Bücher von Giacomo Leopardi

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.

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 "e;come over"e; 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 "e;criticism of life."e; The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti.

First published in 1921, as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume presents the complete text of Leopardi's Pensieri in the original Italian. A short editorial introduction in English is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Leopardi and his works.