Analysis Of Dante's Inferno

In his verse translation of Dante’s Inferno, Allen Mandelbaum translates the Italian phrase “sovra lor vanità che par persona” to “their empty images that seem like persons” in Canto IV. This Canto poetically describes Dante’s awakening to the Third Circle, where the Gluttonous dwell and are constantly bombarded by a ceaseless rain. The phrase describes how most of the sinners in this circle pay don’t pay any attention to Dante and Virgil. The Gluttonous are like ghosts, or empty images, that fail to acknowledge the two men. Although they are just souls, they seem so real and human to the poets. The sinners must have grown emotionless after spending so much time in Hell. When looking at Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies, we see that Maciek often references Dante’s Inferno throughout his recollections of Poland during World War II. He
But what drove Louis Begley to interweave his novel with Dante? The answer lies within a section of his work which references a similar translation of the aforementioned phrase in Canto IV. Begley writes “Poetry has its own power, and a poet’s words overcome even the hardness of his heart. In that place mute of all light, as the two poets trudge on, setting their feet on the emptiness of sufferers that seem like real bodies, sopra lor vanità che par persona, one question reverberates louder than all others: Who piles on these travails and pains, and why does our guilt waste us so?” (75). Begley understands that the horror behind Dante’s Inferno is unspeakable. However, he sees Dante’s work of poetry as a form of art, which gives the horror it describes a sort of “redeeming”