Alongside his monumental Notebooks and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy's greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly in the form of gently humorous dialogues, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas and many of the metaphysical questions that preoccupied his restless spirit.First published in 1827 and here presented in a new translation by J.G. Nichols along with Thoughts, Leopardi's own selected pearls of wisdom and gems of social observation, this volume will enchant both those who are familiar with and those who are new to the works of Italy's last great polymath.
This essential introduction to the poems of Giacomo Leopardi provides a complete translation of The Canti, explanatory notes, and a selection of Leopardi's prose keyed to related poems. Further background is provided by an introduction and a brief biography woven from Leopardi's own words.
First published in 1937, this book presents a selection of poems from Leopardi's Canti in the original Italian. Created primarily for university students, the selection was made with the idea of representing as fully as possible all stages of Leopardi's poetic career. The text also contains a detailed introduction, notes and bibliography, all in English. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Leopardi's poetry and Italian literature.
A groundbreaking translation of the epic work of one of the great minds of the nineteenth century Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. (Jonathan Galassi's translation of Leopardi's Canti was published by FSG in 2010.) He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or "hodge-podge," as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary, epochal publication.
This series is conceived as a library of bilingual editions of works chosen for their importance to Italian literature and to the international tradition of art and thought Italy has nurtured. In each volume an Italian text in an authoritative edition is paired with a new facing-page translation supplemented by explanatory notes and a selected bibliography. An introduction provides a historical and critical interpretation of the work. The scholars preparing these volumes hope through Biblioteca ltaliana to point a straight way to the Italian classics. GENERAL EDITOR: Louise George ClubbEDITORIAL BOARDPaul J. Alpers, Vittore BrancaGene Brucker, Fredi ChiappelliPhillip W. Damon, Robert M. DurlingGianfranco Folena, Lauro MartinesNicolas J. Perella
Newly awakened interest in Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), arguably the greatest Italian poet since the Renaissance, has resulted in this project to translate a major portion of his works. This volume is the first of four which will encompass the great Canti (in bilingual text), selections from the poet's correspondence, a substantial portion of his enormous intellectual journal, the Zibaldone, and the focus of the present volume, the Operette morali. Originally planned as a set of dialogues in the manner of Lucian, the Operette is a compilation of brief, interrelated works on questions of moral philosphy. By means of numerous characters, and by means of a range of styles, Leopardi grapples with a theory of pleasure, the concepts of fame, the infinite, human happiness, the function of poetry, and other topics. In the poet's own opinion, the Operette represented his major philosophical speculation and ranked just below his Canti.
First published in 1923, this book presents the complete text of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti in the original Italian with facing-page English translation, along with extensive critical notes. The text also contains a biographical introduction, appendices and a detailed bibliography. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Leopardi, Italian literature and the Romantic movement in general.
There is a sense in which one might say, as Leopardi did say about poetry, that his poems are born of illusion, yet what they register is a lament over its loss and a persistent rejection of all deception. The Canti are conspicuously influenced by illusion, but paradoxically dominated by a continual taking the measure, as it were, of truth, of a human and cosmic reality which simply is what it is. In generalising his convictions the poet does make a certain claim on our belief and he challenges us to take what he says seriously. However, the merit of the poems themselves is the full expression of those convictions; it is this aspect that this Introduction addresses, and not whether we should agree or disagree with Leopardi. Its aim is to explain in order to help appreciate what is found on the page. It is an analysis of the poems and an attempt to create a coherent and comprehensive structure for students in which nearly all the Canti can be considered from several points of view.
Still unfinished at the time of his death, Thoughts, now in its first English translation, represents Giacomo Leopardi’s urgent desire to organize his lifetime’s observations of mankind, life, and the world. Written by the greatest Italian poet and thinker of the 19th century, these timeless musings contain immense philosophical and psychological insight. Ranging from mankind to nature, social order to the individual soul, they reveal a man of brilliance struggling to reconcile all that he sees around him.
