Our pilgrim, Dante, and his guide, Virgil, have been dropped off on the other wide of the boiling river where they enter a strange wood, a twisted Eden, with sickly trees, thorns, and Harpies up in the branches.

If we remember Virgil’s map of hell, we' know we’re in the second ring of the seventh circle of INFERNO: the suicides (both those who killed themselves and those who squandered everything they had).

But there’s more than one sort of suicide. There’s literary suicide. That is, creating a text that stretches the boundaries of credulity until the text breaks. Which is what Dante-the-poet may be doing.

Because the passage starts to turn on trust. And on trusting Virgil. And on not being able to. All while encountering one of the strangest landscapes of hell.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I start our exploration of Canto XIII of INFERNO, a tour de force from our poet Dante.

Here’s my English translation of INFERNO, Canto XIII, lines 1 - 45:

Nessus hadn’t even gotten to the other side

When we stepped into a wood

That wasn’t even blazed with a trail.

 

No green leaves, but ones the color of dusk,

No smooth branches, but knotty and tangled ones,

No clusters of fruit were there, but thorns with poison.

 

No rougher, thicker scrub is the home

Of the wild beasts that despise the farmed land

In the low spot between Cécina and Corneto.

 

Here the hideous Harpies make their nests,

The creatures that chased the Trojans out of the Strophades

With sad prophecies of their future woe.

 

These Harpies had wide wingspans, but the necks and faces of humans,

Feet with talons and feathers across their ample bellies.

They made their lamentations up in the bizarre trees.

 

And my good master: “Before you get any farther in,

You should know that you’re in the second ring,”

He started to say, “and will be here

 

“Until you get to the horrible sands.

So have a good look around—you will see stuff

That you wouldn’t trust even if I gave a formal oration on it.”

 

I heard wailing from every direction

And didn’t see anyone who could be making it.

For this reason, I stopped, completely lost.

 

I believe that he believed that I believed

That all the voices from among the branches

Came from people who were hidden from us.

 

So my master said, “If you break off

A twig from one of these bushes,

Your current thoughts will be cut short.”

 

At that, I stretched out my hand a bit

And broke off a small branch from a large thorny bush.

Then the stem cried out, “Why do you break me?”

 

When it had been made dark with blood,

It recommenced talking: “Why do you rend me?

Don’t you have any compassion in your soul?

 

“We were men who have now become brambles.

I’ll bet your hand would have shown more pity

If we’d been the souls of snakes.”

 

Like a green log burning on one end,

That drips sap out of the other

And hisses as the air escapes,

 

So from that broken branch oozed out

Words and blood all at once. And I let the twig

Drop and stood like a man held in terror.