INFERNO, Episode 44. Erichtho And The Complications In Virgil's Backstory: Inferno, Canto IX, Lines 1 - 33

Standing outside the walls of Dis, Virgil finds himself in a moment of faithful doubt, or maybe doubtful faith. In any event, he tries to clarify what’s happening by spinning a tale of his first descent to the bottom of hell.

And while he may make things easier on the pilgrim (“I’ve been here before!”), he complicates Dante’s poem beyond belief.

Or perhaps the Dante-the-poet complicates his own poem, making up a story about Virgil with no precedence, sticking Virgil in the middle of Lucan’s PHARSALIA, muddling his poem’s position toward the classical texts that come before it, and offering strange new resonances inside the character of Virgil.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through the many ways that Virgil’s story of his first descent complicate Dante’s masterwork COMEDY immeasurably.

Here’s my English translation of INFERNO, Canto IX, lines 1 - 33:"

The color that cowardice had painted my face

When I saw my leader turn back in retreat

Made him hurry up and get a grip on his own pallor.

He stopped, like a man who listens alert,

Since his eyes could not reach very far

Into the black air and the clotted fog.

“We still should be able to win this fight,”

He began, “Unless. . . .  But such a one was promised.

Oh, I think it takes too long for another to come.”

I knew exactly that he had covered up

What he had started to say

And had spoken in a completely different way.

But what he said still filled me with fear,

Because I understood the broken words

To mean worse than even he intended.

“Does anyone from the first circle,

Where the only punishment is the loss of hope,

Ever get this far down into the sad pit?”

So I made this question and this: “Only rarely,”

He replied to me, “do any of us

Make the journey as I now go.

“To be honest, once before I came this way,

Conjured by remorseless Erichtho,

Who brings shades back to their bodies.

“I had not long been denuded from my flesh

When she made me enter these walls

To snatch a soul from the circle of Judas.

“There’s nowhere lower or blacker

Or farther from the heaven that wheels over everything.

I well know the way, so you can be certain of that.

“This swamp that belches this foul crap

Completely garters the sorrowful city.

We can’t get in without some sort of wrath.”