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Selected Poems
By general consensus, Giacomo Leopardi is the greatest Italian poet since Dante. His influence on the major Italian poets who come after him--Montale, Ungaretti, and Pavese--is indisputable. Yet he's not well known to English speakers, largely because his work has resisted translation. That's why this fine new version of Selected Poems is particularly welcome. The Irish poet Eamon Grennan has managed to clear away the cobwebs, judiciously employing a loose blank verse reminiscent of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Along with capturing the lyrical fluidity of Leopardi's rhythms, Grennan reminds us that a poem like "The Solitary Thrush" is exactly contemporary with Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"--and that Leopardi is more acid than the Romantics ever were:
You'll not grieve, surely,Just as Hamlet leaps out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, Leopardi (who died in 1837) ceases to accept the consolations of the Enlightenment. Refusing to find a fixed center of the universe, he admits to the presence of the void. No poet before him so actively conveys the force of nothing: "Tomorrow the hours will be leaden / With emptiness and melancholy." Indeed, the recognition of such metaphysical boredom, which the Italians call la noia, strikes Leopardi as the very badge of humanity: "To suffer want, emptiness, and hence noia--this seems to me the chief sign of the grandeur and nobility of human nature." --Mark Rudman
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.
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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592 people want to read
About the author
Giacomo Leopardi
653 books526 followersItalian 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 8, 2021
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.
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.
May 2, 2019
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.
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.
July 12, 2015
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.
"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.
January 21, 2026
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.
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.
October 11, 2025
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.
“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.
July 20, 2013
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.
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.
November 6, 2011
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
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
January 28, 2016
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.
June 26, 2011
this stuff is really sad, really beautiful
pretty much the two best things ever for a book to be!
pretty much the two best things ever for a book to be!
December 26, 2011
Studied it in Fac de Lyon, long time ago
June 5, 2015
Some of the most intensely beautiful, intellectually satisfying poems I've read. Easy to see why Nietzsche has been among Leopardi's translators.
July 7, 2020
The poetry is worthy of 5 stars but this thin book is not much of a value.
December 31, 2018
A fine, manageable collection beautifully translated
January 22, 2021
3 1/2 stars.
February 8, 2023
Eh not my favorite poetry
September 22, 2019
My boy Giacomo was sad as heck
Want to read
January 13, 2018Oliver found out that Elio like him when they were talking about Leopardi.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews