The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi [Paperback]

Giacomo Leopardi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 19, 2007

Translated by Frederick Townsend

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: BiblioBazaar (December 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0554093545
• ISBN-13: 978-0554093543
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,902,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Best English Rendition Available, June 21, 2008

By 

Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (Paperback)

There have been few attempts to render the sublime poet of Italian literature into English as of the last few decades, but none have been able to best Frederick Townsend's 1888 translations. The languor, the rhythm and the syntax is versified with intelligence and sensibility, while the depth of the abandon unto the ennui of a prescient amor fati is nuanced with deft and stress. On the merits of Leopardi I have already spoken in previous reviews, but suffice it to say for those that have yet to become acquainted with the Italian poet, classist, philologist and philosopher of the 1800, the crass analogy of liking him to a Wordsworth with the cadences and concision of a Keats may be useful; whereas for those more familiar with German literature you may well make the claim, as absurd as these may be, that he is similar to Holderlin, in a similar fashion given to a riddled existential angst, while intimating the dismal distress that only Nietzsche was since apt to give voice to, yet Leopardi's "pessimism" (beware those of you who adopt this term without responsible and adequate insight) is more akin to Shopenhauer. No literarary intellecual or lover should go without experiencing Giacomo Leopardi, a man who in spite of his avowed atheism and consonent hopelessness was as spiritual as any poet has ever dared to be.
Upon the first edition of Townsend's translation of the Italian Lyric genius, O. Brook Frothingham observed in its preface that "Giacomo Leopardi is a great name in Italy amoung philosophers and poets but is quite unknown in this country." Why the English have yet to embrace this poetic genius 120 years later is a topic well worth discussing, especially so because in France, Germany, and Spain he has been received with the highest interest and esteem. Whaereas he may be classified yet as a Romantic poet by the English readership he would never be branded as such elsewhere. Leopardi poses questions and allows them to lyrcally dissolve into a peculiar angst-ridden beauty; he quantifies the infinite and disenchants the illusive tendencies of human nature while eulogizing them by means of an elegy; Leopardi reflects on language and tradition with an astute picturesque dissonance; he labours through the disquiet of a melancholy spirit while wrestling with an absent divinity. It is a hybrid beauty that depicts cantos as if Giorgio De Chirico were absorbed by Edvard Munch. And most astounding is the fact that from this monster comes beauty as pristine as any modernity has been able to compose.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "But wherefore give him life?", February 22, 2009

By 

Cristiano Nisoli (Los Alamos NM, USA and Lombardy, Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Great poems - but not formatted for Kindle! - a waste!!!!, December 29, 2010

By 

Delvyn Case - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (Kindle Edition)

These poems - by Italy's greatest 19th-century poet - are wonderful. But don't waste your $1 on the Kindle version. It's not formatted, so it's a mess to read.