Sighs under a starless air
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Quivi sospiri, pianti e alti guai risonavan per l’ aere sanza stelle, per ch’ io al cominciar ne lagrimai.
There sighs, laments, and deep wailings resounded through the air without stars, so that at the outset I wept.
Inside the gate, Dante's first experience is of sound: sighs, weeping, and wailing under an air with no stars.
Hell reaches Dante first as noise. Before he sees a single soul he hears them — <i>sospiri, pianti e alti guai</i> — three kinds of grief layered into one sound, sighing, weeping, howling. The line itself piles up its nouns until the ear is as crowded as the place.
<i>Sanza stelle</i>, without stars, is the quiet horror underneath. Dante loves the stars; each canticle of his poem will end on the word. To be under an air that has none is to be cut off from every light that points a way up. He weeps at the threshold, and the reader is meant to understand: this is a grief you feel before you can even name its cause.
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