Quote 43
O Muses, o high genius, help me now;
o memory that set down what I saw,
here shall your excellence reveal itself! (Inf. II, 7-9)
In a nod to the Virgilian epic, Dante invokes the muses to lend credence to his words. This invocation, along with frequent apostrophes to God, reveals that Dante draws as much from the Classical tradition as from the Christian one.
Quote 44
Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries
were echoing across the starless air,
so that, as soon as I set out, I wept.
Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements,
accents of anger, words of suffering,
and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands –
all went to make a tumult that will whirl… (Inf. III, 22-28)
With this passage, Dante demonstrates that Hell is a realm in which language breaks down. All the human sounds that greet Dante on entering Hell are unintelligible expressions of pain and anger. This depicts Hell as a place of irrationality, where reason cannot be adequately expressed and where articulate words are hard to come by.
Quote 45
Faced with that truth which seems a lie, a man
should always close his lips as long as he can –
to tell it shames him, even though he’s blameless;
But here I can’t be still; and by the lines
of this my Comedy, reader, I swear –
and may my verse find favor for long years –
that through the dense and darkened air I saw
a figure swimming, rising up, enough
to bring amazement to the firmest heart,
like one returning from the waves where he
went down to loose an anchor snagged upon
a reef or something else hid in the sea,
who stretches upward and draws in his feet. (Inf. XVI, 124-136)
Dante points out a number of inadequacies in language. At the first sight of Geryon, Dante is struck dumb. For one of the first times in the Inferno, his vocabulary lacks words to describe what he beholds. In trying to describe Geryon, Dante says his best option is to "close his lips as long as he can." Later, in comparing Geryon to a diver, Dante commits a linguistic sin. He tries to affirm the veracity of his statement by swearing on his own work. As a process, swearing or taking an oath cannot function properly if one swears on one’s own words; this demonstrates circular reasoning. By doing this, Dante shows either his arrogance or a breakdown of reasoning at beholding a sight as wondrous as Geryon.