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TO

Nicola Gardini

AND

Shirley Hazzard

INTRODUCTION

POET OF PROBLEMS

Leopardi’s Canti, one of the most influential works of the nineteenth century and one of the great achievements in Italian poetry, is not a conventional collection of pooems. A mere forty-one compositions make up the Book of Life and Thought of Italy’s first modern poet—a series of beginnings, of constantly evolving experiments in style and thematics, obsessively reworked and reorganized over a lifetime. They include both the most public and the most personal work of a writer who also spent his enormous if not inexhaustible energies on countless other literary endeavors: classical translations, philological studies, and the editing of texts and anthologies; philosophical dialogues and social criticism; and the enormous notebook of ideas and impressions, the Zibaldone,1 which is the seedbed of all of Leopardi’s work.

Among the canti are the first truly modern lyrics, the wellspring of everything that follows in the European poetic tradition. But they are not merely evocations of private suffering and grief, for the poet “not only had feelings to sing about but things to say,” as one critic has put it.2 The canti posit and explicate and, at their greatest, embody Leopardi’s ideas and beliefs about human life. For all their beauty, for all their dedication to vaghezza, to the grace and mystery of indeterminacy, they are always crystallizations in poetic form of Leopardi’s thought, unlike anything that preceded or followed them.3 They are exemplars of pensiero poetante, thinking in poetry, as Martin Heidegger has called it, and they proved inspirational for some of the nineteenth century’s deepest, most radical thinkers, among them Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.4

Leopardi’s complex structuring of the Canti has been ably dissected and theorized,5 but to us the book reads like a compendium of disparate undertakings. Beyond the poet’s celebrated idylls, with which any reader new to his work should begin, there are public poems (the canzoni and epistles on history and politics); sentimental “novellas”; harsh philosophical satires; and translations and imitations; and the shifts in tone and material at times feel drastic. The book’s title altered, too, from the aulic, Petrarchan Canzoni of 1824 to the more anthologistic Versi of 1826, to, finally, the musical, open Canti, or “Songs” of the 1831 and 1835 editions, this original and magisterial new name indicative of Leopardi’s expanded confidence in and willingness to assert the significance of his project.6 His book was, as he himself pointed out, a “reliquary” in which he “deposited” what he had felt and thought; it was his version of Petrarch’s canzoniere, or “songbook,” in which he gave significant form to his deepest preoccupations and convictions, where his ideas devolved out of abstract thought back into concrete if not “unpremeditated” art.7

A classicist by education and mental inclination, Leopardi was severely critical of a world that had added to the comforts of religion—which he rejected as a young man—an equally credulous and self-deluding new faith in the ability of scientific knowledge to ameliorate the essentially tragic nature of life. He grew up in the small, backward town of Recanati in the papal Marche, in a household of ultramontane reactionary Catholic nobles. His father had amassed a great library stocked not only with the church fathers but with all of Greek and Latin literature, which he read and studied so intently and voraciously that by the time he was fifteen there was nothing more for his tutors to teach him and he had seriously compromised his health. Instead of leading him to holy orders, as his parents had hoped, his studies exposed him to illicit Greek sensuality and stoicism. He yearned for love, and for liberation from the clutches of his family, for the place in the great world that his great brilliance seemed to promise him; and indeed his philological and literary work earned him widespread fame at a young age. Yet he was always financially dependent on his parents—a benevolent but uncomprehending and rigidly conventional father and a withholding, judgmental mother (maternal imagery in Leopardi’s poetry is usually negative)—and he never really won full emancipation from them. His sallies forth—to Rome, to Bologna, to Florence and Pisa—habitually ended in defeat, in a return to Recanati. He learned that he was unsuited for worldly life, just as he found that his amorous forays met with the indifference or disdain of the women with whom he became infatuated, his poor health and unprepossessing appearance no doubt contributing substantially to his sense of isolation and hopelessness. It was only in his last years, when he joined forces with a young Neapolitan, Antonio Ranieri, that he managed to establish an independent life in Naples.

