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.'