Данте Алигьери – The Divine Comedy / Божественная комедия (страница 47)

Flying behind him followed close, desirous

135 The other should escape, to have a quarrel.

And when the barrator had disappeared,

He turned his talons upon his companion,

And grappled with him right above the moat.

But sooth the other was a doughty sparhawk

140 To clapperclaw him well; and both of them

Fell in the middle of the boiling pond.

A sudden intercessor was the heat;

But ne'ertheless of rising there was naught,

To such degree they had their wings belimed.

145 Lamenting with the others, Barbariccia

Made four of them fly to the other side

With all their gaffs, and very speedily

This side and that they to their posts descended;

They stretched their hooks towards the pitch-ensnared,

150 Who were already baked within the crust,

And in this manner busied did we leave them.

Canto XXIII

Silent, alone, and without company

We went, the one in front, the other after,

As go the Minor Friars along their way.

Upon the fable of Aesop was directed

5 My thought, by reason of the present quarrel,

Where he has spoken of the frog and mouse;

For 'mo' and 'issa' are not more alike

Than this one is to that, if well we couple

End and beginning with a steadfast mind.

10 And even as one thought from another springs,

So afterward from that was born another,

Which the first fear within me double made.

Thus did I ponder: “These on our account

Are laughed to scorn, with injury and scoff

15 So great, that much I think it must annoy them.

If anger be engrafted on ill-will,

They will come after us more merciless

Than dog upon the leveret which he seizes,”

I felt my hair stand all on end already

20 With terror, and stood backwardly intent,

When said I: “Master, if thou hidest not

Thyself and me forthwith, of Malebranche

I am in dread; we have them now behind us;

I so imagine them, I already feel them.”

25 And he: “If I were made of leaded glass,

Thine outward image I should not attract

Sooner to me than I imprint the inner.

Just now thy thoughts came in among my own,

With similar attitude and similar face,

30 So that of both one counsel sole I made.

If peradventure the right bank so slope

That we to the next Bolgia can descend,

We shall escape from the imagined chase.”

Not yet he finished rendering such opinion,

35 When I beheld them come with outstretched wings,

Not far remote, with will to seize upon us.

My Leader on a sudden seized me up,

Even as a mother who by noise is wakened,

And close beside her sees the enkindled flames,

40 Who takes her son, and flies, and does not stop,

Having more care of him than of herself,

So that she clothes her only with a shift;

And downward from the top of the hard bank

Supine he gave him to the pendent rock,

45 That one side of the other Bolgia walls.

Ne'er ran so swiftly water through a sluice