Leopardi’s first, adolescent writings were works of classical philology, scientific inquiry, and obligatory religiosity, but by the age of twenty, after apprenticing himself to his calling by way of translation and imitation, first of Horace and other canonical Latin writers and then, significantly, of the “prohibited” Greeks,8 he began to embark on original work of several kinds. His social ideas found voice in exhortatory canzoni, public poems in which he called on the Italians to reclaim their culture’s forgotten greatness and liberate themselves from the political oppression of the post-Napoleonic Restoration. (This made him a forefather of the Risorgimento and to other national liberation movements of the nineteenth century.) At the same time, he was inscribing into the Zibaldone copious profound and original reflections on his broad and deep studies in all branches of knowledge, which would remain unread until they were finally published at the very end of the century. And, more or less simultaneously, in the poems he called his idylls, he was writing about his own anguish in an entirely direct and new poetry that was to become the basis for his enduring international reputation.

Here is what is arguably the first of the idylls, written when the poet was barely twenty-one:

To the Moon

O graceful moon, I can remember, now

the year has turned, how, filled with anguish,

I came here to this hill to gaze at you,

and you were hanging then above those woods

the way you do now, lighting everything.

But your face was cloudy,

swimming in my eyes, thanks to the tears

that filled them, for my life

was torment, and it is, it doesn’t change,

beloved moon of mine.

And yet it helps me, thinking back, reliving

the time of my unhappiness.

Oh in youth, when hope has a long road ahead

and the way of memory is short,

how sweet it is remembering what happened,

though it was sad, and though the pain endures!

Everything that will follow in two centuries of Western lyric poetry is here: a new self-consciousness of the writer’s alienation from life, with the constant companionship of pain and the consolation of the power of memory—all evoked with unmediated directness and haunting expressive beauty. This is the Leopardi we think we know, the voice of suffering self-knowledge and lovely torment. But it is important to understand that the different modes of Leopardi’s poetry, the lyric and the didactic, the pastoral and the historic, the metaphoric and the argumentative, derive from the same vision, express the same spirit in diverse ways. Even Leopardi’s most articulated political exhortations are studded with classically inspired similes and lyric interludes that illustrate his ideas poetically; while the poems we read as pure lyrics likewise need to be seen as embodiments of his ideas, with the didacticism largely though not entirely suppressed.

The rhetoric of the early canzoni derives from a received, elevated style that had dominated Italian verse since the Renaissance; the verse epistle to Carlo Pepoli and the “Palinodia,” too, exhibit what the idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce called the argumentative “non-poetry” that also finds its way into Leopardi’s testament, “La ginestra,” which many have seen as the great poem of Italian national identity. But the mind that was analyzing and deriding the headlong liberal belief in unending self-improvement and societal betterment—

… having failed to make a single

person on earth happy, they abandoned man

and tried to find a universal bliss;

and having found it easily,

out of many wretched and unhappy persons

made a joyful, happy race:

is the same mind that is preoccupied in his intimate lyrics with his—and our—inability to achieve serenity. “Each creature born will be / simply unhappy, in whatever era … by universal law”: our natural mere unhappiness, about which nothing can be done, is the subject and stuff of his most personal lyrics, a distillation of a vision of life conditioned by Greek philosophy and confirmed by personal experience of the omnipresence of pain, offset only by the power of illusions to conceal it from us for a time. Leopardi’s ultimate cast of mind, then, is disabused and, at its darkest, utterly hopeless. The trajectory from his best-known idyll, “L’infinito,” to its mirrorpoem, “A se stesso,” is the trajectory from a stunned contemplation of the mysterious “sea of being”—which arouses an amorous desire to lose oneself in existence—to disgusted resignation and withdrawal from life. It runs the gamut, one might say, from an overpowering urge to fuse with overbrimming “immensity,” to a bitter leave-taking of the emptiness of “all”—one, as in a Möbius strip, the obverse of the other. And it makes him, in spite of himself, one of the major figures of European romanticism.

