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 dying and the moment of death is of 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay My pity overwhelmed me and I felt loosened: Faint as in death, I fell like a dying body. When in reality, the original In Italian reads "like a corpse". This moment of fragility, realized after the interaction with the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, depends entirely on the choice of word. If Dante falls as a "dead" body, then the lovers have made him realize his own mortality. By changing the word to "die," Pinsky implies that Dante is less aware of his own death. Dante realizes that he is falling as a dead body, which means that he is not exactly one like oneself, like one's state of being. Simile is in effect a state of repression; suggests that Dante is so different from a corpse that the comparison between the two constitutes quite a memorable analogy, to emphasize that he falls almost as if he were dead only emphasizes that he is in a similar but different, living state. And what are the living if not those about to die? All life is nothing but an anticipation of death, and if death is the inevitable event then dying is the inevitable process that leads to it. Living (and therefore dying) means having a fixed trajectory, assuming that death is expected in an indeterminate span of years. Virgil soon promises the trajectory to Dante, and his consent 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 ultimately become one of the dead he encounters (even if he reaches eternal providence) is crushing to Dante (a poet convinced that his work will outlast many others), and is partly the reason for his fainting fit. When Dante falls “like” a corpse, he is forced to realize that he is not yet dead, which means that his death is still imminent. His human mortality becomes more apparent and the text hammers home this realization. In the original Italian, the repeated words “morisse” and “morto” are so linguistically similar that they simply reinforce the awareness that death is approaching, and therefore that Dante is dying. In contrast, saying how to “die” implies that Dante is not dying, that his trajectory is still changing, and that Dante is less aware of his path: be it an almost biblical rise or fall. The fundamental difference between death and dying is also a matter of movement and reinforces Dante's awareness of mortality. To be dead is to be in stasis; even shadows that appear to be moving do not have the ability to change position. Paolo and Francesca are simply suspended in an eternal circle, capable only of sliding towards the human and Dante, who instead follows a fixed path of ascent. Dante chooses to underline how their immobility, their being dead, only serves to underline that he is not dead but is dying. Dante "fell", collapsed "in a swoon". It has the ability to move, but only in one direction: downward, just like the decline of death. Dante must descend into Hell to become whole, just as he must go through the process of dying to reach death and then (as he has been promised) salvation. The lovers remind Dante that he must fall, but fall like the.