Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses/Scylla and Charybdis/177

Annotations

Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood ... fatto trombetta     (Italian) Stephen here conflates two lines from Milton's Paradise Lost and one line from Dante's Inferno. The lines from Milton refer first to Satan's huge bulk as he lies prone in the burning lake of Hell and then to the tears he lets drop as he is about to address his fallen angels:

Paradise Lost 1:196 ... 1:620

Lay floating many a rood... Tears such as angels weep burst forth....

The line from Dante is the closing line of the twenty-first canto of the Inferno. It refers not to Satan but to another infernal demon Barbaricca, one of the Malabranche. Barbaricca is the leader of a troop of demons who escort Dante and Virgil through the fifth of the Malebolge that comprise the Eighth Circle of Hell. His fellow demons salute him by sticking out their tongues and he responds by farting:

Inferno 21:139

ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

and he made a trumpet of his arse.

Stephen has modernized Dante's spelling of elli (he)

and one more to hail him : ave, rabbi     (Latin) hail, master. The words, spoken by Judas just before he kisses and betrays Christ, are taken from the Latin Vulgate translation of Matthew 26:49. Cranly is presumably being identified here by Joyce as Judas. Joyce and J. F. Byrne (the model for Cranly) became estranged in 1902, shortly before Joyce met Oliver St. John Gogarty (the model for Buck Mulligan), though it was Byrne who felt that he had been betrayed by Joyce.