"I am wretched, I am tired, but the preacher is on fire"

[larryhammer]

The last post ended up with a lot of ponies scattered about, not to mention poets, and it's hard to resist a challenge. Drawing on those and my small Spanish and less Latin, I get for those same lines:

Like one who's just learned that his bite's
a scam, a sting, and starts to fume,
so Phlegyas in his stifled ire.

My leader stepped down in the boat,
and had me follow after him;
not till then did it bear a load.

The rhyme's reduced to assonance (my preferred slanting) on just the first and third lines, with no linking. In tetrameter, because pentameter lines seemed too padded. Certainly, forcing myself to pare down the lines to eight syllables made me go as plain as possible, matching Dante's style as best as I can grasp it. The "bite" isn't in the original; if I was willing to give up the slant-rhyme, I'd go with "that it's all."


So far two people have expressed interest in a canto-a-day community. If a couple more are up for it and someone's willing to co-moderate (assuming we can find a good name), we should go for it.

---L.