Canti

'So my mind sinks in this immensity: and foundering is sweet in such a sea'

Leopardi's Canti is one of the most influential poetic works of the nineteenth century, and a landmark achievement in Italian verse. Revisited and reorganised over his lifetime, this extraordinary work was described by Leopardi as a 'reliquary' for his ideas, feelings and deepest preoccupations.

It encompasses drastic shifts in tone and material, and includes early personal elegies and idylls; radical public poems on history and politics; philosophical satires; his great, dark, despairing odes such as 'To Silvia'; and later masterworks such as 'The Setting of the Moon', written not long before Leopardi's death. Infused with classical allusion and nostalgia, yet disarmingly modern in their spare, meditative style and their sense of alienation and scepticism, the Canti influenced the following two centuries of Western lyric poetry, and inspired thinkers and writers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Beckett and Lowell.

Jonathan Galassi's new translation sensitively responds to the musicality of the Canti, while his introduction discusses the paradoxes of Leopardi's life and work. This edition also contains notes, a chronology, a bibliography and notes on the Canti's structure.

Translated with notes and an introduction by JONATHAN GALASSI.

About The Author

Giacomo Leopardi was born in the Papal States in 1798 and died of cholera in Naples in 1837. One of the greatest Italian poets, he was also a prose writer of genius, his strange, nihilistic work being drawn together in the Zibaldoni, from which this selection is taken.