On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Dante, Inferno, X, 22-81, 94-114, using Petrocchi’s edition for the Italian text and Allen Mandelbaum’s English translation. Both can be accessed through the Digital Dante project at Columbia University. The session focused on “The new year and the future” and together with Dante we read Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by] and Virginia Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915.

Dante’s canto X is about the souls of the Epicureans punished in the Inferno, who know the distant future but cannot see the present:

“We see, even as men who are farsighted,
those things,” he said, “that are remote from us;
the Highest Lord allots us that much light.

But when events draw near or are, our minds
are useless; were we not informed by others,
we should know nothing of your human state.

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

This is Farinata degli Uberti speaking, the Ghibelline who, upon hearing Dante’s Tuscan accent, asks him imperiously who his ancestors were. This is how the dialogue between these two Tuscans from opposite parties (Ghibelline and Guelph) starts, but it is soon interrupted by Cavalcanti de’ Cavalcanti, who asks Dante why his son, Guido (Cavalcanti), is not with him:

He looked around me, just as if he longed
to see if I had come with someone else;
but then, his expectation spent, he said

in tears: “If it is your high intellect
that lets you journey here, through this blind prison,
where is my son? Why is he not with you?”

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Dante hesitates for a moment, enough for Cavalcante to think that his son Guido is dead. Devastated by this thought, Cavalcante collapses, and we don’t see him again.

Farinata’s assurance and Cavalcante’s desperate paternal love make this canto memorable, but the intensity of Dante’s dialogue with them is heightened by their peculiar condition: they see the distant future but ignore the present — unlike Dante, unlike us.