INFERNO, Episode 151. Turning The Beast With Two Backs Into Poetry: Inferno, Canto XXV, Lines 34 - 78 (Part Two)

In the last episode of WALKING WITH DANTE, I helped you understand the sources and textual problems in this second metamorphosis from the seventh of the evil pouches (the malebolge) in INFERNO's great ring of fraud. Two become one, two beasts become one, and both become nothing.

Now let's talk through the implications of the passage and follow out some of its premises and conclusions. We're about to get very meta. But you knew that already.

Here are the episodes of this episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:49] Once again, as in the last episode, my English translation of this passage: INFERNO, Canto XXV, lines 34 - 78. If you'd like to read along, just scroll down this page.

[04:43] Six implications from this passage. First, gay panic.

[06:58] Second, questions about the nature of the self as a created thing.

[10:06] Third, questions about what exactly is fusing here.

[11:50] Fourth, theological blasphemy.

[14:37] Fifth, literary blasphemy.

[17:30] Sixth, Dante the poet's fears exposed.

And here is my English translation of Inferno, Canto XXV, Lines 34 – 78

That centaur galloped by as [Virgil] was speaking.

Then down below us, three spirits came up,

Whom neither my guide nor I noticed at first,

Until they hollered, “Who are you guys?”

At this we stopped telling tales

And turned our attention to them and them alone.

I didn’t know who they were; but it came to pass,

As it does through sheer coincidence a lot of the time,

That one of them mentioned the name of another

By saying, “Where in the world did Cianfa get off to?”

That’s why I, to make my guide pay attention,

Set a finger from my chin to my nose.

If, reader, you’re hesitant to believe

What I’m about to say, it’s no cause for surprise,

Because I who saw it can still hardly permit myself to believe it.

While I held my eyebrows up to get a good look at them,

A serpent with six feet suddenly launched itself

Onto one of them and hugged him tight.

Its middle feet got wrapped around his gut.

Its front feet took hold of both his arms.

Then it stuck its fangs first into one cheek, then into the other.

Its back feet stretched down his thighs

And it jammed its tail between them,

Curving it upward along his butt.

Ivy never gripped a tree trunk

So tightly as this nasty beast

Puts its tendrils all around the guy’s body.

Then, as if they were made of hot wax,

They started to fuse together, mixing their colors

Until neither seemed what he or it had been at the start.

It’s the same way that when paper burns,

A dark brown color moves in front of a flame,

Where it’s not yet charred black but all the white is long dead.

The other two spirits were looking on and each one

Cried out, “Wow, Agnello, how you morph!

See, you’re already neither two things nor one.”

By that point, the two heads had become one,

As the two expressions fused

Into one face until both were lost.

Two arms got made out of four limbs.

The thighs along with the calves, the belly, and the chest

Became body parts that were never seen before.

Each former feature was obliterated.

This perverse image was now both two things and nothing.

Such as it was, it went away with slow steps.