Читать книгу The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (3 Classic Unabridged Translations in one eBook: Cary's + Longfellow's + Norton's Translation + Original Illustrations by Gustave Doré) - Dante Alighieri - Страница 35

WHO, e'en in words unfetter'd, might at full

Tell of the wounds and blood that now I saw,

Though he repeated oft the tale? No tongue

So vast a theme could equal, speech and thought

Both impotent alike. If in one band

Collected, stood the people all, who e'er

Pour'd on Apulia's happy soil their blood,

Slain by the Trojans, and in that long war

When of the rings the measur'd booty made

A pile so high, as Rome's historian writes

Who errs not, with the multitude, that felt

The grinding force of Guiscard's Norman steel,

And those the rest, whose bones are gather'd yet

At Ceperano, there where treachery

Branded th' Apulian name, or where beyond

Thy walls, O Tagliacozzo, without arms

The old Alardo conquer'd; and his limbs

One were to show transpierc'd, another his

Clean lopt away; a spectacle like this

Were but a thing of nought, to the' hideous sight

Of the ninth chasm. A rundlet, that hath lost

Its middle or side stave, gapes not so wide,

As one I mark'd, torn from the chin throughout

Down to the hinder passage: 'twixt the legs

Dangling his entrails hung, the midriff lay

Open to view, and wretched ventricle,

That turns th' englutted aliment to dross.

Whilst eagerly I fix on him my gaze,

He ey'd me, with his hands laid his breast bare,

And cried; "Now mark how I do rip me! lo!