The Eighth Circle. Fraud
The Fourth Trench. Diviners and Soothsayers
About strange punishments must I make verses,
and furnish matter for the twentieth song
of this first lay, which treats of those submerged.
Already had I wholly given myself
to looking down at its uncovered bottom,
which with the tears of agony was bathed;
when people in the great round trench I saw
come weeping silently, and at the pace,
at which in this world litanies advance.
Then, as my sight fell on them lower down,
wondrously twisted each of them appeared
between the chin and where the chest begins;
for toward his loins his face was turned around,
and backward it behooved him to advance,
because of foresight they had been deprived.
By palsy some, perhaps, may thus have been
entirely turned around, but I ’ve not seen it,
nor do I think there ever was one such.
So may God let thee, Reader, gather fruit
from this thy reading, think now for thyself
how I could ever keep my own face dry,
when at close range I saw our human image
so twisted, that the weeping of the eyes
along the fissure bathed the back. Indeed,
as on a rock of that hard crag I leaned,
I wept so, that my Escort said to me:
“Art thou still foolish as the others are?
Here liveth piety when wholly dead
is pity. Who, then, guiltier is than he
who lets his feelings judge Divine Decrees?
Lift, lift thy head, and see the man for whom,
before the Trojans’ eyes, the earth was opened!
whence all cried: ‘Whither art thou rushing now,
Amphiaràus? Why quittest thou the war?’
and he ceased not from plunging headlong down
to Minos, who lays hold on every one.
See how he makes a bosom of his shoulders;
because he wished to see too far ahead,
he looks behind, and backward goes his way.
Behold Tiresias there, who changed his looks,
when female he became, from being male,
his members being each and all transformed;
and afterward he needs must strike again
the two entwining serpents with his rod,
ere he the plumage of a male regained.
He who to that one’s belly turns his back,
is Aruns, who in Luni’s mountain quarries,
where toils the Carrarese who dwells below,
among white marbles had as dwelling-place
a cave, from which his view was not cut off,
when at the stars he gazed, or at the sea.
And she who, yonder, with dishevelled locks
covers the breasts which thou dost not behold,
and has on that side all her hairy skin,
was Manto, who first searched through many lands,
then settled in the place where I was born;
thereof I ’d have thee hear me speak a little.
After her father had from life departed,
and Bacchus’ city had become enslaved,
she wandered long about the world. Up there
in lovely Italy, beneath the Alps
which o’er the Tyrol lock out Germany,
there lies a lake…
