Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews the fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so. But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there.

I cannot rightly say how I entered it, I was so full of sleep at the moment I left the true way; but when I had reached the foot of a hill, there at the end of the valley that had pierced my heart with fear, I looked up and saw its shoulders already clad in the ways of the planet that leads men aright by every path.

Then the fear was somewhat quieted that had continued in the lake of my heart through the night I had passed so piteously. And as he who with labouring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to look back on the dangerous waters, so my mind which was still fleeing turned back to gaze upon the pass that never left anyone alive.

This extract was taken from a translation of Dante. Inferno. by Charles S Singleton (Princeton University Press, 1970).
Read by David Greagg
Recorded on 28 March 2007