Pier delle Vigne seemed to be finished—except he’s not. After some hesitation—and the first words from our pilgrim, Dante, since Canto XI (!)—Pier sets in again, this time with the story of what will happen to his body in the resurrection of the dead. He’ll get it back—but not in any way that Christian theology understands!

So many metamorphoses in this passage! Of Ovid. Of Jesus’s parables. Of the notion of the bodily resurrection of the dead.

And so many strange bits of honesty and heresy, all fused up into Pier’s characteristic, rhetorical excess.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look at all the strangeness and brilliance of Pier’s second speech in the wood of the suicides in the seventh circle of Inferno. Dante-the-poet is at the top of his game here. It’s hard to tell what’s true, what’s excess, what’s interpretive nonsense, and what’s to be taken at face value. Dante is pushing his luck. And maybe his text’s, too.

Here is my English translation of Inferno, Canto XIII, lines 79 - 108:

He hesitated and then: “While he has fallen silent,”

The poet said to me, “Don’t lose any time.

But speak up and ask him things, if you’d like.”

 

At which I to him, “Please ask him again

About whatever you believe would bring me satisfaction,

For I couldn’t—so much pity disheartens me.”

 

So he began, “If you want to make this man do

Freely what you’ve begged him to say,

Imprisoned spirit, may it please you

 

To explain how the spirit is lain

In these knotty brambles, and tell us, if you can,

If anyone ever undoes his parts from these twisted limbs.”

 

At that, the stem huffed and puffed, and then

That wind was transformed into a voice:

“You’ll get an answer, if briefly.”

 

“When the violent soul takes leave

Of its body, from which it has torn itself out by the roots,

Minos dictates its place in the seventh circle.

 

“It falls into the wood, in no special spot,

But wherever fortune tosses it down,

And there it germinates like a spelt grain.

 

“It sends out a shoot, then becomes a tangled mess.

The Harpies, arriving to sample the leaves,

Give it sorrow and a window for its sorrow.

 

“Like the others, we will eventually come by our spoils

But not like the others to clothe ourselves in them,

For it is not just for a man to have what he has taken from himself.

 

“We will drag them here and in this miserable wood

Our bodies will be hung,

Each one of the bush of its own devious shade.”