Canti
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- USD 0.99
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- USD 0.99
Descripción editorial
Il pensiero di Leopardi è caratterizzato, attraverso le fasi del suo pessimismo, dall'ambivalenza tra l'aspetto lirico-ascetico della sua poetica, che lo spinge a credere nelle «illusioni» e lusinghe della natura, e la razionalità speculativo-teorica presente nelle sue riflessioni filosofiche, che invece considera vane quelle illusioni, negando ad esse qualunque contenuto ontologico.
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.
