, are crying, ‘‘Sodom!’’
79 to castigate themselves as you have heard,
bringing self-shame to aid the scorching fire.
Our sin, by contrast, was hermaphrodite.
82* And since we paid no heed to human law ?
choosing to follow bestial appetites -
ourselves we read out our opprobrium,
85 speaking, on leaving here, the name of one
who made herself a beast in beastlike planks.
So now you know our guilt and what we did.
88
But if you seek to know us each by name,
there is no time - and I don’t know them all.
I shall diminish what you want of me.
***
And in Dante’s own words
64 ditemi, acciò ch’ancor carta ne verghi:
chi siete voi, e chi è quella turba
che se ne va di retro a’ vostri terghi?’
67 Non altrimenti stupido si turba
lo montanaro e rimirando ammuta,
quando rozzo e salvatico s’inurba,
70 che ciascun’ ombra fece in sua paruta;
ma poi che furon di stupore scarche,
lo qual ne li alti cuor tosto s’attuta:
73 ‘Beato te, che de le nostre marche,’
ricominciò colei che pria m’inchiese,
‘per morir meglio, esperienza imbarche!
76 La gente che non vien con noi offese
di ciò per che già Cesar triunfando
“Regina” contra sé chiamar s’intese;
79 però si parton "Soddoma" gridando,
rimproverando a sé com’ hai udito,
e aiutan l’arsura vergognando.
82 Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito,
ma perché non servammo umana legge,
seguendo come bestie l’appetito,
85 in obbrobrio di noi per noi si legge,
quando partinci, il nome di colei
che s’imbestiò ne le ’mbestiate schegge.
88 Or sai nostri atti e di che fummo rei;
se forse a nome vuo’ saper chi semo,
tempo non è di dire, e non saprei.
***
Paul Shaw Commentary: from Purgatori: A Canto by Canto Commentary, ed. Mandelbaum at all (2008)
Most important, as has often been noted, the image is functional on another level altogether. It is the only way that Dante signals to us, obliquely, that there is something odd or deviant in the way the second group of souls is going around the mountain. The laws of nature are broken in the simile describing those who broke the natural law, just as their punishment includes a symbolic element of “unnaturalness” in the direction in which they move. Homosexuality is for Dante a sin against nature—so much seems clear from the Inferno, where the homosexuals are in a different circle and indeed a different section of Hell from the heterosexual lustful, whose sin is merely one of incontinence or excess. But nowhere here does he state that explicitly. Indeed, the notion of an infraction of the natural order seems more pertinent to the heterosexuals than to the homosexuals, since the example they shout out, an example of bestiality, is much more clamorously a violation of that order.
The heterosexuals and the homosexuals are distinguished only by the direction in which they move around the mountain and the examples of lust they call out as they go. But whereas the homosexuals call out simply “Sodom and Gomorrah,” the biblical archetype that requires and receives no further elucidation, the heterosexuals call out not just the name of Pasiphae (the mythological queen of Crete who coupled with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur), but the story of her infatuation, telescoped into its single, significant moment, the brutal, dehumanized sexual act: the monstrous coupling of human being and animal. Again, Dante’s question about the identity of the groups elicits in the case of the homosexuals only a second classic, but anecdotally oblique, instance of the practice. They sinned in the way that caused Caesar to be called “queen,” a reference to his reputed relationship with the king of Bithynia. There is no definition of their sin, no description of their activities, and anonymity reigns. No such reticence inhibits the statements about the heterosexuals. (In dramatic terms the greater degree of explicitness reads as self-recrimination, for it is a heterosexual speaking, but the choice of emphasis is, as always, Dante’s.) These sinners failed to observe human law (83), pursuing their appetites like beasts (84), hence they call out the name of the woman “che s’imbestiò ne le ’mbestiate schegge” (“who, in/the bestial planks, became herself a beast,” 87). The original exemplum is repeated periphrastically in a line that is surely one of the most remarkable in the poem.
Dante’s choice of Pasiphae as sole representative of heterosexual lust is shocking and is meant to shock. What makes her case so much more disturbing than conventional images of sexual excess such as promiscuity is the perverse ingenuity required to act out her lust. She had a cow fashioned out of timbers—the schegge of line 87; the deluded bull mated with the cow, thus mating also with the woman concealed inside it. Bestiality is the extreme case, the end of the spectrum of physical desire unrestrained by “human law.” In the Convivio Dante had said that the man who abandons reason and lives only by the senses lives not as a man but as an animal: Pasiphae’s story literally and emblematically enacts this moral truth. The explosive harshness of the consonantal clusters of line 87 suggests both the violence of the transgression enacted against the natural order and the urgency of the speaker’s moral revulsion: sexual and moral energy fuse with verbal energy, for imbestiare is yet another Dantesque coinage. The reflexive verb implies not just that Pasiphae “became an animal” but that she “made an animal of herself,” that she “turned herself into an animal.” Where modern moralists might locate the offence in the denial of the sexual partner’s humanity, the treating of another person as an object, Dante’s exemplum invites us to see lust as self-injury, a wilfully and wantonly self-inflicted loss of humanity and human dignity.
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