INFERNO, Episode 82. The Long View Across The Burning Sands: Inferno, Canto XV, Lines 1 - 24

We're walking with our pilgrim, Dante, along the embankment to a stream, heading down into the depths of the seventh circle of hell where the sins of violence are punished. This levy is the feature Virgil has plumped as the most amazing yet in hell.

More amazing still is our pilgrim's response to it: doubt. What's more, the poet behind the pilgrim seems to be at a different game altogether: poetic overabundance. The poet is snowing us with similes, twinning them against each other, perhaps offering us a clue about what we're about to face in this bit of hell.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I walk with the poet and pilgrim into one of the strangest cantos of INFERNO. We get psychological insights into the pilgrim and gorgeous bits of poetic excess, all as a set-up to what's ahead, the very heart of a writer's project: fame.

Here are the segments of this episode:

[01:59] The passage itself in my English translation. If you'd like to follow along, the passage is written out just below.

[03:45] Before we get started, I should confess my assumption about this canto (and the next one, too, while I'm at it). I believe the sinners here are the homosexuals. On down the line, in a future episode, we'll talk about why my assumption may not be the case.

[05:07] The first three lines of Canto XV: the geography of margins and the poetry of excess.

[12:07] Our first double simile: The Flemish and the Paduans, with their dikes and embankments, in a doubled-up comparison. But even stranger than this redundancy of two similes saying the same thing, there's the strange doubt expressed by the pilgrim (or maybe by the poet). "Whoever the master builder [of such works] might be"? Doesn't Dante know?

[18:02] The pilgrim tells us he really, truly, honestly doesn't need to look back at the wood of the suicides, now far back on the horizon. Why's he so interested in that wood? Does he protest too much?

[21:28] The squad arrives! A group of men comes up from across the burning sands. And we get yet another double simile in this already fraught opening to one of the greatest cantos of INFERNO.

Here’s my English translation of INFERNO, Canto XV, lines 1 - 24:

Now one of the rock-hard borders gave us passage

And the steam from the stream offered a shelter,

So that it made the water and embankments safe from the fire.

As the Flemish between Wissant and Bruges,

Fearing the tide that can flood them out,

Make a barrier so that they can escape from the sea;

And the same as the Paduans do along the Brenta,

To guard their towns and castles,

Before the Carentana feels the heat,

Along these same lines, although not so tall or grandiose,

These embankments were built

By the master builder, whoever he could be.

At this point we were so far away from the wood

That I would not have been able to see where it is,

Even if I’d made myself turn to see it.

That’s when we came upon a squad of spirits

Who came along the embankment, and each one of them

Gave us the once over as men do in the evening,

Gazing at each other under a new moon.

They furrowed their brows

As an old tailor does at the eye of a needle.

As I was being scrutinized by this band,

I was recognized by one of them, who grabbed ahold of

My hem and cried, “What a marvel!”