Canto XVII of INFERNO is often seen as a transitional canto, the way we get from the seventh circle of the violent to the eighth circle of fraudulent. But I don't think so. I think it's the canto in which our poet strikes out on his own to craft the work he needs to meet the terms of his own salvation.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we enter a canto full of poetic fireworks with perhaps the strangest beast in all of hell: the monster of fraud, so carefully described, so difficult to parse, so made up out of whole cloth.

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

[01:21] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto XVII, lines 1 - 27. If you'd like to read along, you can find this passage just below.

[03:16] Two prefatory points: 1) We need to go back to Virgil's map of hell in Canto XI and 2) Canto XVII is in no way a transitional canto.

[05:05] Canto XVI bleeds into Canto XVII. And something stranger, too: Dante swears on his COMEDY that he saw this monster and then Dante goes silent and Virgil takes over. Complex irony abounds!

[06:54] Behold the beast! It's a blasphemous perversion of "Behold the man."

[08:32] Canto XVII is stuffed the synecdoches, the parts for the whole.

[11:30] My quibble with the commentary tradition. Many connect this beast with a passage in the gospel of Matthew, warning against false prophets, wolves in sheep's clothing. But there's no interior v. exterior debate here. The beast is fully visible as horrific.

[14:41] The beast of fraud is painted--the same way the leopard was apparently painted and thereby connecting the two.

[17:05] The sheer bulk of metaphors and similes in this canto: four right here. And all about the fusion of craft and deceit.

[22:33] A side note: This is the passage in which Boccaccio dies while writing his commentary.

[25:31] So much emphasis on the thing's tail. What's going on here? Maybe a thematic structuring of INFERNO and maybe a set-up for the sewer of the eighth canto that lies ahead.

My English translation of Inferno, Canto XVII, Lines 1 – 27:

 

“Behold the beast with the stabby tail!

This thing passes over the mountains and breaks the walls as well as any armaments.

Behold the one who makes the whole world smell like crap.”

 

That’s how my leader started speaking to me

As he waved the hideous thing to come onto the shore

Near the end of our hard-as-marble path.

 

And that nauseating portrait of fraud

Came toward us, its head and chest coming to rest

But its tail lolling about out over the edge.

 

Its face was the face of a just man—

In fact, it seemed benevolent, at least skin-deep—

But all the rest of it was more like a serpent.

 

Both arms were hairy from the pits down.

Its back, chest, and both hips

Were painted with knots and whorls.

 

No embroidery or weaving was ever made

With that much color by Tartar or Turk,

Nor did Arachne ever make something like that on her loom.

 

As rowboats sometimes lie at the bank of a river,

Partly in the water and partly on the land;

And just as among those drunk Germans

 

A beaver sets himself at the water’s edge to start his siege;

So lay the worst of the beasts supine

On those stones that lip the sand.

 

All of its tail waggled out over the nothingness,

Curling up its venom-filled fork

That was armed like a scorpion’s.