Canto XVII of INFERNO is often seen as a transitional canto, the way we get from the seventh circle of the violent to the eighth circle of the fraudulent. But I don't think so. I think this is the canto in which our poet strikes out on his own to craft the work he needs to meet the terms of his own salvation.
Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we enter a canto full of poetic fireworks with perhaps the strangest beast in all of hell: the monster of fraud, so carefully described, so difficult to parse, so made up out of whole cloth.
Here are the segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[01:21] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto XVII, lines 1 - 27. If you'd like to read along, you can find this passage on my website, markscarbrough.com, under the header about this podcast.
[03:16] Two prefatory points: 1) We need to go back to Virgil's map of hell in Canto XI and 2) Canto XVII is in no way a transitional canto.
[05:05] Canto XVI bleeds into Canto XVII. And something stranger, too: Dante swears on his COMEDY that he saw this monster and then Dante goes silent and Virgil takes over. Complex irony abounds!
[06:54] Behold the beast! It's a blasphemous perversion of "Behold the man."
[08:32] Canto XVII is stuffed the synecdoches, the parts for the whole.
[11:30] My quibble with the commentary tradition. Many connect this beast with a passage in the gospel of Matthew, warning against false prophets, wolves in sheep's clothing. But there's no interior v. exterior debate here. The beast is fully visible as horrific.
[14:41] The beast of fraud is painted--the same way the leopard was apparently painted and thereby connecting the two.
[17:05] The sheer bulk of metaphors and similes in this canto: four right here. And all about the fusion of craft and deceit.
[22:33] A side note: This is the passage in which Boccaccio dies while writing his commentary.
[25:31] So much emphasis on the thing's tail. What's going on here? Maybe a thematic structuring of INFERNO and maybe a set-up for the sewer of the eighth canto that lies ahead.