DANTE: INFERNO
English translation of Dante's Inferno
Digital Dante Columbia University (commentary, text, translations)
French translation of Dante's Inferno
John Ciardi reading Dante
Silent film L'Inferno (1911)
William Blake, Dante running from the Three Beasts, 1824–7
CANTO I: DARK WOOD
And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!
And never moved she from before my face,
Nay, rather did impede so much my way,
That many times I to return had turned.
The time was the beginning of the morning,
And up the sun was mounting with those stars
That with him were, what time the Love Divine
At first in motion set those beauteous things;
So were to me occasion of good hope,
The variegated skin of that wild beast,
The hour of time, and the delicious season;
But not so much, that did not give me fear
A lion’s aspect which appeared to me.
He seemed as if against me he were coming
With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger,
So that it seemed the air was afraid of him;
And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings
Seemed to be laden in her meagreness,
And many folk has caused to live forlorn!
She brought upon me so much heaviness,
With the affright that from her aspect came,
That I the hope relinquished of the height.
William Blake, The Inscription Over the Gate, 1824–7
CANTO III: GATES OF HELL
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.
These words—their aspect was obscure—I read
inscribed above a gateway
Alberto Martini, Minos, 1937
CANTO V: LUST
There dreadful Minos stands, gnashing his teeth:
examining the sins of those who enter,
he judges and assigns as his tail twines.
I mean that when the spirit born to evil
appears before him, it confesses all;
and he, the connoisseur of sin, can tell
the depth in Hell appropriate to it;
as many times as Minos wraps his tail
around himself, that marks the sinner’s level.
Always there is a crowd that stands before him:
each soul in turn advances toward that judgment;
they speak and hear, then they are cast below.
William Blake, The Circle of the Lustful, Francesca da Rimini (The Whirlwind of Lovers), 1826-27
I reached a place where every light is muted,
which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest,
when it is battered by opposing winds.
The hellish hurricane, which never rests,
drives on the spirits with its violence:
wheeling and pounding, it harasses them.
When they come up against the ruined slope,
then there are cries and wailing and lament,
and there they curse the force of the divine.
I learned that those who undergo this torment
are damned because they sinned within the flesh,
subjecting reason to the rule of lust.
William Blake, Cerberus, 1824–7
CANTO VI: GLUTTONY
When Cerberus, the great worm, noticed us,
he opened wide his mouths, showed us his fangs;
there was no part of him that did not twitch.
My guide opened his hands to their full span,
plucked up some earth, and with his fists filled full
he hurled it straight into those famished jaws.
Just as a dog that barks with greedy hunger
will then fall quiet when he gnaws his food,
intent and straining hard to cram it in,
so were the filthy faces of the demon
Cerberus transformed—after he’d stunned
the spirits so, they wished that they were deaf.
Sandrow Birk, Ciacco and the Gluttons, 2007
The name you citizens gave me was Ciacco;
and for the damning sin of gluttony,
as you can see, I languish in the rain.
And I, a wretched soul, am not alone,
for all of these have this same penalty
for this same sin.” And he said nothing more.
Salvador Dali, Inferno XXIX, 1960
CANTO XI: FRAUD
Now fraud, that eats away at every conscience,
is practiced by a man against another
who trusts in him, or one who has no trust.
This latter way seems only to cut off
the bond of love that nature forges; thus,
nestled within the second circle are:
hypocrisy and flattery, sorcerers,
and falsifiers, simony, and theft,
and barrators and panders and like trash.
Sandrow Birk, Greyon: The Beast of Fraud, 2007
CANTO XVII: VIOLENCE
“Behold the beast who bears the pointed tail,
who crosses mountains, shatters weapons, walls!
Behold the one whose stench fills all the world!”
So did my guide begin to speak to me,
and then he signaled him to come ashore
close to the end of those stone passageways.
And he came on, that filthy effigy
of fraud, and landed with his head and torso
but did not draw his tail onto the bank.
William Blake, The Simoniac Pope, 1824–7
CANTO XIX: SIMONY
Out from the mouth of each hole there emerged
a sinner’s feet and so much of his legs
up to the thigh; the rest remained within.
Both soles of every sinner were on fire;
their joints were writhing with such violence,
they would have severed withes and ropes of grass.
As flame on oily things will only stir
along the outer surface, so there, too,
that fire made its way from heels to toes.
