Our pilgrim, Dante, and Virgil have made it down the rock slide and our pilgrim is noticeably quiet. Virgil thinks Dante is pondering the landscape. Is Virgil right?

It may not matter—because Virgil launches into more about his life in the afterlife outside of COMEDY.

What is Dante-the-poet up to? Why is he so insistent on Virgil’s backstory? And why does Virgil get the nature of reality wrong when he had just been such a sure theologian in Canto XI?

These are fundamental questions about Dante’s art—and part of the fun of our slow walk through COMEDY. We can stop and ponder. Because we’ve got the time.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this passage that has come in for so much negative commentary over the centuries since Dante wrote his masterwork

Here’s my English translation of this passage, INFERNO, Canto XII, Lines 31 - 48:

I went along in thought, and he said, “Perhaps you’re thinking

About this rockslide, which is guarded

By that bestial rage that I quenched just now.

“Okay, so I want you to know that the other time

I descended this far into lower hell,

These rocks had not yet cascaded down.

“But for sure, if I’ve got this figured out right,

Just before that one came down

And lifted out of Dis the great booty of the highest circle,

“The whole lot of this filthy, deep valley trembled so much

That I thought the universe

Felt the love by which some believe

“The world has often morphed into chaos.

It was right then when these old rocks,

Here and around us, fell into pieces.

“But set your eyes on what’s below, for we’re approaching

The river of blood in which are boiled

The ones who through violence have hurt others.”