Leopardi: Selected Poems

by Giacomo Leopardi, Eamon Grennan (Translator)

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

Genres: Poetry, Italian Literature, Fiction, Classics, Italy

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Italian scholar, poet, essayist and philosopher, one of the great writers of the 19th century.
Leopardi's love problems inspired some of his saddest lyrics. Despite having lived in a small town, Leopardi was in touch with the main ideas of the Enlightenment movement. His literary evolution turned him into one of the well known Romantic poets.
In his late years, when he lived in an ambiguous relationship with his friend Antonio Ranieri on the slopes of Vesuvius, Leopardi meditated upon the possibility of the total destruction of humankind.
Leopardi was a contemporary of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom he shared a similarly pessimistic view of life. The latter praised Leopardi's philosophical thoughts on The World as Will and Representation.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life is nothing
But blankness of spirit, a bitter taste, and the world
Mud. Now rest in peace.

Yesterday affixed a rather grim grip and this collection didn’t fare well. Today is just as golden but blessed with a giddy breeze. I returned to reread and found the insights if not charms of such resilience. There’s not much caprice on display. Leopardi’s observations appear worn, scarred and regret remains the region’s argot.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Silvia, do you remember
those moments, in your mortal life,
when beauty still shone
in your sidelong, laughing eyes,
and you, light and thoughtful,
leapt beyond girlhood’s limits?

The quiet rooms and the streets
around you, sounded
to your endless singing,
when you sat, happily content,
intent on that woman’s work,
the vague future, arriving alive in your mind.
It was the scented May, and that’s how
you spent your day.

I would leave my intoxicating studies,
and the turned-down pages,
where my young life,
the best of me, was left,
and from the balcony of my father’s house
strain to catch the sound of your voice,
and your hand, quick,
running over the loom.
I’d look at the serene sky,
the gold lit gardens and paths:
this side the mountains, that side the far-off sea.
And human tongue cannot say
what I felt then.

What sweet thoughts,
what hope, what hearts, O my Silvia!
How all human life and fate
appeared to us then!
When I recall that hope
such feelings pain me,
harsh, disconsolate,
I brood on my own destiny.
Oh Nature, Nature
why do you not give now
what you promised then? Why
do you so deceive your children?

Attacked, and conquered, by secret disease,
you died, my tenderest one, and did not see
your years flower, or feel your heart moved,
by sweet praise of your black hair
your shy, loving looks.
No friends talked with you,
on holidays, about love.

My sweet hopes died also
little by little: to me too
Fate has denied those years.
Oh, how you’ve passed me by,
dear friend of my new life,
my saddened hope!
Is this the world, the dreams,
the loves, events, delights,
we spoke about so much together?

Is this our human life?
At the advance of Truth
you fell, unhappy one,
and from the distance,
with your hand you pointed
towards death’s coldness and the silent grave.

[Sleepydrummer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Giacomo Leopardi's poetry you'll find a man who writes of love in many forms; love of nature, unrequited love, love of all he hears. The clarity of this man's poetry is acute.

"Sometimes, getting up
From the books I loved
And those sweat-stained pages
Where I spent the best of my youth,
I'd lean from the terrace of my father's house
Toward the sound of your voice
And the quick click of your hands
At the heavy loom. Wonder-struck, I'd stare
Up at the cloudless blue of the sky,
Out at the kitchen gardens and the roads
That shone like gold, and off there
To the mountains and, there, to the distant sea.
No human tongue could tell
The feelings beating in my heart."

As beautiful as these words are, the original Italian verses are arranged to the left of each english translation, on the opposite page. This is a thoughtful selection of Leopardi's poetry, beautifully translated by Eamon Grennan. I encourage my friends to indulge themselves in the written works of Giacomo Leopardi.

[Víctor Jiménez Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Humanity is doomed to channelling existential despair through resignation. But only embracing this absurd one might find, in this process, a bare beauty. The contradiction of accepting lack of sense, of purpose and embracing death can be the only meaningful act we can ever get to enjoy. Leopardi grasped life's irremediable damnation with pain just to feel: and he made it valuable, precious, dreamy and graceful.

