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.