NYSL: Jonathan Galassi on "Giacomo Leopardi's Canti"

http://www.nysoclib.org/notes/2011/leopardis_canti.html

In celebration of National Poetry Month, noted poet, translator, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux president and publisher Jonathan Galassi evokes the rich world of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). Leopardi is Italy's greatest modern poet, the first European writer to portray and examine the self in a way that feels familiar to us today. A great classical scholar and patriot, he explored metaphysical loneliness in entirely original ways. Though he died young, his influence was enormous, and it is no exaggeration to say that all modern poetry, not only in Italian, derives in some way from his work.

Leopardi's poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, and he has been less well known to English-language readers than his central significance for his own culture might suggest. Now Jonathan Galassi has produced a strong, fresh, direct version of this great poet that offers English-language readers a new approach to Leopardi. He will also contextualize the poems with a sense of Leopardi's sources, ideas, and place in the foundation of modern lyric poetry.


Count Giacomo Leopardi was born in a small town in the Italian Marches. Renowned in his youth as a classical scholar, he suffered from poor health all his life and never experienced happiness in love. The poems collected in Canti are Leopardi's best-known and best-loved work, and in the eyes of many make him the greatest Italian poet after Dante. He also published the Operette morali, a collection of philosophical dialogues and essays and the prodigious, immense Zibaldone, a notebook of literary and philosophical speculations.

Jonathan Galassi has also translated the poetry and prose of Eugenio Montale and is the author of two volumes of poems, Morning Run and North Street.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• New York Society Library
• Jonathan Galassi
• Giacomo Leopardi
• Canti
• Poems
• 2011
• April