Leopardi: Selected Poems [Hardcover]

Giacomo Leopardi (Author), Eamon Grennan (Author, Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

By general consensus, Giacomo Leopardi is the greatest Italian poet since Dante. His influence on the major Italian poets who come after him--Montale, Ungaretti, and Pavese--is indisputable. Yet he's not well known to English speakers, largely because his work has resisted translation. That's why this fine new version of Selected Poems is particularly welcome. The Irish poet Eamon Grennan has managed to clear away the cobwebs, judiciously employing a loose blank verse reminiscent of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Along with capturing the lyrical fluidity of Leopardi's rhythms, Grennan reminds us that a poem like "The Solitary Thrush" is exactly contemporary with Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"--and that Leopardi is more acid than the Romantics ever were:

You'll not grieve, surely,
For the life you've led, since even
The slightest twist of your will
Is nature's way. But to me,
If I fail to escape
Loathsome old age--
When these eyes will mean nothing
To any other heart, the world be nothing
But a blank to them,
Each day more desolate, every day
Darker than the one before--what then
Will this longing for solitude
Seem like to me? What then
Will these years, or even I myself,
Seem to have been? Alas,
I'll be sick with regret, and over and over,
But inconsolable, looking back.

Just as Hamlet leaps out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, Leopardi (who died in 1837) ceases to accept the consolations of the Enlightenment. Refusing to find a fixed center of the universe, he admits to the presence of the void. No poet before him so actively conveys the force of nothing: "Tomorrow the hours will be leaden / With emptiness and melancholy." Indeed, the recognition of such metaphysical boredom, which the Italians call la noia, strikes Leopardi as the very badge of humanity: "To suffer want, emptiness, and hence noia--this seems to me the chief sign of the grandeur and nobility of human nature." --Mark Rudman --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

[Leopardi's] contribution to 19th-century European poetry second only to Baudelaire's . . . there's plenty to be grateful for in this lucidly translated selection. . . -- Boston Review
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 117 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691016437
• ISBN-13: 978-0691016436
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,894,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful poetic pessimism, November 6, 2001

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J from NY (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Leopardi (Paperback)

giacomo leopardi is an incredibly fascinating and yet somewhat obscure figure, and anyone who avoids his poetry because of it's pessimism or nihilism is really missing out. at times he becomes unbearably depressing and this is certainly a turn off past a point, but we should admire him nonetheless for his candor and commitment to expressing what he believed was truth. his bleak outlook on human life, contrary to popular belief, did not necessarily stem from his individual misfortunes (such as becoming a hunchback) or personal misery. he was simply a brilliant, lucid man who was aware that human life is ephemeral and without ultimate justification or meaning. anyone with the slightest bit of poetic or philosophical sensitivity to the nearly unfathomable miracle of the world and our lives can immediately understand where he is coming from. in any case, whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, you cannot afford to miss out on leopardi's work.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cosi` tra questa immensita` s'annega il pensier mio..., May 6, 2000

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Luca Graziuso - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leopardi: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, An English Leopardi, November 21, 2010

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Burl Horniachek (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leopardi (Paperback)

Leopardi is reputedly very difficult to render in English. But you wouldn't know it from these translations. Grennan does a masterful job of carrying over this great poet into English.

Leopardi is among the most bleak of poets. No matter how depressed you are, he seems to be more depressed. But his absolute control of tone keeps him from ever slipping into bathos. He somehow transforms desolation into ecstasy.