INFERNO, Episode 118. Poets, The Biggest Fraudsters Of All: Inferno, Canto XX, Lines 1 - 24

Canto XX of INFERNO is one that many skip. it's just too hard or too discursive or too long-winded. But others spend careers on. After Canto I, Canto XX stirs some of the most in-depth commentary of any in INFERNO.

What gives? We should probably take our cue from our poet: we're about to enter the meta space of a canto about poetry, all among the fraudsters, with Dante and even Virgil out in front, leading the way.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we begin our exploration of Inferno's Canto XX, this deep pit of metapoetics and savage irony.

Here are the segments of this episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:49] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto XX, lines 1 - 24. If you'd like to read along, scroll down this page.

[04:16] The damned arrive at line 7 of the canto. They're the fortune tellers, the soothsayers. We don't know that except we have to know it to understand the emotional landscape of the lines. Which means we, too, have to be prognosticators.

[08:16] A discussion of contrapasso--that is, the punishment fits the crime. And my thesis that the notion of contrapasso develops over the course of writing INFERNO.

[13:39] You know what soothsayers are: They're poets. Like Dante, whose poem is one big future-telling event.

[15:02] The poet may tip his hat to us in the final lines of the passage: don't believe what I say; just focus on how I felt.

[18:55] The opening lines of Canto XX. So self-conscious, so awkward that some have wanted to strike them from the text.

[22:42] My overall thesis for this canto: It's about the problems with and craft of poetry, and the savage irony that metapoetics entail.

And here’s my English translation of Inferno, Canto XX, Lines 1 – 24

 I’ve got to fashion verses for this new pain

And so give material substance to the twentieth canto

Of this first canticle, which is all about those who are submerged.

At this point, I was as ready as ever

To look down into the naked depths

Which were bathed with the tears of bitter suffering.

I saw people coming along around the valley’s curve

Silently and slowly, at the pace

That slow processions make in our world.

As I bent my gaze on down their bodies,

Each seemed weirdly contorted.

Between their chins and the tops of the torsos.

Their faces were twisted around to the back

So that they were forced to go along backwards

Since they were denied the sight of what’s ahead.

It could be that sometimes a guy with palsy

Knots himself up all over like this—

But I haven’t seen it, nor even believe it’s possible.

So that God may let you, reader, gather fruit

By reading this, think (if you can)

How I could have kept my face dry

When I saw our human image

So contorted that the tears from their eyes

Ran down to bathe their ass cracks.