Well, we've come to it. The moment of truth. Or fraud. And what if they're the same thing? Or similar things?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for a corker of a passage, the last bits of Canto XVI of INFERNO, in which our poet Dante steps out from behind the plot and swears on the fragments of his own text that he really did see a beast that no one has ever imagined in the depths of hell.

Get ready for meta-poetry. Get ready for irony. Get ready for a complex stance of a writer taking charge of his own text. This passage has been lurking the wilds of the text for a while. And here it is. And here are the segments of this episode:

[01:00] My English translation of Inferno, Canto XVI, lines 124 - 136. If you want to find this passage, just look below.

[02:34] To speak about lies before you name the work you're writing so that you can swear on the truth of your lie. Wow, complicated.

[05:00] The poet steps out from behind the text and speaks directly to us: "I can't keep quiet." Were you trying to keep quiet? Has that been a problem?

[06:40] What is "comedy" for Dante? A matter of style.

[11:18] The figure swims up out of the murky air. "Una figura"--a very artistic word, which brings up the nature of the artistic process--as does the poet's use of the word "reader," indicating to us that he's writing a text to be read, not read aloud. Which means, yes, that the poem has become fully meta.

[15:30] The figure becomes a simile before it becomes a beast. A curious turn of rhetorical events in the poem.

[18:41] Why name the work here? What is the poet doing? Here are some answers given from the 1500s up to today.

Here is my English translation of Inferno, Canto XVI, Lines 124 – 136

When it comes to the truth of something that has the surface features of a lie,

A guy should keep his mouth shut, if at all possible,

For it can bring him disgrace, through no fault of his own.

But I can’t keep quiet! By the very scribblings

Of this Comedy, reader, I swear to you—

And boy, do I hope they bring me favor—

That I saw, right in the thick and murky air,

A figure swimming up

That would make the most confident hearts marvel.

The thing was like a diver who rises up, coming to the surface after he

Has gone down deep to pull up an anchor

Hooked on a reef or something hidden down under the water,

With his arms over his head and his feet drawn up toward his body.