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, you can find this passage on my website, markscarbrough.com, under the header "Walking With Dante."
[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 Canto XV 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.