Page:The Contrasts in Dante.djvu/19

 words of the twenty-seventh Canto, that he, Virgil, has hid this double-horned flame depart; addressing the spirit of Ulysses in the Lombard dialect.

I will take the liberty of reading from my own prose translation:—


 * Now was the flame pointing straight up and (was) still, through not speaking any more, and already was it moving away from us with the permission of the gentle Poet; when another (flame) that was coming on behind it, made us turn our eyes towards its crest, by reason of a confused sound that was issuing from it.

By dritta in su we are to understand that the flame had ceased to wave about (crollarsi, XXVI., 86), and was directing its point straight up in the air. By queta is meant that it was no longer giving forth a sound (mormorando, Ib. 85).

The familiar accents of the North Italian tongue have attracted the attention of another shade, who, coming under the arch over which the Poets are leaning, entreats them to pause for a moment and converse with him. Dante compares the confused jumble of sounds within the flame, to the howls of anguish of the Athenian artificer Perillus, who, having invented a brazen bull in which Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, could roaat his condemned prisonera, was informed that he should himself be the first to teach the bull to bellow; and thus was the engineer "hoist with his own petard," Perillus being the first victim of his own invention.


 * As the Sicilian bull, which had bellowed first with the moaning of him—and that was right—who had fashioned it with his file, bellowed with the voice of the sufferer, with such reality, that notwithstanding it was made of brass, yet did it seem transfixed with agony.

In the brazen bull there was no outlet for the voice, so that the cries of the victim made an inarticulate sound,