Leopardi: Selected Poems: 45 (The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, 45) - Softcover

Leopardi, Giacomo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691016445 ISBN 13: 9780691016443

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Winner of the 1998 Poetry in Translation Award, PEN American Center"

"[Leopardi's] contribution to 19th-century European poetry second only to Baudelaire's . . . there's plenty to be grateful for in this lucidly translated selection. . ."--Boston Review

About the Author:

Eamon Grennan has published three collections of poetry: What Light There Is & Other Poems, As If It Matters, and So It Goes. He has a degree in English and Italian from University College, Dublin, and a doctorate in English from Harvard University. A native of Ireland, he divides his time between there and Poughkeepsie, New York, where he is the Dexer M. Ferry, Jr., Professor of English at Vassar College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0691016445
• ISBN 13: 9780691016443
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 118