The difference between death and dying can often seem small. The dying are simply those who are on their way to death. Yet the intrinsic difference between the process of death and the moment of death constitutes a great literary obsession, particularly in Dante's Inferno. Robert Pinsky's otherwise transcendent translation makes a provocative error in translating the following line: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essay My pity overwhelmed me and I felt relaxed: fainting as in death, I fell like a dying body. When in reality, the original Italian reads “like a corpse”. This moment of fragility, realized after the interaction with doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, depends entirely on the choice of word. If Dante falls like a “dead” corpse, then the lovers have made him aware of his own mortality. By changing the word to "die", Pinsky implies that Dante is less aware of his own death. Dante realizes that he falls like a corpse, which means he isn't exactly one. , like a person's state of being. Comparison is in fact a state of distancing; she suggests that Dante is so different from a corpse that comparing the two instead gives rise to a memorable analogy, emphasizing that he falls almost as if he were falling. is dead only emphasizes that he is in a similar but different state, alive. And what are the living if not those dying? All life is only an anticipation of death, and if death is an inevitable event, then dying is the inevitable process leading to it. To live (and therefore to die) is to have a fixed trajectory, to assume that death awaits in an indeterminate number of years. Virgil promises Dante the trajectory early on, and his assent is assured, just as his death is assured by his existence as a human being. To realize that he is dying is to affirm the trajectory. The fact that he will eventually become one of the dead he meets (even if he achieves eternal providence) is overwhelming for Dante (a poet convinced that his work will outlast so many others), and it is partly the reason for his fainting. When Dante falls "like" a corpse, he is forced to realize that he is not yet dead, meaning that his death is still imminent. His human mortality becomes more evident, and the text hammers home this realization. In the Italian original, the repeated words "morisse" and "morto" are so linguistically similar that they only reinforce the awareness that death is approaching, and therefore that Dante is dying. On the other hand, saying like "dying" implies that Dante is not dying, that his trajectory is always mutable and that Dante is less aware of his path: whether it is an ascension or a almost biblical fall. The main difference between death and dying also lies in the movement and reinforces Dante's awareness of mortality. To be dead is to be in stasis; even shadows that appear to move do not have the ability to change position. Paolo and Francesca are simply carried away in an eternal circle, only able to drift towards the human and Dante, who, instead, follows a fixed path of ascension. Dante chooses to emphasize that their stillness, their death, only emphasizes that he is not dead but dying. Dante “fell”, collapsed “fainted”. He has the ability to move, but only in one direction: downhill, much like the diminishing of death. Dante must descend into hell to become whole, just as he must go through the process of dying to achieve death and thus (as he is promised) salvation. THE.