Very well, I shall provide you with the John Ciardi translation. It preserves Dante's rhyme scheme:
Just as the surge Charybdis hurls to sea
crashes and breaks upon its countersurge,
so these shades dance and crash eternally.
Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls,
far more than were above: they strained their chests
against enormous weights, and with mad howls
rolled them at one another. Then, in haste
they rolled them back, one party shouting out:
"Why do you hoard?" and the other: "Why do you waste?"
So back around that right they puff and blow,
each faction to its course, until they reach
opposite sides, and screaming as they go
the madmen turn and start their weights again
to crash against the maniacs. And I,
watching, felt my heart contract with pain.
"Master", I said, "what people can these be?
And all those tonsured ones there on our left--
it is possible that they were all of the clergy?"
And he: "In the first life beneath the sun
they were so skewed and squinteyed in their minds
their misering or extravagance mocked all reason.
So heavy, those boulders must be. Perhaps it is time that the two of you left them alone.
|