Purgatorio, Canto V: La Pia

The dead soul and narrator of this verse from Canto Five of Dante’s Purgatorio is identified as a woman named La Pia Tolomei, born to a noble family of Siena, Italy, allegedly killed in 1295 on the orders of her husband, Paganello de’ Pannocchieschi. “Nello”, as he was known, owned a castle in the Maremma coastal region; the murder of his wife was an 11th century version of a tabloid sensation, taking place under such a cloak of secrecy that the true manner of La Pia’s death was never known, though popular rumor at the time had it that Nello ordered a servant to take Pia by the feet and drop her from a high tower window.

This, her request to be remembered, is delivered to Dante in the fifth canto, reproduced here for the sheer beauty of the poetic verse, even when translated into English (by John D. Sinclair for Oxford University Press):

‘Thou knowest well how there gathers in the air

the moist vapor which changes to water again as

soon as it rises where the cold condenses it. That

evil will which seeks only evil he joined with

intellect and by the power his nature gave he

stirred the mists and the winds; then, when day

was spent, he covered the valley from Pratomagno

to the great range with cloud and so charged the

sky overhead that the pregnant air was turned to

water. The rain fell and that which the ground

refused came to the gullies and gathering in great

torrents poured headlong to the royal river with

such speed that nothing stayed its course. The

raging Archiano found my frozen body near its

mouth and swept it into the Arno and loosed on

my breast the cross I made of myself when pain

overcame me. It rolled me along the banks and

over the bottom, then covered and swathed me with

its spoils.’

‘Pray, when thou hast returned to the world and

art rested from the long way,’ the third spirit

followed on the second, ‘do thou remember me,

who am La Pia. Siena gave me birth, Maremma

death. He knows of it who, first plighting troth,

wedded me with his gem.’

Quixote XXVII

“And Pooh respects Owl, because you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday” ~~ A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Tuesday was a bad day. On a personal level, it was a bad day because the severe arthritic pain in the connective tissue around the heel of my right foot, which began on Sunday, dissipated on Monday, then returned with a vengeance on Tuesday, had me living in a world of hurt that took my pain medications hours — we’re talking nearly nine hours — to effectively communicate with the torment in my heel and foot.

On a whole other level, Tuesday was a bad day for the ongoing existential struggle between Republican lawmakers and unions and Democrats in the American Midwest, representing a surreal attempt to further erode and undermine the very existence of the middle-class. From the NYT (Spreading Anti-Union Agenda):

Republican talk of balancing budgets is cover for the real purpose of gutting the political force of middle-class state workers, who are steady supporters of Democrats and pose a threat to a growing conservative agenda.

And then, of course, there was madman Colonel Gadhafi’s warning in Libya of conducting “house-to-house” purges by military police until the uprising is put down. And it will be days before we get a final assessment of the death count from the earthquake that struck Christchurch, New Zealand on Monday.

After Lela went to bed shortly after eleven tonight, I settled in and read ten pages of Dante’s Purgatorio (which I’m reading for research) and another chapter of Don Quixote (which I’m reading for pleasure). In Chapter XXVII of Quixote, a sonnet appears, sung “not in the verses of uncouth shepherds but of polished gentlefolk.” The last two lines of the sonnet, for its obvious relevance, literally made me jerk upright on the sofa, where my injured foot is resting on an overturned plastic laundry basket, and reach for my highlighter pen:

Once more grim chaos will engulf our world

And all of us to anarchy be hurled