Dante's Ulysses

 –  Inferno Canto XXVI-

“When I left Circe who more than a year

   retained me over there close to Gaeta

long before Aeneas came  there

 giving the place that name,

   not fondness for my son, nor pity

on my old father, nor Penelope`s claim

to the joys of conjugal love,

   could overcome  in my mind the lust

 to get  experienced of  the whole world

and  all  human faults and virtues,

   and  I turned into the large and open sea

with just one  ship and only those few comrades

who  did not desert me. 

   I saw  both shores as far as Morocco

 and as far as Spain and I saw Sardinia

and the other islands  washed by that sea.

  I and my  comrades were old  and worn

when we sailed  into the narrow pass

where Hercules rose his columns

  warning all men not to go further,

already I had left Ceuta on the left,

Seville now sank behind me on the right.

  “Comrades,” I said, “who through a hundred thousand

perils have reached the West, in the short time

we have still left of our lives

   let us   not deny  ourselves  to experience

 the uninhabited world  following the course

of the sun where it set.

   Consider your origin! You were not born

to live your lives like brutes,

but to  follow the path of virtue and knowledge!”

   With this brief exhortation I made my men

so eager for the voyage I could hardly

have held them back if I changed my mind,

   and turning our stern toward morning,

we bore southwest out of the  known world ,

making wings of our oars for our fool`s flight.

   The night  showed already   all the constellations

 of the other hemisphere and our pole

 had so declined that it did not rise out of its ocean bed.

    Five times  the  moon’s face

 had brightened  and as many time  waned

since we had started our voyage

   when   a mountain appeared to us 

so far that it  looked dark,  a peak so tall

I doubted any man had seen the like.

   We cheered  and  soon we cried

because  a whirl broke hard

upon our ship from the new land:

   three times it turned over and over the ship

 in the wave ,  at fourth the poop rose

 and the bow went down, as Somebody wished

      till the sea closed over us.”

English Translation by Angelo Ruggeri