The Stone Woman

APPENDIX

When those offended souls had told their story,

I bowed my head and kept it bowed until

the poet said, “What are you thinking of?”

When finally I spoke, I sighed, “Alas,

all those sweet thoughts, and oh, how much desiring

brought these two down into this agony.”

And then I turned to them and tried to speak;

I said, “Francesca, the torment that you suffer

brings painful tears of pity to my eyes.

But tell me, in that time of your sweet sighing

how, and by what signs, did love allow you

to recognise your dubious desires?”

And she to me: “There is no greater pain

than to remember, in our present grief,

past happiness (as well your teacher knows)!

But if your great desire is to learn

the very root of such a love as ours,

I shall tell you, but in words of flowing tears.

One day we read, to pass the time away,

of Lancelot, of how he fell in love;

we were alone, innocent of suspicion.

Time and again our eyes were brought together

by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.

To the moment of one line alone we yielded:

it was when we read about those longed-for lips

now being kissed by such a famous lover,

that this one (who shall never leave my side)

then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did.

Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it.

That day we read no further.” And all the while

the one of the two spirits spoke these words,

the other wept, in such a way that pity

blurred my senses; I swooned as though to die,

and fell to Hell’s floor as a body, dead, falls.

Translation by Mark Musa from

The Divine Comedy, courtesy of Penguin Books