This book, to me, is firstly a gift. This bilingual edition covers a collection of selected poems from Leopardi, grouped in three blocks that span over his lifetime as a creator. It is in this lifetime that we attend to see the range of human emotion and feeling in the complex mix it is: love, joy, pain and suffering blent in around life and death, stripped from grandiloquent resolution. Just being. The gift, I guess, was this door to effortless words that wide open some ineffable realisations. The kind of ones that don't answer, but show you.

Leopardi grabs human existence and mirrors it constantly on nature, as a model of purposeless cycles that stands still, violently serene. It used nature as personification of this beauty that comes from accepting this fleeting life which only can lead to infinite solitude and eternal death. Embracing the latter, not as a goal to avoid, but as a means to love and understand, is both what makes life itself painful and worth. Worth to long for until the last consequences. Only this leap of faith can overcome hopelessness.

And so, rich words of preciousness, dense descriptions, and everlasting ache gave me this glimpse into one of the greatest romantics. And it is fine, to drawn in this sea of life, as long as vastness remains and vanity floats away, because waves will still shake the earth.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years ago, I used to like poetry so much that I have learned by heart twenty or thirty of my favorite poems. I still know some of the lines, but for a long period I have stayed away from verse and read other literature.

“A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever”

Here are some of the lines I liked:

“If this is love, how hard it is to bear!

None on earth resembles thee…

Children of Fate, in the same breath

Created were they, Love and Death….

I can only imagine how beautiful it would all sound in Italian. Translated in English, this poetry did not move me as much as I hoped. It may be that I no longer have the age when I was so touched by beautiful verse? I am not sure.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I’ve always loved this lonesome hill
And this hedge that hides
The entire horizon, almost, from sight.
But sitting here in a daydream, I picture
The boundless spaces away out there, silences
Deeper than human silence, an unfathomable hush
In which my heart is hardly a beat
From fear. And hearing the wind
Rush rustling through these bushes,
I pit its speech against infinite silence—
And a notion of eternity floats to mind,
And the dead seasons, and the season
Beating here and now, and the sound of it. So,
In this immensity my thoughts all drown;
And it's easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.”
—
“Taken easily by sleep, you lie
Untroubled in your hushed rooms,
Without a thought for the wound
You’ve opened in my heart.
You sleep, while I say goodnight
To the kindly-seeming sky
And to nature—ancient, all-powerful—
Who shaped me for suffering. — To you,
She said, I refuse even hope; your eyes
Will shine with nothing but tears.
Today was a holiday, and now
You rest from your games, remembering
In a dream, perhaps, how many men
You pleased, how many pleased you:
I am not, nor could I hope to be,
Among your thoughts. And so
Wondering how long I have left to live,
I sink down, cry out, my whole body
Trembling. Such black, black days”
—
“When I was a child, I used to wait
In a fever of desire for Sunday,
And when it was over I'd lie awake
Brokenhearted, sobbing to my pillow;
And then, in the small hours, a song
I'd hear dying away little by little
Through the back streets of town
Would make my heart ache as it's aching now.”
—
“Now that the year has come full circle,
I remember climbing this hill, heartbroken,
To gaze up at the graceful sight of you,
And how you hung then above those woods
As you do tonight, bathing them in brightness.
But at that time your face seemed nothing
But a cloudy shimmering through my tears,
So wretched was the life I led: and lead still ...
Nothing changes, moon of my delight. Yet
I find pleasure in recollection, in calling back
My season of grief: when one is young,
And hope is a long road, memory
A short one, how welcome then
The remembrance of things past—no matter
How sad, and the heart still grieving.”
—
“My face and breast were scalding with sweat,
My voice was choking in my throat, daylight
Was wavering before my gaze. Tenderly, then,
She fixed her eyes in mine and said,
—My dear, have you forgotten so soon
I've been stripped of beauty? Poor thing,
You shiver and burn with love in vain.
Now, one final time, farewell.
Our bodies and our wretched minds
Are severed forever. You cannot
Live for me now, nor evermore: fate
Has broken already those vows you made.”
—
“Love, love, how far you have flown
Away from this heart, which burned once
Even to distraction. Frostbitten by sorrow,
It froze in the bud. I can remember
The day you first came to me. It was
That sweet unrepeatable season
When the sad stage of this world seems
To young eyes a paradise of smiles:
In its very first virgin flush of hope
A boy's heart gallops with desire
As he, hapless poor creature that he is,
Plunges into the business of living
As if it were only a game or a dance.
But as soon, love, as I met you,
Misfortune wrecked my life and left me
In mourning forever. And yet there are
Still times among these open spaces—
In the wide silence around dawn”
—
“How gorgeous the earth is, drenched in dew,
And your wide cloak, divine sky. But ah,
The gods and grim-lipped fate have given
Poor Sappho no part of this infinite beauty.
A tiresome wretched guest in your
Grand, indifferent domain, Nature,
I lift like an abandoned lover
My beggar's heart and beggar's eyes
Up to all your lovely forms. The sunny
Riverbanks don't smile at me, nor dawn's
White light in the sky; bright-winged birds
Don't sing to me, beechtrees don't greet me
With murmuring leaves, and where clear water
Runs under the bending willow's shade
The stream slides and winds away
In scorn from these soiled and slippery feet,
Hugging the sweet-scented bank as it flees.”
—
“Sometimes, getting up
From the books I loved
And those sweat-stained pages
Where I spent the best of my youth,
I’d lean from the terrace of my father's house
Toward the sound of your voice
And the quick click of your hands
At the heavy loom. Wonder-struck, I'd stare
Up at the cloudless blue of the sky,
Out at the kitchen gardens and the roads
That shone like gold, and off there
To the mountains and, there, to the distant sea.
No human tongue could tell
The feelings beating in my heart.

