INFERNO, Episode 72. One Last Suicide, One Last Irony, One Last Intertextuality: Inferno, Canto XIII, Lines 127 - 151

A bush has been torn apart by a crazed squanderers and black dogs. But it's got something to say, too, just like Pier delle Vigne.

 Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we finish off this tour-de-force of a canto from INFERNO. Canto XIII is a never-ending grab bag of surprises, none more so than the pagan wish or hope that ends the whole thing--and then a final metamorphosis, the most horrifying one in a canto full of them.

 There are references to Virgil, maybe hints to our pilgrim's backstory, and confusing prophecies afoot, much like the ones the Harpies offered Aeneas (and were mentioned in the opening lines of this canto). Wild. You've got to hear it to believe it.

Here is my English translation of Inferno, Canto XIII, lines 127 - 151:

My guide took me by the hand

And led me to the bush that wept

In vain from its bleeding stumps.

“O Jacopo,” it said, “of Santo Andrea,

What good did it do to make a screen of me.

What culpability do I have in your guilty life?”

At which point my master stopped above the bush

And said, “Who were you that through so many wounds

Puff out your sorrows with the blood?”

And he to us, “O souls who

Got here just in time to see the dishonorable carnage

That has pulled my leaves from me,

“Collect them at the feet of this sad bush.

I was from the city that changed its first patron

For the Baptist. On that account

“It will forever be grieved by his craft.

And if it were not that at the crossing of the Arno

There remained some bits of the other one’s presence,

“Those citizens, who rebuilt it

From the ashes that Attila left behind,

Would have done all that work in vain.

I made my houses my own gibbet.”