Summary: Giacomo Leopardi is Italy's greatest modern poet, the first European writer to portray and examine the self in a way that feels familiar to us today. A great classical scholar and patriot, he explored metaphysical loneliness in entirely original ways. Though he died young, his influence was enormous, and it is no exaggeration to say that all modern poetry, not only in Italian, derives in some way from his work.
Booklist Reviews
For a poet of his stature, Leopardi has enjoyed few complete translations in English. His poetic corpus isn't large; this volume contains all of it, in the original Italian as well as English. But Leopardi employed archaisms and unusual syntax, classical allusions, and the elision that makes him one of the first modernists. He also modified the traditional poetic forms he used, moving away from their rhyme schemes for the sake of personalizing his poetic voice, though he never descends to autobiography. Galassi grants the impossibility of transferring Leopardi's musicality into English, yet his versions often have their own swing to them, and they always verify the depiction of Leopardi in the introduction as a discouraged but genuine patriot and a philosophical hapless lover. They reflect, too, the romantic displacement of devotion from God to nature, the distrust of science, the exaltation of eros, and the despair of meaningful change that Matthew Arnold's English harbinger of modernism, "Dover Beach," attests. An absorbing presentation of a literary giant. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
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