Gustave Doré, Inferno XXI, 1861
CANTO XXI: MALEBRANCHE
With the same frenzy, with the brouhaha
of dogs, when they beset a poor wretch who
then stops dead in his tracks as if to beg,
so, from beneath the bridge, the demons rushed
against my guide with all their prongs, but he
called out: “Can’t you forget your savagery!
Before you try to maul me, just let one
of all your troop step forward. Hear me out,
and then decide if I am to be hooked.”
Alberto Martini, Inferno XXII, 1937
We made our way together with ten demons:
ah, what ferocious company! And yet
“in church with saints, with rotters in the tavern.”
Gustave Doré, Inferno XXVIII, 1861
CANTO XXVIII: HYPOCRISY
I surely saw, and it still seems I see,
a trunk without a head that walked just like
the others in that melancholy herd;
it carried by the hair its severed head,
which swayed within its hand just like a lantern;
and that head looked at us and said: “Ah me!”
Out of itself it made itself a lamp,
and they were two in one and one in two;
how that can be, He knows who so decrees.
When it was just below the bridge, it lifted
its arm together with its head, so that
its words might be more near us, words that said:
“Now you can see atrocious punishment,
you who, still breathing, go to view the dead:
see if there’s any pain as great as this.
And so that you may carry news of me,
know that I am Bertran de Born, the one
who gave bad counsel to the fledgling king.
I made the son and father enemies:
Achitophel with his malicious urgings
did not do worse with Absalom and David.
Because I severed those so joined, I carry—
alas—my brain dissevered from its source,
which is within my trunk. And thus, in me
one sees the law of counter—penalty.”
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William Blake, Six-Footed Serpent Attacking Agnolo Brunelleschi, 1826-27
CANTO XXV: THIEVES
If, reader, you are slow now to believe
what I shall tell, that is no cause for wonder,
for I who saw it hardly can accept it.
As I kept my eyes fixed upon those sinners,
a serpent with six feet springs out against
one of the three, and clutches him completely.
It gripped his belly with its middle feet,
and with its forefeet grappled his two arms;
and then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks;
it stretched its rear feet out along his thighs
and ran its tail along between the two,
then straightened it again behind his loins.
No ivy ever gripped a tree so fast
as when that horrifying monster clasped
and intertwined the other’s limbs with its.
Then just as if their substance were warm wax,
they stuck together and they mixed their colors,
so neither seemed what he had been before;
just as, when paper’s kindled, where it still
has not caught flame in full, its color’s dark
though not yet black, while white is dying off.
Sandro Botticelli, Inferno XXXI, 1481
CANTO XXI: GIANTS
Just as, whenever mists begin to thin,
when, gradually, vision finds the form
that in the vapor—thickened air was hidden,
so I pierced through the dense and darkened fog;
as I drew always nearer to the shore,
my error fled from me, my terror grew;
for as, on its round wall, Montereggioni
is crowned with towers, so there towered here,
above the bank that runs around the pit,
with half their bulk, the terrifying giants,
whom Jove still menaces from Heaven when
he sends his bolts of thunder down upon them.
Giovanni Stradano, Inferno Canto XXXIII, 1587
CANTO XXXII: TREACHERY
We had already taken leave of him,
when I saw two shades frozen in one hole,
so that one’s head served as the other’s cap;
and just as he who’s hungry chews his bread,
one sinner dug his teeth into the other
right at the place where brain is joined to nape:
no differently had Tydeus gnawed the temples
of Menalippus, out of indignation,
than this one chewed the skull and other parts.
That sinner raised his mouth from his fierce meal,
then used the head that he had ripped apart
in back: he wiped his lips upon its hair.
Alberto Martini, Ugolino, 1937
CANTO XXXIII: TREACHERY
That sinner raised his mouth from his fierce meal,
then used the head that he had ripped apart
in back: he wiped his lips upon its hair.
Lucifer from Petrus de Plasiis Divine Comedy of 1491
CANTO XXXIV: BETRAYAL
I marveled when I saw that, on his head,
he had three faces: one—in front-bloodred;
and then another two that, just above
the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first;
and at the crown, all three were reattached;
the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white;
the left in its appearance was like those
who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.
Beneath each face of his, two wings spread out,
as broad as suited so immense a bird:
I’ve never seen a ship with sails so wide.
They had no feathers, but were fashioned like
a bat’s; and he was agitating them,
so that three winds made their way out from him—
and all Cocytus froze before those winds.
He wept out of six eyes; and down three chins,
tears gushed together with a bloody froth.