Canti
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea'
Revisited and reorganized over his lifetime, this extraordinary work was described by Leopardi as a 'reliquary' for his ideas, feelings and deepest preoccupations. It encompasses drastic shifts in tone and material, and includes early personal elegies and idylls; radical public poems on history and politics; philosophical satires; his great, dark, despairing odes such as 'To Silvia'; and later masterworks such as 'The Setting of the Moon', written not long before Leopardi's death. Infused with classical allusion and nostalgia, yet disarmingly modern in their spare, meditative style and their sense of alienation and scepticism, the Canti influenced the following two centuries of Western lyric poetry, and inspired thinkers and writers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Beckett and Lowell.
Jonathan Galassi's direct new translation sensitively responds to the musicality of the Canti, while his introduction discusses the paradoxes of Leopardi's life and work.
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.
