The Ninth Circle. Treachery. Cocytus
Traitors to their Relatives, and to their Country
If I had rhymes that were as harsh and hoarse
as would be fitting for the dismal hole,
on which lean all the other circling rocks,
I ’d squeeze the juice of my conception out
more fully; but because I have them not,
not without fear do I resolve to speak;
for to describe the bottom of the universe
is not an enterprise wherewith to jest,
nor for a tongue that says ‘mamma’ and ‘dad’;
let, then, those Ladies give my verse their aid,
who helped Amphion build the walls of Thebes,
that from the facts the telling differ not.
O rabble, that, ill-born beyond all people,
are in a place, to speak of which is hard,
far better had ye here been sheep or goats!
When we were down within the gloomy well,
beneath the Giant’s feet, though lower far,
and I still gazing at its lofty wall,
I heard one say to me: “Look where thou walkest!
and see that with thy feet thou trample not
the heads of us two wretched, weary brothers!”
Thereat I turned around, and saw before me,
and ’neath my feet, a lake which, being frozen,
seemed to be made of glass and not of water.
The Danube up in Austria never made
so thick a veil in winter for its course,
nor yonder ’neath the cold sky did the Don,
as what was here; for even if Tambernich
had fallen on it, or had Pietrapana,
it had not cracked even at its very edge.
And as a frog remains, to do its croaking,
with muzzle out of water, in the season
when oft the peasant dreams that she is gleaning;
even so, as far as where one’s shame is shown,
the woeful shades were livid in the ice,
as to the notes of storks they set their teeth.
Each kept his face turned downward; from his mouth,
the cold, and from his eyes, his saddened heart
provides itself a witness in their midst.
When I had gazed around a while, I looked
down at my feet, and two I saw with heads
so close together, that their hair was mixed.
“Ye that are pressing thus your breasts together,
say who ye are,” said I. They bent their necks,
and when their faces had been raised toward me,
their eyes, moist only inwardly before,
gushed upward though the lids; whereat the cold,
binding the tears between them, closed them up.
A clamp ne’er bound so tightly board to board;
whereat, so great the anger mastering them,
like two he-goats, they butted one another.
And one who had, by reason of the cold,
lost both his ears, with face still lowered, said:
“Why dost thou mirror thee so much on us?
If thou wouldst know who those two near thee are,
the valley from which thy Bisenzio flows
belonged to their sire Albert and to them.
They issued from one body;…
