Canti
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
L’originalità poetica di Giacomo Leopardi nasce dalla sfumatura tutta romantica che egli attribuisce ad un’impostazione filosofica di fondo di stampo materialistico: il divenire incessante delle cose, che cancella infanzia, giovinezza , affetti, bellezza, gloria e virtù. Fatta propria dalla ragione questa scoperta l’uomo può decidere se chiudere per viltà gli occhi ed adattarsi per convenienza alla tranquilla mediocrità del quotidiano oppure fare come l’uomo di genio, guardare ben fisso il desolato nulla che gli si apre davanti e vivere fino in fondo, senza religiose consolazioni, la propria infelicità.
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.
