Customer Reviews

The Canti With a Selection of His Prose: With a Selection of His Prose (Centenary Edition)

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This English version is of the COMPLETE poems, not just a selection, like that published by Princeton as part of its Lockert Library series. Moreover, this translation by Nichols is far more accurate, formal, and literal than the loose and slangy "translations" by Eamon Grennan. Leopardi is a great poet, and this is a valuable book. The other indispensable Leopardi book currently in print is the Cecchetti translation of the "Moral Essays and Dialogues," published by the University of California Press, in its Biblioteca Italiana series. This is one of the most underrated works of all 19th-century literature! If you like Leopardi's poetry, or the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or even Samuel Beckett, read this book!

Introducing a poet who divulged the voice of exclusion seems a bit of a paradox, yet it is precisely what his valiant translator seems to suggest to be doing given the relative want of interest that presently he has been receiving in the U.S. The translation is successfully carried out to the extent that the mood is respected and the melancholy distance is imparted rather faithfully. The resulting exposition of Leopardi's inestimable poetry bears the stamp of a poet who is in tune with his subject and displays considerable lyrical dexterity. However for all the agility that is here employed - so as to reproduce a work akin with the original - as always it inevitably does not do justice to the tremor that transpires through the Italian undulating and langorous resonance. The syntax is also essential to understanding the reach of this poet that only Holderlin, Rilke and Trakl may be said to have deployed a similar structural approach. Giorgio Agamben's book "Language and Death," would be a good source for English readers to "get a feel" of the poet's startling implosion of loss; the subtle fragility of his theory of noia (tedium); the whole of it punctuated with and surging, tentalizing strokes that emerge in the illuminations of village damsels, of frolicsome lads or of the naively insouciant Silvia. The poems herein abound with familiar illustrations of pastoral life and of the sublime that most all Romantic poets resorted to; The fashion in which Leopardi was able to express such aloofness and despair is tragic, brilliant and engagingly dispassionate. In the words of Oliver Goldsmith: "We cannot hesitate to say that in almost every branch of mental exertion, this extraordinary man seems to have had the capacity of attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest exellence. Whatever he does, he does in manner that makes it his own; not with a forced or affected, but a true originality. stamping on his work, like other masters, a type that defies all counterfeit." Amoungst others Nietzsche had the daring to translate Leopardi's poetry. These poets shared much more than simply a common profession in Philology...they were far too profound for anyone to fathom the abyss which they ceaselessly foundered within so as to dolcify the excesses of our tragic sense of life.

First, I cannot comment on this particular translation, as I read and studied the Canti in Italian - so my 5 stars ought to be taken cum grano salis.

Also, who am I to give stars to Leopardi? In fact, it would be rather silly of me to attempt, here, in a few lines, a short literary criticism of the work of one of the greatest poets in Italian language as well as a giant of human thought. Libraries can be filled with books on this enfant prodige, who as a child would toy with greek, latin and hebrew philology, write tragedies, essays on theology, histories of astronomy - as Italo Calvino puts it, when he writes a poem on the moon, Leopardi knows precisely well what he is talking about - or could forge a Callimachus and fool the world authorities on ancient greek literature. His Zibaldone di Pensieri ("Eggnog of thoughts") anticipates contemporary philosophy from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Heidegger - indeed it anticipates the contemporary age; his entire work is like a big bang, and contains in nuce future existentialism, nihilism, ontology. So, I will just rant a little about what of Leopardi speaks to me personally.

Men are not created equal. I hold this truth to be self evident. So did Leopardi. He knew he was not one of the "greggia", not one of the sheep (the sheep whose stolid happiness he envied). Some of us are different, as he tells us. There are people that can experience in advance what our kind will explore in the future centuries. And most of them burn, like fuses burn. We watch them fall with an admixture of admiration, horror and awe - as the tragic chorus watches Oedipus.

That is why I do not believe that "Cosmic Pessimism" is a good label for Leopardi. Sure, that would attract a teenager, and indeed at seventeen, I myself could not open his Canti without reading all of them, many times, usually ending up at late night, early morning.

But what is truly universal about Leopardi is his incredible sensitivity for the "being", his "esprit de finesse". He does not "understand" the infinite. He can feel it, as a revelation. In "L'Infinito" he describes - as a real, physical experience - the simplification of the universe to the cosmic equation that brahmanism would write as Brahman=Ataman (without him knowing anything of the Upanishad):

But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,

I create interminable spaces,

greater than human silences, and deepest

quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.

(...) and I remember the eternal

and the dead seasons, and the living present

and its sound (...)

Shipwreck can be sweet in the sea of the absolute, as it is to drown thoughts in this immensity; but as Leopardi points his eyes into its depths, reality poses him radical questions. At the end, Leopardi answers are notoriously horrific: Nature as a stepmother, and not a good one. Cruelty as at the core of the being. Men, women, children, no more valuable or respected than ants. And life itself the crazy joke of a disturbed mind. Get a taste (and pardon my poor translation):

In travail man is born

and often his birth causes death

Pain and torment he feels

with his earliest breath

and from the first, his parents fondly strive

to console him of being born (...)

We do not have to believe his answers - Nietzsche found different (yet similar) ones, so did Buddha, or Epicure or St. Paul... although we certainly cannot dismiss his pessimism by trivializing the personal experience of such an excellent mind, as some mediocre contemporaries have tried to.

But art, as we know, is not "a way to say things", it is a form of knowledge, a revelation for the artist foremost, as well as its transmission to others in the form that is closest to that pristine experience of truth. We read Leopardi to relive the enlightening of his soul, or at least to try. Perhaps at the end, answers are not so important.