Giacomo Leopardi Books

iris origo really has something here, and her poetic biography of the great giacomo leopardi is a classic in itself. the darkness and despair of leopardi's verse is probably one reason for leopardi's obscurity and little known philosophical works, but the overwhelming sense of nothingness and meaninglessness that his work conveys is no reason to put him aside. we do not necessarily have to agree with an author about everything to enjoy the aesthetic brilliance and the passion present in his essays and poetry. anyone who gets a dark thrill (as i do) from philosophy and poetry that focuses on the more shadowy and sad side of existence will devour leopardi's work. he would undoubtedly gotten along with and befriended the two other great literary prophets of doom, samuel beckett and arthur schopenhauer, and unconsciously shares their philosophy and really disturbing reflections about the emptiness of human life and it's accidental and contingent origin. leopardi was a quite genuine pessimist, unlike schopenhauer who betrayed through his lifestyle and even occasionally in his work itself a love and passion for life and art, and his gloom is not simply temperamental or tongue in cheek as it with arthur, but is very serious and profoundly felt. leopardi's work openly refers to the poetic imagination and man's feelings of divinity or supremacy in the universe as "beautiful illusions", which is all the more infuriating to those who have them because does not violently condemn them or even make an effort to disprove them objectively, but just dismisses them offhandedly as the obvious products of wishful thinking and fanciful self delusion. despite the depressing and sometimes unbearable bleakness of his work, i think giacomo leopardi is unjustly obscure and the best italian poet since dante. all of his work is a must read for students or lovers of philosophy and poetry.

I am so grateful to this publisher for having reissued the books of Iris Origo. I first read this book a dozen years ago and it has continued to haunt me since.

Origo has created a masterpiece from her tale of Leopardi's short and lonely life. This is a book where the atmosphere is more important than the facts. No poet could object to coming to life, thus, between the lines setting forth Origo's appreciation of his art and sympathy for his suffering.

Leopardi can hope for no better chance of literary resurrection than that given to him by Iris Origo. If this biography sends you in search of his poetry it has done its job.

Leopardi is the greatest Italian poet since Dante and Petrarch.

He should be just as famous, however, for this prose work, which is a collection of short essays and philosophical dialogues.

Cecchetti is an eminently qualified translator, and this California Press paperback gives you a marvelous opportunity to revel in what is indisputably a neglected (in English, at least)
Major Work.

If you like Beckett, or especially the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or even Kafka and Borges, you will also find reading Leopardi a superb, rewarding experience!

Operette Moralli is quite humorous some times. A more accurate translation of the title would be "small ethical works," but the current title is more truthful to the actual content. Giacomo Leopardi's work deals with subjects like suicide, egoism of men, the role hope plays in out lives, the genius's fate, similarities between fashion and death (I was as surprised as you are but he's actually right!), pleasure, happiness, poetry, philosophy, death, love, etc.

I think his humorous dialogues show much more invention and wit than other, more serious, essays. Although seriousness pervades every work it's not always visible. The hopelessness and pessimism that runs through most of the Operette Moralli may not suit the style of most people. But hopelessness here is the result of strength, and it's done with no hatred. Some of his opinions are surprisingly contemporary.

There are better books out there in my opinion, but this is still a very good book, and as Leopardi himself notes: "... books now are mostly written in less time than one needs to read them, and you see very well that since they cost what they are worth, they also last in proportion to what they cost."

