karenika - books - the inferno

The Inferno

If I had rhymes as harsh and horrible
as the hard fact of that final dismal hole
which bears the weight of all the steeps of Hell,

I might more fully press the sap and substance
from my conception; but since I must do
without them, I begin with some reluctance.

For it is no easy undertaking, I say,
to describe the bottom of the Universe;
nor is it for tongue's that only babble child's play.

But may those Ladies of Heavenly Spring
who helped Amphion wall Thebes, assist my verse,
that the word may be the mirror of the thing.

O most miscreant rabble, you who keep
the stations of that place whose name is pain,
better had you been born as goats or sheep!

We stood now in the dark pit of the well,
far down the slope below the Giant's feet,
and while I still stared up at the great wall,

I heard a voice cry: "Watch which way you turn:
take care you do not trample on the heads
of the forworn and miserable brethren."

Whereat I turned and saw beneath my feet
and stretching out ahead, a lake so frozen
it seemed to be made of glass. So thick a sheet

never yet hid the Danube's winter course,
nor, far away beneath the frigid sky,
locked the Don up in its frozen source:

for were Tanbernick and the enormous peak
of Pietrapana to crash down on it,
not even the edges would so much as creak.

I don't know why I've never read Dante's Inferno before, but I'm so glad I did now. This translation by Ciardi is really true to the original. I wonder if Frost's poem of the world possibly ending in ice came from this story.