INFERNO, Episode 129. Strolling Down The Avenue With The Demons: Inferno, Canto XXI, Lines 13 - 39

Dante, our pilgrim, and Virgil, his guide, have fallen in with a pack of nasty demons who are on the prowl for any barrators who stick up from the boiling pitch in the fifth evil pouch in the circle of fraud.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we get super literary with this rather simple passage and begin to try to answer the most pressing question for Dante: how do you make your fraudulent story seem real?

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

[01:08] My English translation of this passage: INFERNO, Canto XXI, lines 13 - 39. If you'd like to read along, just scroll down this page.

[03:42] How do you "read" (in the literary sense--that is, "interpret") these cantos with the barrators, the political grifters? I have three suggestions: 1) as a comic interlude in INFERNO, 2) as one of many genres the poet plays with during the course of INFERNO, or 3) as a pressing moment in which Dante's fraudulent poetics come into contact with his real life journey in exile.

[14:16] How does Dante the poet establish verisimilitude (that is, the appearance of being real or true) in this fifth pouch of the malebolge? 1) With natural imagery. 2) With folksy colloquialisms. 3) With personal details of his real life. And 4) through the self-conscious admission of the act of writing the artifice of poetry.

And here’s my English translation of Inferno, Canto XXII, Lines 13 – 39

We walked along with these ten demons.

Wow, such a ferocious company! But in the church

With saints, in the bar with boozers.

My attention was completely on the pitch,

To see every particular about this pouch

And the people burning inside it.

As dolphins, when they make signals

To the mariners with the arch of their spines,

So that those guys take precautions for saving their ships,

In the same way, once in a while, to lessen his pain,

One of the sinners would show his back

And hide it again in a flash.

And as at the water’s edge in a ditch

Frogs stand there with just their snouts sticking out,

Keeping their feet and their big bulk submerged,

So the sinners positioned themselves on both sides.

But as Curly Beard got near,

They sank back under the boil.

I saw—and even now my heart still skips a beat—

One linger a bit, just as you might see

One frog hesitate while the others leap away.

And Mange-Dog, who was closest to him,

Hooked him by his tarred hair

And hauled him on shore—he looked like an otter to me.

I already knew all their names,

Because I’d jotted them down as they were picked

And then when they called out to each other.