Dante, our pilgrim, and his guide, Virgil, have been stopped in their tracks by a pack of demons above the fifth evil pouch in the eighth circle of hell. We're in the rings of fraud, the largest landscape in Inferno. And we're standing over the political grifters who are sunk in boiling pitch. The damned sure have it bad. Maybe Virgil and Dante, too.
Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as one of the demons, Evil Tail, steps out and musters his troops to lead our duo along a cliff until they can find a bridge to cross over the sixth of the malebolge.
Would you follow a pack of demons? Especially with names like these?
Here are the segments of this episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE:
[02:35] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto XXI, lines 103 - 126. You can find this translation on my website, markscarbrough.com.
[04:40] Some notes about translation problems in this passage and even throughout COMEDY. And my confession: translation is (always?) an act of interpretation.
[07:08] The opening nine lines in this passage from INFERNO. Warning bells should be sounding in your brain!
[10:44] The problems of translating "Tussle-Head" (or "Scarmiglione").
[12:25] The very accurate dating of this moment in the passage lends veracity to Evil Tail's lie. (It also lends veracity to Dante's lie . . . you know, the poem as a whole).
[21:09] The squadron of ten demons--and much about how their names do (or don't) translate from the medieval Florentine. Maybe these translation problems are intentional.