The recent effort to translate Leopardi made by Anne Paolucci must be acknowledged as a statement which betokens the persistent affection which scholars develop for the poet from Recanati while sauntering into Renaissance verse or German Idealism. Such is the fate which Dr. Paolucci found herself challanged by. She had previously been engaged with her husband and likewise redoubtable scholar Henry Paolucci in an essay for the "Reader's Advisor - Vol. 2" and her immersion became complete within time as she laboured through Hegel, dramatic theory, and the theatre of the absurd. She's also written fiction, poetry and plays herself: the merit of which i cannot speak of.
We find a translator who is much less concerned with translation, but rather wrestles with the passion and intimacy, the restlessness and ennui that Leopardi elicits. The translator lives the lines, absorbs the poetry and stands in awe in relation to it, practically distraught over the depth and definition which the canti give from and meaning to. It is a rare expression of love we find here, where the relationship between translator and her subject exposes a beauty the poetry often fails to disclosse due to the lyrical ecstasy we founder within.
In the introduction the translator dabbles into themes Leopardi readers will have no chance but to become enrapt by, such as "noia" and his "pessimism". She relates that she tried to "approximate the clearness and simplicity of Leopardi while respecting the tight syntax, abrupt transitions, and conversational tone". The memory of the great Thomas Bergin is somewhat overstated but necessary. Here his name is flaunted but only the skeletal presence of hs work (a year or so in 1986 - his last prject before dying and I dare say his most daunting one).
Dr. Paolucci reprints a letter by Bergin on the matter which may shed light on the difficulty of the task, the contribution of the translator of Dante, Boccaccio and Vico and the influence which presents itself in the delicate balance of the final versions. In a letter dated January 28, 1986 and addressed to Anne Paolucci we read:
"It was probably a mistake to begin with this one (L'Infinito) - it is, as you know, very tight and compacted. Even with your version and my school text original (very heavily glossed and frequently paraphrased) I found it very hard work. What I was after here was to preserve the meter...and keep the meaning honest -not always literal but at least saying what L. is saying. And of course I agree that a translation should not sound like translation, often however L.'s language is faintly archaic and a good translation is bound to mirror that."
Dr. Paolucci is too aware of competing translations and works through them as well. Ultimately the final product is much more an effort of her own than a concerted one with Thomas Bergin, who could not have been satisfied with the translation, for it sound too much like a translation (even Nietzsche gave up on such a task while living in Turin and enamoured by the Italian's uberhuman talent). Dr. Paolucci is indeed aware of that, but the magnetism of this enterprise lies elsewhere; the clarity and simplicity is retained and the syntax is a genial parallel, but we find ourselves swallowed by the aura of her struggles with the poet and the genuine engagement of her labour of love is a vehicle which elucidates the intimacy and candour of the verses as it stupefies the faculties into a philosophical spread of a subtle and broad nature. This is more a work of fiction, a story brilliant and evocative, boundless and implosive, rather than an exhibition of poetic genius.
Reading Dr. Anne Paolucci's translations and mediating on her selections we become acquainted with a world that must have made of her a better human being: one more at peace with the inscrutable layers of truth that envelop our everyday lives. This work is an exemplum of what it means to become a scholar for the love of literature and for it offers a greater insight into reality and a more profound sensibility to truth than any other experience may hold claim to.
If you can't speak Italian well...take this one to the grave with you.
Aside from the inevitable failures a translation is bound to become mired within, this is a wonderful experience and one that shall yield infinite returns and interminable silences beyond the rows and numbers that stand alongside the original Italian.

Leopardi's _Thoughts_ (Pensieri) combines the aphoristic style of Pascal and other French moralists with the pessimistic world-view that inspired Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and other 19th century readers of his work. Leopardi in Italy occupies a place equivalent to Emerson in the US: read by every schoolchild and understood by almost none of them, yet still taken as emblematic of the national spirit. His pessimism may be absolute but it is also intensely spirited and does point towards resignation but rather towards exhiliartion. Everyone should read this book, along with his other work of prose, the _Moral Essays_.

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.

If you like Leopardi, grab this book while you can! It's an English import, and might not be around that long. I've always wanted a complete translation of Leopardi's poetry, and this book fits the bill, with supplements from Leopardi's notebooks and other hard-to-find prose works. Too bad it's listed under the wrong title--I just ordered it, and this book is not called "The Centenary Edition"! This book is actually a paperback editon of the title listed directly above it, "The Canti: With a Selection of the Prose."

... The great Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is radiant again in a fresh translation, "Leopardi: Selected Poems" ... that appeared just as Iris Origo's marvelous 1935 biography, "Leopardi, A Study in Solitude" ... was reissued. Leopardi's birth into an aristocratic Tuscan family was no protection against a case of scoliosis that left him hunchbacked, a permanent invalid, unlovable in the eyes of any woman he might come to love. Yet his poetic world is often as enchanting and full of health as a convalescent's, for whom all things come alive, and "roofs and meadows and little hills / Are shining in the sun." Leopardi celebrates such moments of renewal and delight, though his self-forgetful pleasures always return him to a lonely prison. But this is the human condition, not just the poet's. Nature "drives all things to their destruction," the "feast-day is over in a flash, / The work-day comes on, and time takes away / All we are and do." So, he asks, why not love one another? Why turn cold or quarrel, when death sweeps everyone into darkness?

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.

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.