The Book of Magic by Brian Copenhaver

Author:Brian Copenhaver
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141393155
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

7.18

Hell’s Doorkeeper: Dante, Inferno, 5.1–45

When we go to a movie and see Batman, we go knowing what he and Bruce Wayne should look like. Comic books and television have made the Caped Crusader familiar and memorable by disseminating images that are fun to look at. Having only rhythms, rhymes and words to work with – in a stricter and serious register – Dante does much more for the snarling Minos and his shrieking victims. The gloom is dense where the monster stands, and moaning sinners thicken the darkness, making this pit of carnality ‘all deaf to light’ – sublime language to immortalize the horrors recorded by Dante. The awful vision that screams around him and Virgil is one of hell’s now timeless scenes and sounds, brought within human time and space by the godlike art that justifies the name of the Divine Comedy (see 4.12; 10.7).

*

As I dropped below the higher circle

down to the second that cinches in a smaller

and a sadder space that makes us weep,

There stands Minos terribly and snarling,

examining the guilty as they enter,

judging and assigning those he grabs:

I’m saying how a soul to evil born

will come before him and confess it all,

and then that careful connoisseur of sins

Sees what place in Hell the soul will get,

cinching his tail as many times around

as where he’ll plunge the sinner to his level.

Many of them always stand before him,

each going on its fated way to judgement,

talking, listening – then he hurls them down.

‘This cruel hostel, where you’re signing in … ’

he says, and then great Minos looks at me,

breaking off his awful duties just that long,

‘ … watch how you enter, careful whom you trust,

and don’t let the spacious entrance fool you!’

To which my guide replies: ‘Now why the scream?

‘Don’t block his destined journey: that’s the will

that’s willed where what is willed

is what can be, and we can ask no more.’

Now the doleful noise of pain starts up

and makes me hear it; now I go

where lamentation beats upon me hard.

I come into a place all deaf to light

and roaring like an ocean struck by storms

of warring winds that strike and batter.

This hellish hurricane that never rests

guides the spirits like a robbing thug,

whirling, pummelling and tormenting them.

All the ruination that they face,

the shrieks, the moaning, the laments –

right here this makes them curse the might of God.

I learned that those tormented in this way

are damned because they sinned the sins of flesh,

subduing reason to their likes and lusts.

And – when the weather’s cold – as starlings

wing themselves in full, far-reaching flocks,

just so that blast directs the evil spirits,

To here, to there, above, below it leads them,

with never any hope of comfort, never

any rest, nor even any hope of lesser pain.

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