What I now had to see in the blood and wounds,


who could ever say it adequately,


even in free speech, even told several times?

Paul Ingendaay

Europe correspondent for the feature pages in Berlin.

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    Chi porìa mai pur con parole sciolte


    dicer del sangue e delle piaghe a pieno


    ch'i 'ora vidi, per narrar più volte?

    (Inferno XXVIII, 1–3, translated by Hartmut Köhler)

    The question of whether the selected atrocities and various brutalities of Dante's Inferno could be better expressed in free speech, i.e. without verse, than with the terzines of the Commedia, has been tackled a little discussion: Dante wants to say that one comes closer without rhyme and meter approach the truth of the scenes described? Great autobiographers like Primo Levi, who recognized the Florentine as the most reliable key witness for the possibility of depicting violence at all, saw it differently. Let us take the first three lines of Canto 28 of the Inferno again, this time in the version by Wilhelm G. Hertz: “Who could say, even if he chose prose, / Of all blood and all wounds / That I see ', no matter how often he told it! "The passage is one of the more successful of this transmission,even if a phrase like “whom I behold” is more likely to be attributed to the stylistic “junk” that persuaded Hartmut Köhler to translate the commedia into flexible German prose.

    And of course the author, who sowed doubts about sayability more than seven hundred years ago, best tells what can be said. The “blood” in his verses is to be taken literally as the blood in Shakespeare's “Macbeth”: Everything is red, slippery, the innermost turned outward, and the juice that we so carefully guard in the body flows from Dante our eyes there. In the twelfth chant, the pilgrim and Virgil descend into the first ring of the seventh circle, where the murderers and dictators are literally sitting in the bloodstream they have created in life. First the hikers have to pass the Minotaur, but then they see it, the river of blood (“la riviera del sangue”), and then centaurs come with bows and arrows to shoot at all those guilty who want to rise higher from the blood ,than their punishment dictates them.

    Then the blood cell is colored in. Chiron, leader of the centaurs, deigns to make a few explanations, and images of the underworld emerge before our eyes that are shockingly concrete. “Over there,” says Chiron, “Alexander swims because the cruel Dionys who brought Sicily agonizing years” (Koehler calls him as Schiller did in the “guarantee”). And they actually swim! Shortly afterwards, Chiron gives the pilgrim the Nessus as a riding horse so that Dante can even get through the

    "Red boiling stream", the "hot brew" creates, in which "the boiled people uttered shrill screams". The less bad among the bad guys are allowed to let their upper bodies stick out of the broth. And then, it is said, “the blood flow gradually became shallower until it only boiled your feet”. His translator acknowledges that Dante wrote parts of a splatter movie by referring to the American thriller writer Thomas Harris and his bloodthirsty killer Hannibal Lecter in his learned commentaries.

    Much later, when at the end of the ascent to the Cleansing Mountain, in the thirtieth canto of the second part, Beatrice appears and Dante wants to turn to Virgil to tell him about his emotions, his companion has disappeared, but the words echo inside him: “None I have a little bit of blood left that doesn't tremble. “What a picture!

    A reminder that for Dante, blood is as natural and present as the animals and natural things in his everyday world around 1300, which his comparisons speak of time and again: cranes and pigeons, frogs and bulls, leaves and trees.

    All previous episodes of

    our series can be found at www.faz.net/dante.