Before winter had withered the grass,
You were dying, dear girl,
Struck and cut down by blind disease.
And you didn't see your years
Break into blossom, nor ever felt
Your heart melt
Under honeyed praise of your jet-black tresses
Or the shy enamored light in your eyes.
And never did your friends spend Sundays
Whispering with you, all about love.”
—
Perched on top of that old tower,
You sing as long as daylight lasts,
The sweet sound of you winding
Round and round the valley
Spring shimmers
In the air, comes with a green rush
Through the open fields, is a sight
To soften any heart. You can hear
Sheep bleating, bellowing cattle,
While the other birds swoop and wheel
Cheerily round the wide blue sky,
Having the time of their lives together.
Like an outsider, lost in thought,
You are looking on at it all:
Neither companions nor wild flights
Fire your heart; games like these
Mean nothing to you. You sing,
And in singing spend the best
Part of your life and the passing year.
[…]
Solitary little singer, when you
Reach the evening of those days
Which the stars have numbered for you,
You'll not grieve, surely,
For the life you've led, since even
The slightest twist of your will
Is nature's way. But to me,
If I fail to escape
Loathsome old age—
When these eyes will mean nothing
To any other heart, the world be nothing
But a blank to them,
Each day more desolate, every day
Darker than the one before—what then
Will this longing for solitude
Seem like to me? What then
Will these years, or even I myself,
Seem to have been? Alas,
I'll be sick with regret, and over and over,
But inconsolable, looking back.”
—
“I spend years—loveless, alone, buried alive,
And growing bitter as a matter of course,
Cast among this pack of begrudgers. Here—
Because of whom I have to herd with—
I lose every last shred of civility,
Am stripped of every decent feeling,
And become a despiser of mankind,
Whilst all the while my priceless youth—
More precious than any laurel crown,
Dearer than daylight or breath itself—
Takes flight. Sunk among miseries
In this inhuman place, living to no purpose
And lacking all joy, it's youth I lose,
The one and only flower that blooms
In this desert that we call life.”
—
“Gracious nature, these
Are the gifts you grant us,
These the favors you lavish
On mortal men and women. For us,
Pleasure means escape from pain.
Sufferings you scatter
With prodigal hand; unhappiness
Needs no prompting; and that
One touch or two of joy
That like a miracle or nine-day marvel
Springs from sorrow
Is our rich reward.”
—
“But why bring into the light of day,
Why protect the life of a creature
Who needs to be consoled for life?
If life is nothing but misfortune,
What's the point of bearing it at all?
And this, unblemished moon,
Is the mortal state of man.
But you're no mortal, and you may
Give little heed to what I say.

