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    Leopardi: Selected Poems
    Leopardi: Selected Poems
    Leopardi: Selected Poems
    Ebook149 pages12 hours

    Leopardi: Selected Poems

    By Giacomo Leopardi and Eamon Grennan

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    About this ebook

    These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets.


    By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), Leopardi: Selected Poems should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a "criticism of life." The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJun 30, 2016
    ISBN9781400884100
    Leopardi: Selected Poems
    Author

    Giacomo Leopardi

    Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (June 29, 1798 – June 14, 1837) was an Italian poet, philosopher, essayist and philologist. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century

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      Book preview

      Leopardi - Giacomo Leopardi

      TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

      ATTEMPTS AND PRELUDES

      I FIRST encountered Leopardi while studying Italian at University College, Dublin, in 1962. My enthusiasm was stimulated by a wonderful teacher of Italian poetry, Dr. Gioia Gaidoni, who simply walked us through the texts themselves, showing us how to care for and be responsible to the language, the images, the sentiments, the thoughts. She loved her poets, and what she communicated to us by example was something like that love, or at least a shadow of its possibility. Even though the B.A. marked the end of my formal study of Italian, Leopardi's poems have always remained in my mind as a clear, undiminished light. Their calm lucidity of understanding and expression, their combination of eloquence and idiomatic directness, created some subconscious notion of style for me, while their extremity of content—at once in touch with the cosmic and the quotidian; at once spiritually satisfying and intensely secular; at once personal to the point of solipsism and yet a powerful endorsement of human solidarity; full of romantic melancholy and nostalgia, yet bathed in the hard unflinching light of some sort of absolute courage in the face of existential despair (a mix we associated in the sixties with Camus, and part of which I later came to see in Beckett)—their extremity of content became a sort of benchmark for an unaided human and, in the best sense, materialist way of

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