Canti
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
La produzione poetica significativa leopardiana è tutta raccolta in quest’opera: "Canti" consta di quarantu-no testi di varia lunghezza, composti tra il 1816 e il 1837. L’edizione definitiva dell’opera uscì postuma (1845) e si presenta come una fedele copia della seconda edizione corretta dall’autore e con l’aggiunta di due testi. Prima di pensare a questa opera, Giacomo Leopardi aveva pubblicato numerose stampe parziali dei testi via via composti: tali edizioni attestavano la consapevolezza leopardiana di aver lavorato su due filoni di-versi, uno di tipo patriottico-civile-filosofico ed uno evocativo-esistenziale-sentimentale, che vanno a coincidere all’incirca con le canzoni, il primo, e con gli idilli, il secondo.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A towering figure among European Romantic poets and a national hero of Italian letters, the tormented, learned, sometimes hyperbolic Leopardi (1798 1837) has inspired other writers and defied translators since before his early death: the 41 elegies, odes, love poems, and meditations called Canti lie at the heart of his work. Leopardi wrote at the bloody start of the movements that brought Italy independence: early odes call on the nation's "glorious ancestors" to revive lost patriotic hopes. Yet his enduring sadness was not so much political as metaphysical, erotic, and nostalgic: "my heart is stricken," he writes, "to think how everything in this world passes/ and barely leaves a trace." Landscapes and villages, and indeed his own memory, yield fleeting joys that self-consciousness takes away: "If life is misery," one of his characters asks the moon, "why do we bear it?/ But we're not mortal,/ and what I say may matter little to you." Several canti lament the deaths of beautiful women. To Leopardi's elaborate stanzas Galassi (who has also translated Montale) brings a light touch and a feel for modern speech. This bilingual version comes with copious notes aimed at beginners, informed, but not overwhelmed, by Italian scholarship.
