INFERNO, Episode 94. Tumbling Over A Simile About A Waterfall: Inferno, Canto XVI, Lines 91 - 105

We're going to slow up even more and take one long look at a very complicated fifteen lines that include a twelve-line simile about the waterfall ahead of us.

 Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we walk passage by passage through Dante's masterwork, COMEDY. We're in the seventh circle of Inferno, in the second rung (or almost the third rung) of that circle and we have come to a passage that downshifts the narrative and allows the poet more freedom to step out from behind the curtain of his creation.

 But to get that freedom, he first has to marshall his poetic tools with this tour-de-force simile.

 Here are the segments of this podcast episode:

 [01:39] The passage itself: Inferno, Canto XVI, lines 91 - 105. If you want to see my translation of this passage, just look below.

 [03:27] A little bit about the geography mentioned in this simile--and why it's not all it's cracked up to be.

 [08:01] This is the longest simile we have yet to encounter in COMEDY. Why is that important? Because it's setting us up for the monster similes that dominate the eighth circle of hell. And it shouldn't surprise us that monster similes exist ahead of us--because we're about to enter the land of fraud. And what's more fraudulent that poetry?

 [12:09] The waterfall and similes about that waterfall are the structuring device of Canto XVI of Inferno.

 [13:39] The simile itself replicates the very waterfall it's trying to explain. This simile is a tumble of verbals, participles, and clauses, all coming together to create one big rush of language.

 [17:14]            More about the geography here. The seventh circle opens at the top of the Italian peninsula and then comes toward its close with another reference to those Alpine regions. Dante is truly an artistic at work, building the architecture of his poem as he also deepens its thematics.

My English translation of Inferno, Canto XVI, Lines 91 – 105

I followed him, and we weren’t very far along

When the sound of the water wasn’t so very far away

That we could barely have heard each other even if we’d spoken.

Like the river that’s the first to preserve its way

Down from Mount Viso and on toward the east

Along the left slope of the Apennines,

On up there where it’s called Acquacheta

Before it flows on into its lower bed

And abandons its name at Forli,

Roaring up above San Benedetto

Dell’Alpe, falling down in one great waterfall

Where there might have instead been thousands,

Just so down that steep bank

We found the dark water clamoring

So loudly that it could have done harm to our ears.