THIS IS LOOKING like the year I catch up a little on the great 19th century poets that I can read only in translation. Hölderlin in November, now Leopardi in December.
At the end of Adam Kirsch's NYRB review of Charles Taylor's new book, which Kirsch characterizes as about "poets who were writing elliptically about their visions and intuitions, trying to suggest cosmic truths without actually stating them" (e.g. Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Eliot) Kirsch mentions by way of contrast "poets who were writing great poems about what it feels like to live in a world where such truths are definitely absent," naming Leopardi, Matthew Arnold, and Wallace Stevens. Hmm, Leopardi named in apposition to Hölderlin...was it a sign? Then a friend mentioned that he was reading the Canti in Italian and enjoying them very much. So this must be the time.
And (drum roll) I loved Leopardi. He was writing in the 1820s and 1830s, but his relationship to the inherited Italian poetic tradition is roiled enough to make him sound like a modern at times, never more so than when he is dispensing entirely with any species of philosophical or spiritual consolation. Unlucky in love, too, it seems. But he never seems mired in the Slough of Despond, somehow. There is something lean and tough in his pessimism, and a vein of tart humor that keeps things brisk (especially in the sustained irony of "Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi').
My favorite: "La ginestra"--in English, "Broom."
I can't judge the accuracy of Galassi's translation, but it reads beautifully.
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