Wow, it took us a long time to actually see those who have been violent against others. Why all this set-up? Why the delay?

Canto XII is one of the most “cracked” of all the cantos in INFERNO. But that’s not a bad thing. It lets us into the interpretive space.

Join me, Mark Scabrough, as I posit some of the problems that may lie under this canto: corporeality, guilt, and the changing notion of who the pilgrim is as he walks across the known universe.

Here’s my English translation of INFERNO, Canto XII, lines 103 - 139:

I saw people dunked to their eyebrows,

And the grand centaur said, “They are the tyrants

Who bathed their hands in blood and plundering.

 

Here they lament their slash-and-burn crimes:

Here’s Alexander and fierce Dionyius,

Who made Sicily endure years of woe.

 

And that forehead that has really black hair

Is Ezzelino, and that other one, the blond,

Is Obizzo da Este, who, truth be told, was

 

Slain up in the world by his own bastard.”

At this, I turned to the poet, and he said,

“Let him be your primary guide now; and I, your second.”

 

A little ways ahead the centaur paused

Above some people who looked as if they were

Rising from the boiling stream up to their throats.

 

He showed us a shade by itself on one side,

Saying, “In the center of God’s church, that one split

The heart that still drips blood above the Thames.”

 

Then I saw some people who had not only their heads

But their chests out of the stream,

And I recognized a lot of these.

 

And more and more the level of the blood

Sank lower, until it just braised the soles of their feet,

And this was where we could cross the ditch.

 

“Just as you see that the boiling stream

Grows shallower right here,” the centaur said,

“I would have you believe me

 

“That the streambed gets deeper and deeper

On the other side until it gets deep enough

So that tyranny groans forever.

 

Over there divine justice stings

Attila, who was a scourge of the earth;

And Pyrrhus and Sextus, too; it eternally

 

Milks the tears, loosened by the boiling, of

Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo,

Who have declared war on the roadways.”

Then he turned back and crossed at the ford again.