VII/4 The theme of language in distortion reflects once again the twisting of values that dominates the canto. By accident Dante's own text is present in this plate which is reworked from part of the earliest version of the illustrations when it was my intention to write out the whole of the Italian text by hand within the picture area. Here words are defeated by pain and stand for the suffering of their speakers. These are the sullen syllables of the morose who sing their miserable psalm as if in bubbles and eddies round a drain. Even the interior text from A Human Document has become clogged towards unintelligibility. Thus the Canto begins and ends with incoherence. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.