When we left Virgil and Dante, the pilgrim had just asked who was being tossed this way and that in the winds of lust.

Virgil answers with a list of the "great" sinners out on the wind: figures from shadowy antiquity, through the Trojan War, and up to medieval romance. Maybe that’s no so shocking. But here’s what is: Virgil also seems to redefine lust, away from a "simple" sin to something more insane, more earth-shattering, and socially disruptive.

The Divine Comedy is nothing short of shocking at every turn. Dante-the-poet feels free to warp the very nature of reality to his art. Would we expect anything less?

Here’s my English translation of Inferno, Canto V, Lines 52 - 87:

“The first of those whose stories

You want to know,” he then told me,

“Was empress of a polyglot world.

 

“She got so rotted by the vice of lechery

That she made lust legit in her laws

To blot out the shame she’d brought on herself.

 

“She is Semiramis—we  read that

As his wife, she succeeded Ninos [to the throne]

And held the land that the Sultan now rules.

 

“Next is she who offed herself for love

And ripped up her faithfulness to the ashes of Sychaeus.

And then there’s raunchy Cleopatra.

 

“Look at Helen, around whom so many horrid times

Revolved, and look at the great Achilles

Who waged a final battle with love.

 

“Look at Paris, Tristan!” And he pointed out

More than a thousand shadows and named them, too,

Every one whom love had cut off from our life.

 

After I heard my teacher name

The ladies of old and their knights,

Pity grabbed me, and I was almost lost.

 

I began: “Poet, I really want

To speak with those two who go together

And seem so light in the wind.”

 

And he to me, “You will see them when they

Get closer to us. Then beg them

By the love that drives them and they will come to you.”

 

Right when the wind bent them close to us,

I spoke up, “O worn-out souls,

Come talk to us, if no one disallows it.”

 

As doves are drawn to their sweet nest

With their wings open and firm, summoned by their desire,

Moving on the air, wanting to land,

 

Just so these spirits slipped away from the flock near Dido

And came to us through the malevolent air—

That’s how strong my endearing cry was.