Commentary Purg XIII 1-3

The whole mountain, by virtue of the way in which it is seven times sliced away, resembles a huge circular stairway cut into stone.  The travelers' arrival at the second of these terraces coincides with a canto beginning.  This is the only time that such a coincidence occurs in this cantica.  It is as though Dante wanted to acknowledge the reader's expectation that the arrival at each terrace might coincide with the beginning of a canto, thus forcing that reader to speculate upon the aesthetic reasons for the poet's not being overly 'neat.'

      The verb dismalare is almost certainly a Dantean coinage; we have tried to reflect its unusual character in our translation with an English coinage: 'unsins.'