The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi 1817-1837


Book Description

"Giacomo Leopardi, Italy's great poet of the Romantic age, is the author of some of the most beautiful and best-loved poems in the Italian language and some of the most remarkable letters in European literature. The interest of the letters in both biographical and literary: they document the background - the difficult personal circumstances, the intense and troubled family relationships, the contacts and friendships with other writers - against which a haunting and compelling poetic voice came to maturity. The letters, not previously available in English except fragmentarily, are here offered in a new translation undertaken to celebrate the poet's birth in 1798. In the light of growing academic interest in Italy and the re-organization of many university courses in Italian along interdisciplinary lines, this book series brings together different scholarly perspectives on Italy and its culture. Italian Perspectives incorporates books and essay collections and is published under Maney's Northern University Press Imprint. It is notable for the breadth and diversity of themes covered, incorporating all aspects and periods of Italian literature, language, history, culture, politics, art and media, as well as studies which take an interdisciplinary approach and are methodologically innovative. The series welcomes books written in English and in Italian. The Italian Perspectives series is edited by two established scholars in the field of Italian studies, supported by an international Advisory Board."




Selected Poems


Book Description




Moral Fables


Book Description

Alongside his monumental Notebooks and the poems collected in Canti, which make him one of Italy's greatest and best-loved poets, Giacomo Leopardi penned a number of fictional pieces, mostly in the form of gently humorous dialogues, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas and many of the metaphysical questions that preoccupied his restless spirit.First published in 1827 and here presented in a new translation by J.G. Nichols along with Thoughts, Leopardi's own selected pearls of wisdom and gems of social observation, this volume will enchant both those who are familiar with and those who are new to the works of Italy's last great polymath.




The Poems of Leopardi


Book Description

First published in 1923, this book presents the complete text of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti in the original Italian with facing-page English translation, along with extensive critical notes. The text also contains a biographical introduction, appendices and a detailed bibliography. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Leopardi, Italian literature and the Romantic movement in general.




Giacomo Leopardi’s Search For A Common Life Through Poetry


Book Description

This book traces the life of Giacomo Leopardi by examining four different yet interrelated aspects: his social origins and class in relation to his evolving conception of nobility; the mixture of idealism and misogynism in his attitude toward women and in his conception of love; his poems and prose on the theme of Italian independence; and his philosophical materialism as expressed in his poetry, intellectual diary, and essays. Frank Rosengarten pays particular attention to the ways in which the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche illuminates Leopardi’s world view. He also devotes a section of the book to the different personal, moral, and philological components of Leopardi’s humanism. Throughout, he maintains a sharp focus on the connections between Leopardi’s life and the historical period in which he lived. The major themes and human concerns expressed in Leopardi’s writings relate to his life experiences and to the historical period in which he lived. Of central interest are nobility and love, since Leopardi’s perception of these two themes evolved and changed as he acquired a more general and universal conception of life. This fascinating combination of classical and modern perspectives on life and literature is highlighted throughout the book.




The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.




Zibaldone


Book Description

A groundbreaking translation of the epic work of one of the great minds of the nineteenth century Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. (Jonathan Galassi's translation of Leopardi's Canti was published by FSG in 2010.) He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or "hodge-podge," as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary, epochal publication.




The Canti


Book Description

This essential introduction to the poems of Giacomo Leopardi provides a complete translation of The Canti, explanatory notes, and a selection of Leopardi's prose keyed to related poems. Further background is provided by an introduction and a brief biography woven from Leopardi's own words.




Leopardi's Nymphs


Book Description

"How can one make poetry in a disenchanted age? For Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) this was the modern subject's most insolvable deadlock, after the Enlightenment's pitiless unveiling of truth. Still, in the poems written in 1828-29 between Pisa and the Marches, Leopardi manages to turn disillusion into a powerful source of inspiration, through an unprecedented balance between poetic lightness and philosophical density. The addressees of these cantos are two prematurely dead maidens bearing names of nymphs, and thus obliquely metamorphosed into the charmingly disquieting deities that in Greek lore brought knowledge and poetic speech through possession. The nymph, Camilletti argues, can be seen as the inspirational power allowing the utterance of a new kind of poetry, bridging antiquity and modernity, illusion and disenchantment, life and death. By reading Leopardi's poems in the light of Freudian psychoanalysis and of Aby Warburg's and Walter Benjamin's thought, Camilletti gives a groundbreaking interpretation of the way Leopardi negotiates the original fracture between poetry and philosophy that characterises Western culture. Fabio Camilletti is Assistant Professor in Italian at the University of Warwick."