|
what. the hell?
Enigma,
Gustave Doré, 1871
http://www.danteonline.it/
Dante Alighieri, Commedia Divina, Inferno, Canto 1:
Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood, |
|
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh— |
|
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found |
|
I will recount the other things I saw.
How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep |
|
when I forsook the one true way.
But when I reached the foot of a hill,
there where the valley ended |
|
that had pierced my heart with fear,
looking up, I saw its shoulders
arrayed in the first light of the planet |
|
that leads men straight, no matter what their road.
Then the fear that had endured
in the lake of my heart, all the night |
|
I spent in such distress, was calmed.
And as one who, with laboring breath,
has escaped from the deep to the shores |
|
turns and looks back at the perilous waters,
so my mind, still in flight,
turned back to look once more upon the pass |
|
no mortal being ever left alive.
After I rested my wearied flesh a while,
I took my way again along the desert slope, |
|
my firm foot always lower than the other.
But now, near the beginning of the steep,
a leopard light and swift |
|
and covered with a spotted pelt
refused to back away from me
but so impeded, barred the way,
(...)
|
|
){kind=link}