Maybe You Can't Trust Those Old Roman Poets: Inferno, Canto XIII, Lines 1 - 45

Nessus has dropped our pilgrim, Dante, off on the other side of the river where he and Virgil step into a gloomy wood with thorns rather than fruit, twisted limbs rather than shapely trees.

We know from Virgil's map of hell in Canto XI that this should be the place of the suicides, those who have committed violence against themselves (and their property). But what we find instead is a landscape that highlights a central problem for Dante-the-poet: How do you trust what you read?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for this exploration of one of the most gorgeous and troubling cantos in INFERNO. Virgil, Ovid, Harpies, rhetoric, metamorphosis, and torqued grammar: It all adds up to a tour de force from the poet Dante.

Here are the segments of this episode of the podcast:

[01:20] My English language translation of this passage from INFERNO: Canto XIII, lines 1 - 45. If you want to see this passage, you can look it up on my website markscarbrough.com under the header "Walking With Dante."

[04:19] We've stepped into a canto of negation: "non," "non," "non," a refrain that introduces us to poetry that will eventually test the limits of rhetoric and our own credulity. How much are we going to let the poet get away with?

[08:05] There are Harpies in those sickly trees? In other words, we've stepped back into a Virgilian landscape--but with a difference.

[12:00] And here's the difference: Virgil says you wouldn't believe this place even if I, the great poet, wrote about it. Which brings up the nightmare question for any writer: How do you create a text that is trustworthy?

[15:27] Dante-the-pilgrim is "completely lost"--just as he was once before in another trackless wood.

[16:50] The central problem: Interpretation is a matter of trust, of faith.

[20:28] Our pilgrim breaks off a steam--and it speaks!

[23:16] A gorgeous simile which sets up the central metaphor of burning that will occupy the middle of this canto. But there's another problem: the speech from the sinner we're about to meet takes its cue from the metaphor that the poet has just written. What?

[26:00] A review of the issues we've already found in Canto XIII.