Dante, our pilgrim, has done as Virgil instructed: he's torn a branch off a bramble, only to have it spit blood and air--and words!

The bush is the soul of one of the great courtiers of the Middle Ages: Pier della Vigne. He's here because . . . well, if you trust him, for nothing of his doing.

His speech is a tour de force of literary technique. Our poet is pulling out all the stops.

And maybe starting a fire, too. Because what if you can't trust what you read? Isn't that literary suicide?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore one of the great speeches of INFERNO, if not all of COMEDY.

Here are the segments of this podcast episode:

[01:23] My English translation of this passage from INFERNO: Canto XIII, lines 46 - 78. If you'd like to see this translation, it's on my website, markscarbrough.com, under the "Walking With Dante" header.

[04:15] Virgil, credulity, incredulity, and nature of reading--or the dangerous game of pushing your luck as a writer.

[08:37] The branch speaks! Pier delle Vigne. A bit about his history--what we know and what we don't.

[16:45] Pier blames his fate on envy, the scourge of every court. And his rhetoric lofts to the sky. What's he hiding? Or telling? Or doing?

[20:03] The exact moment of the suicide, one of the most perfect and elliptical lines in an already perfect and elliptical passage. It says everything. And says nothing. All at the same moment.

[27:31] A look at the rhetorical structure of the passage as a whole--and the point that it may all be trending toward its appeal.