*   *   *

The poems of the Canti fall into several periods, which are presented in roughly chronological order in the book. In the early, “extravagant,” radical canzoni (1817–23),9 Leopardi explores political, historical, and philosophical subjects, using the received rhetoric of public poetry with great virtuosity, suppleness, and concision. He also makes his first experiments in creating a poetic “character” for himself: in the song of the poet Simonides that brings alive the last part of the first canzone, “All’Italia,” the young Leopardi impersonates the great bard of ancient Greece in a bid to speak as the public voice of emergent Italy—a declaration of ambition and intentions that amounts to an ars poetica. Likewise, in the “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” he portrays the “unloved lover,” the unbeautiful, undesired singer of human pain that will become his other principal persona. These dramatic monologues are cousins of “Alla luna” and “L’infinito,” lyric “poems” in our modern, delimited sense of the word. And these two kinds of composition, public canzone and intimate idyll, set him on the course of alternating voices that will be fundamental to his ever-evolving approach to poetic creation.

From the very start Leopardi is formally revolutionary, gradually revising and relaxing the rules of his genre. In the early elegies and especially in the idylls (1819–21), many of them written contemporaneously with the canzoni and inspired by Hellenistic pastoral, we find the first instances of the private, ur-modern Leopardi, evoking a solitary character at odds with his native setting, in a kind of alienated antipastoral, in fact. The great odes of the Pisa-Recanati period (1828–30), composed after a long hiatus during which he was preoccupied with the satirical dialogues that became the Operette morali, represent a complex, mature return to the lyric impulse of the first idylls, but in a darker, more despairing, more memory-obsessed key; indeed, in later masterworks such as “A Silvia” and the “Canto notturno,” the poet makes the canzone form an instrument entirely his own, in which rhyme is used originally and sparingly to overwhelmingly powerful effect.

In the poems written in Florence and Bologna (1831–35) during the poet’s thirties, in the throes of his one intense attempted love affair, Leopardi oscillates between an austerely beautiful, almost abstract idiosyncratic Platonism and a novelistic sentimentality (in “Consalvo,” in particular) that, while popular in Leopardi’s time, is vexing to us today. (It is notable that most of Leopardi’s poetic activity in his last years, when he had more or less withdrawn from society and given up on love, was largely devoted to the political satire of the Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, a long and caustic poem about Bourbon Naples that is not part of the Canti, and the social criticism of the “Palinodia.”) Finally, in the last great Neapolitan poems of 1836, “La ginestra” and “Il tramonto della luna,” written as his health was failing, he offers a resigned vision of human life devoid of illusions, considered from above and afar, by moonlight.

*   *   *

So many of the greatest moments in Leopardi’s poetry take place under the aegis of the moon. Unabashed, obsessive repetition of theme, imagery, and trope are characteristic of his work, as if he is saying, over and over, “This is what matters; this is what I’m talking—and talking—about.” Except for the poet’s own persona, the figures in his poems are not individuals, by and large, but represent existential categories; as his sympathetic English biographer, Iris Origo, wrote, the women of Leopardi’s poetry are really only vehicles for his emotions.10 Indeed, the moon is the poet’s most constant interlocutor, the only feminine presence in his lyrics, apart from safely dead figures like Virginia and Silvia and Nerina, with whom he can calmly converse, though he, or his stand-in the wandering shepherd, does all the talking. (Harold Bloom calls the moon “a trope of male self-negation” for Leopardi, as for Keats and Lawrence.) In “Bruto minore,” “Alla luna,” “La vita solitaria,” and the “Canto notturno,” the speaker addresses the moon directly (as he talks to the Big Dipper in “Le ricordanze”); in fourteen of the forty-one canti, in fact, the poem transpires under moonlight. Moonlight, then, is the medium of Leopardi’s preferred mode of thought, a representation of the cool, removed contemplation that his most serene poetry achieves, and in which the poet is perhaps most wholly himself. In the countervailing mode, embodied by the heat of midday, life is at a standstill, and, as in “L’infinito” and “Le ricordanze,” the self is shipwrecked, virtually overwhelmed by conflicting forces. Under the moon, by contrast, the “potent fire” of day has passed, the unendurable pressures of being are relaxed, and half-light allows for a certain indeterminacy and openness to illusion. The poet can observe celestial and earthly activity at a remove, almost as on Keats’s urn (in Leopardi’s late “sepulchral” odes “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale” and “Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna,” moonlight is reified as stone, carrying this motif into the tomblike realm of art). Moonlight is half-life, the realm of memory, of aftermath, a silent, death-haunted eternity.

