Friday Night Poetry: Lines from Dante

There are hundreds of translations around the world of Dante's Divine Comedy. If one can read it, the original version is best. The Divine Comedy, of course, begins with the Inferno. Here are the opening lines of one of the world's great poems.


Inferno


I was midway through our journey of life
and woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered far from the true path.

It is not easy to say what it was,
this thick wood of gnarled trees, stubborn and grim
(the memory of it stirs my old fears),

a bitter place! Death could hardly be worse.
But to show the good that took long to come
I must talk of things other than the good.

How I entered there I cannot recall,
so sleepy had I become when I first strayed
from my course in life, leaving the true path;

but when I found myself nearing the bottom,
at the edge of the wilderness, in the valley,
where a shadow plunged my heart deep in fear,

I raised my head and saw on the hilltop
a golden silhouette of the morning light
that heartens men forward on every road...