Leopardi: Selected Poems

Giacomo Leopardi

May 1997 · Princeton University Press

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.

About the author

Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, son of Count Monaldo and Countess Adelaide, was born in Recanati, Italy, on June 29, 1798. Leopardi enjoyed the company of his brother Carlo and sister Paolina, with whom he played such games as dressing up in clerical wear and saying mass, or acting in historical dramas. Encouraged to learn by his parents, Giacomo Leopardi was able to read and write Greek by the age of 15. It was his ability at poetry that kept him sane when, at 18, he lost most of his eyesight and developed a severely curved spine. Leopardi fell in love with his married cousin Countess Geltrude Cassi, with whom he had a powerful affair, in 1817. Nine years later, Leopardi fell in love with yet another married countess, Teresa Carniani Malvezzi, whose husband put an end to the affair. Leopardi channeled his anguish over his physical condition and emotionally exhausting romances into his poetry, fueled by the enthusiasm of his mentor, Pietro Giordani, and by the financial aid of such persons as publisher Antonio Stella, who paid Leopardi for his editing of works by classical writers. Although his poetry is usually grim and gloomy, his attention to detail with outdoor scenes is praised by critics, such as in his shortly-before-death poem, "The Broom," about a flower's growth. Giacomo Leopardi died on June 15, 1837, in Naples, Italy.