num_pages: 180
description: 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, 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.  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
language: English
title: Selected Poems
titlecomplete: Selected Poems
genres: Classics, Fiction, Poetry, Italian Literature
ratings_count: 187
publisher: Griffon House Publications