Dante, our pilgrim, and Virgil, his guide, have fallen in with a pack of nasty demons who are on the prowl for any barrators who stick up from the boiling pitch in the fifth evil pouch in the circle of fraud.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we get super literary with this rather simple passage and begin to try to answer the most pressing question for Dante: how do you make your fraudulent story seem real?

Here are the segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:08] My English translation of this passage: INFERNO, Canto XXI, lines 13 - 39. If you'd like to read along, you can find this translation on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[03:42] How do you "read" (in the literary sense--that is, "interpret") these cantos with the barrators, the political grifters? I have three suggestions: 1) as a comic interlude in INFERNO, 2) as one of many genres the poet plays with during the course of INFERNO, or 3) as a pressing moment in which Dante's fraudulent poetics come into contact with his real life journey in exile.

[14:16] How does Dante the poet establish verisimilitude (that is, the appearance of being real or true) in this fifth pouch of the malebolge? 1) With natural imagery. 2) With folksy colloquialisms. 3) With personal details of his real life. And 4) through the self-conscious admission of the act of writing the artifice of poetry.