Yet a solitary, ceaseless wanderer like you,
Brooder as you are, might understand
The lives we lead on earth,
The ways we suffer, why we sigh, what dying means:
That last warm trace of color fading
As we perish from the face of the earth
And leave behind us
All our old friends and loving company.”
—
“To the gods our wretched human lot
Would seem too trouble-free, too happy,
If youth with its single grain of joy
For every hundredweight of sorrow
Could last a lifetime.
Too lenient that decree
That sentences every animal to die,
Were half the journey of their life
Not worse than dreaded death itself. The gods,
Whose minds remain forever young,
Aptly invented old age
As the worst of evils, old age,
In which desire should be undiminished,
Hope quenched, the springs of pleasure
All dried up, aches and pains
Increasing ever,
Nothing left in life to savor.”
—
“Just as a little apple falling
From the tree in late autumn—
Which no force but ripeness alone brings down—
Crushes, lays waste, and buries in an instant
Those neat dwellings the ants have labored
To fashion in the soft clay,
Destroying all the precious stores
These painstaking, driven creatures
Had prudently harvested
Over the months of summer, so—
Flung from the mountain's
Thundering bowels to the wide sky

And plummeting from a great height—
A downpour black as night
Of ashes, brimstone, boulders
With boiling streams of lava riddled,
Or a flood of molten
Rock, metal, blazing sand
Torn through the mountain's side and thrown
In a crazy spate through tall grass
Once overwhelmed, shattered to bits,
And buried in seconds these coastal towns
Washed by the waves of the sea,
So that now, goats browse above them
And new towns rise on the far side
Which have as their footstool
Those razed and buried walls
The sheer-sloped mountain
All but tramples in the dust.
For nature has no
Kinder regard for man
Than she has for ants, and if such slaughters
Don't befall us as often, the only reason
Is our loins breed
Less than the loins of those teeming creatures.”

[Krishna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dual language edition of 16 poems, the Italian on the left and an English translation by Eamon Grennan on the right. Leopardi was an early 19th century poet, a child prodigy who taught himself a dozen classical and modern European languages. He literally ruined his health reading, and was dead by the time he reached his late thirties.

Maybe I would be more positive about Leopardi if I could read his original Italian, but these poems were a letdown -- part odes to nature and part philosophical musings, many seem to be motivated by thwarted love. There is an introspective and self-pitying tone to the poems, more appropriate to the socially awkward sophomore wasting away yearning for unrequited love -- which was probably not that different from Leopardi's real-life situation. He does have a knack for nature description, in poems such as The Calm After the Storm.

[Abbi Dion · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Sera Del Di' Di Festa (Sunday Evening) is almost overwhelming in its beauty and depth.

When I was a child, I used to wait
In a fever of desire for Sunday,
And when it was over I'd lie awake
Brokenhearted, sobbing to my pillow;
And then, in the small hours, a song
I'd hear dying away little by little
Through the back streets of town
Would make my heart ache as it's aching now.

-from Sunday Evening

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not much of a poetry person, so I think a lot of this was lost on me, but the poem about the flower that grows out of the ashes of Vesuvius was gorgeous and alone was worth reading this collection.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

this stuff is really sad, really beautiful
pretty much the two best things ever for a book to be!

[Gino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Studied it in Fac de Lyon, long time ago

[Nick Ziegler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most intensely beautiful, intellectually satisfying poems I've read. Easy to see why Nietzsche has been among Leopardi's translators.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry is worthy of 5 stars but this thin book is not much of a value.

[Tim Parks · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine, manageable collection beautifully translated

[Theron Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars.

[Kinsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh not my favorite poetry

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

My boy Giacomo was sad as heck

[saya]

Oliver found out that Elio like him when they were talking about Leopardi.