Part 33

I was already thoroughly disposed To peer down into the uncovered depth, Which bathed itself with tears of agony;

And people saw I through the circular valley, Silent and weeping, coming at the pace Which in this world the Litanies assume.

As lower down my sight descended on them, Wondrously each one seemed to be distorted From chin to the beginning of the chest;

For tow’rds the reins the countenance was turned, And backward it behoved them to advance, As to look forward had been taken from them.

Perchance indeed by violence of palsy Some one has been thus wholly turned awry; But I ne’er saw it, nor believe it can be.

As God may let thee, Reader, gather fruit From this thy reading, think now for thyself How I could ever keep my face unmoistened,

When our own image near me I beheld Distorted so, the weeping of the eyes Along the fissure bathed the hinder parts.

Truly I wept, leaning upon a peak Of the hard crag, so that my Escort said To me: “Art thou, too, of the other fools?

Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine?

Lift up, lift up thy head, and see for whom Opened the earth before the Thebans’ eyes; Wherefore they all cried: ‘Whither rushest thou,

Amphiaraus? Why dost leave the war?’ And downward ceased he not to fall amain As far as Minos, who lays hold on all.

See, he has made a bosom of his shoulders! Because he wished to see too far before him Behind he looks, and backward goes his way:

Behold Tiresias, who his semblance changed, When from a male a female he became, His members being all of them transformed;

And afterwards was forced to strike once more The two entangled serpents with his rod, Ere he could have again his manly plumes.

That Aruns is, who backs the other’s belly, Who in the hills of Luni, there where grubs The Carrarese who houses underneath,

Among the marbles white a cavern had For his abode; whence to behold the stars And sea, the view was not cut off from him.

And she there, who is covering up her breasts, Which thou beholdest not, with loosened tresses, And on that side has all the hairy skin,

Was Manto, who made quest through many lands, Afterwards tarried there where I was born; Whereof I would thou list to me a little.

After her father had from life departed, And the city of Bacchus had become enslaved, She a long season wandered through the world.

Above in beauteous Italy lies a lake At the Alp’s foot that shuts in Germany Over Tyrol, and has the name Benaco.

By a thousand springs, I think, and more, is bathed, ’Twixt Garda and Val Camonica, Pennino, With water that grows stagnant in that lake.

Midway a place is where the Trentine Pastor, And he of Brescia, and the Veronese Might give his blessing, if he passed that way.

Sitteth Peschiera, fortress fair and strong, To front the Brescians and the Bergamasks, Where round about the bank descendeth lowest.

There of necessity must fall whatever In bosom of Benaco cannot stay, And grows a river down through verdant pastures.

Soon as the water doth begin to run, No more Benaco is it called, but Mincio, Far as Governo, where it falls in Po.

Not far it runs before it finds a plain In which it spreads itself, and makes it marshy, And oft ’tis wont in summer to be sickly.

Passing that way the virgin pitiless Land in the middle of the fen descried, Untilled and naked of inhabitants;

There to escape all human intercourse, She with her servants stayed, her arts to practise And lived, and left her empty body there.