Leopardi : : Selected Poems / / Giacomo Leopardi.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Leopardi, Giacomo,
• MitwirkendeR: Barnes, John C.,
• TeilnehmendeR: Grennan, Eamon.
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2016]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation ; 125
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (120 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION. TO GIACOMO LEOPARDI -- TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION "ATTEMPTS AND PRELUDES" -- ONE -- L'Infinito / Infinitive -- La sera del d' di festa / Sunday Evening -- Alla luna / To the Moon -- Il sogno / Dream -- La vita solitaria / The Life of Solitude -- Ultimo canto di saffo / Sappho's Last Song -- Coro dei morti / Chorus of the Dead -- Two -- A silvia / To Silvia -- Il passero solitario / The Solitary Thrush -- Le ricordanze / Memories -- La quiete dopo la tempesta / The Calm after the Storm -- Il sabato del villaggio / Saturday in the Village -- Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell' Asia / Night Song of a Nomadic Shepherd in Asia -- Three -- A se stesso / To Himself -- Il tramonto della luna / The Setting Moon -- La ginestra o il fiore del deserto / Broom or The Flower of the Desert