Souls move through the wall of fire in two streams — some going one way, some another, like ants meeting on the road and touching antennae. When the two groups pass, they greet each other with brief, burning kisses and cry out their sins. Those going one direction shout "Sodom and Gomorrah" — the sin of same-sex lust, for which those ancient cities were destroyed. Those going the other direction shout the name of Pasiphae — the queen who in myth coupled with the bull and gave birth to the Minotaur — the emblem of heterosexual excess. Both groups are in the fire; both are being purged; both, equally, once allowed the fire of desire to consume what it should have illuminated. The fire is the same for all — the substance differs only in direction.
The souls marvel at Dante's shadow and press around to look. One speaks — Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, the poet Dante called his "father" in the sweet new style, whose love lyrics shaped everything Dante wrote. The encounter is reverent and tender. Dante tells him he holds Guinizelli's poems dearer than any. Guinizelli is moved but points to another soul nearby: if you want to see the master, look there — that man was a better craftsman of the mother tongue than all the others. He points to Arnaut Daniel, the 12th-century Provençal troubadour, perhaps the greatest master of technically demanding lyric in the tradition before Dante. Arnaut speaks — uniquely in the whole Comedy — in his own Occitan language, not Italian. He asks Dante to remember his suffering; he weeps and goes back into the fire. The use of Occitan, untranslated, in an Italian poem is itself a tribute: Dante allows Daniel to speak in his own tongue, a gesture of pure literary generosity.