Leopardi: Selected Poems
Paperback
- Price:
- $28.95/拢22.00
- ISBN:
- Published:
- May 25, 1997
- Copyright:
- 1997
- Pages:
- 120
- Size:
- 6 x 9.25 in.
- Main_subject:
- Literature
ebook
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 鈥渃ome over鈥 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 鈥渃riticism of life.鈥 The translator’s aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi’s inestimable Canti.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the 1998 Poetry in Translation Award, PEN American Center