We start our trek with the pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil across the final, ninth circle of hell, an unforgiving ice sheet, where we encounter disembodied voices, questions about perspective, pastoral imagery, and some puzzling questions about how it all works.

Dante’s imagination is mechanical and full. But even he nods once in a while. Maybe a couple of times in this passage, in fact. But not in its overall effect: a nightmare of frozen bodies at the center of the universe.

Here are the segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:17] My English translation of the passage: INFERNO, Canto XXXII, lines 16 - 39. If you'd like to read along or drop a comment, please scroll down this page.

[03:20] What does it mean that Dante and Virgil are "well below the feet of the giants"?

[06:00] Who says "watch out"? Why are these lines of dialogue unassigned?

[10:17]            The final ring of hell is not a lake of fire, but a lake of ice, made from the rivers of hell. But there's an interesting problem here! Dante may have nodded off and forgotten some details.

[15:07] Dante bring "local" geography to the last circle of hell, furthering the complex irony in the passage.

[18:08] How does Dante know about Cocytus?

[21:15] We get pastoral glimpses inside the terror of the final ice sheet.

[24:10] The damned use a language denied to Dante the poet.

[25:31] Cocytus is a noisy place!

[26:22] The final revelation is that the endpoint of evil is immobility.

And here’s my English translation of Inferno, Canto XXXII, Lines 16 – 39

 

When we were way on down in the dark pit,

Well below the feet of the giants,

And I was still staring back at the high wall,

 

I heard someone say to me, “Watch where you put your foot down!

Go on so you don’t bumble on the heads

Of these miserable, weary brothers with your feet.”

 

So I turned around and saw out before me

And also beneath my feet a lake of ice

With a surface more like glass than water.

 

So thick a cloudy veil was never made over

The Austrian Danube in winter,

Nor over the Don under a freezing sky,

 

As there was here—for if Mount Tambura

Had fallen on it, or Pietrapana,

The ice wouldn’t have cracked even out at its edge.

 

As when frogs sit and croak

Their snouts just out of the water, during the season

When rustic women often dream of gleaning,

 

These sorrowful shades, pale in pallor, were crying,

Held in the ice up to the spot where the shade of shame appears,

Playing the music of storks with their teeth.

 

Each one turned his face down.

Their mouths gave testimony to the cold;

And their eyes, to their heart-deep grief.