Gustave Doré's Nimrod's Gibberish

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“Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi,”

Gustave Doré
Plate 64 from Illustration for Inferno (Dante's Divine Comedy)
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So shouted his fierce lips, which sweeter hymns

Became not; and my guide address’d him thus:

“O senseless spirit!  let thy horn for thee

Interpret:  therewith vent thy rage, if rage

Or other passion wring thee.  Search thy neck,

There shalt thou find the belt that binds it on.

Wild spirit!  lo, upon thy mighty breast

Where hangs the baldrick!”  Then to me he spake:

“He doth accuse himself.  Nimrod is this,

Through whose ill counsel in the world no more

One tongue prevails.  But pass we on, nor waste

Our words; for so each language is to him,

As his to others, understood by none.”

From Wikipedia:

"Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi"

is a verse from Dante's Inferno, XXXI.67. The verse is shouted out by Nimrod, 

one of the giants who guard the Ninth Circle of Hell. The line, whose literal 

meaning is uncertain (it is usually left untranslated as well), is usually 

interpreted as a sign of the confusion of the languages caused by the fall of the 

Tower of Babel.

Context, content

The biblical character Nimrod is portrayed as a giant in the Inferno, congruent 

with medieval traditions of giants. That he is the biblical character also is 

indicated by the (hunter's) horn which hangs across his chest: Nimrod is "a 

mighty hunter before God". With other mythological giants, Nimrod forms a ring 

surrounding the central pit of Hell, a ring that Dante from a distance mistakes 

as a series of towers which he compares to those of Monteriggioni (40-45). 

When Nimrod speaks this, his only line in the poem, Virgil explains that "every 

language is to him the same / as his to others--no one knows his tongue" (80-

81).

Interpretation

Early commentators of Dante generally agreed already that there was no 

possible translation. Critics have noted, though, that there are possible 

comparisons with magic formulae, "with their mixtures of Hebrew-, Greek-, and 

Latin-looking words, and suggestions of angelic and demoniac names." Such 

formulae were often interspersed with psalms--Nimrod's line ends with almi, 

and its rhyme word in line 69 is salmi, "psalms".

Later critics typically read the "senseless" verse as a sign of incomprehensibility, 

of the tendency of poetic language to "displace language from the register of its 

ordinary operation". The line is compared to "Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe", 

another untranslatable verse from the Inferno (VII.1) spoken by an angry 

demon (Plutus), both of which are, according to one critic, "intended primarily 

to represent the mental confusion brought about by the sin of pride."

Denis Donoghue warns, however, that Virgil may be too quick with his criticism: 

"Virgil is not a patient critic, though his morality is impressive; he should have 

attended to the fury in Nimrod's words, if it is fury, and not to the words." 

Rather than "gibberish", Donoghue suggests it is "probably another version of 

King Lear's 'matter and impertinency mixed, reason in madness.'" Eric Rabkin 

reads the line as an example of metalinguistic discourse (which treats "language 

as subject, material, [and] context"):

In saying "'He hath himself accused,'" Virgil is making Nimrod's language the 

subject of his own language; in creating this nonsense utterance, the poet 

Dante is using language as material to be shaped into his poem; and in having 

the incomprehensible statement made meaningful to Dante by his mentor-poet 

Virgil, the text elliptically comments on its own context, on its existence as 

poetry that has the effect of creating order and palpable reality even where 

such reality may to ordinary or unblessed mortals be unapparent.

By the way:


Wikipedia entry on Gustave Doré has this strange/amusing sentence:


"At age five he had been a prodigy troublemaker,
playing pranks that were mature beyond his years."