For Leopardi, poetry was an intermittent mode of expression, albeit the highest one, the ultimate distillation, the summum of his work, one might say.11 It was not, however, a constant practice the way it was for many of the major poets of his time, such as, say, Wordsworth, possibly his nearest contemporary in our language, though Eamon Grennan, himself an intrepid Leopardi translator, makes a good case for Coleridge’s “mixture of the lyrical and meditative manner” as most congruent with the Italian’s in certain respects. Grennan goes on to imagine a “translation committee” for Leopardi that would include “Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Arnold, James Thomson—who translated some of Leopardi’s prose and whose own poems show Leopardi’s influence—Sam Johnson, Sam Beckett, and Wallace Stevens.”12 D. S. Carne-Ross, more plausibly, has suggested the Milton of Lycidas or Samson Agonistes as an appropriately daunting model for anyone foolhardy enough to attempt versions of this maddeningly various, inventive, sinuously decisive poetry. In fact, there have been many tries at translating Leopardi into English, and few successes. Nicolas Perella quotes the critic G. Singh to the effect that the best translations seem to be paraphrases in prose that aspire to be poetry, adding, “We can only wince in recalling that Leopardi spoke harshly of paraphrases.”13 In approaching Leopardi, the hapless translator is often confronted with impenetrably perfect, sonorous expressiveness; in the end, the best he can manage is likely a close approximation of the poem’s literal thrust, which, if he is faithful and lucky, attains a modest aptness in his own language.

In tone and style, Leopardi is a precursor of our modernists, who a hundred years later brought chaste, nude elision to an overstuffed, overly familiar Edwardian language. At its most successful, his grave, meditative voice attains an air of spare finality, of “unstrained dignity,” as Perella puts it, in which each word feels entirely inevitable, the most surprising and efficient possible use of his instrument. Leopardi’s diction may appear “contorted” to us, as Patrick Creagh has said; the willful remoteness of his style is no doubt related to his reaction against the “progressive” fashion of his moment.14 In any case, Perella notes, his “recourse to words of an archaic or quasi-archaic nature and to unusual syntactical forms” has the effect of raising “the ‘reality’ of his subject matter into a sphere where myth and memory reign.” Like John Heath-Stubbs, who associates his classicism with “the passionate paganism of Hölderlin,”15 Carne-Ross asserts that Leopardi’s work at its height is closest in spirit and form to ancient Greek poetry, claiming that “Leopardi, a great Latinist in Latinate Italy, achieved in his best work a Greek ease and fluidity,”16 and reminding us that the Zibaldone shows his deep familiarity with the Greek language and his “sensitivity to its slightest nuances.” In his hands, Italian verse gradually attained a radical new freedom as he melded the rigidly formal canzone with the unrhymed hendecasyllable to produce a poetic instrument that attained the impersonal authority of the choruses of Greek tragedy,17 moving “from I to we,” as Michel Orcel puts it, “from coeur to choeur.”18

*   *   *

Leopardi thought of himself as a writer who never finished anything.19 His papers are full of sketches and outlines, often highly articulated, for discourses, operas, odes. This, too, is something truly modern about him. He is a poet of the industrial revolution who writes about railroads, printing presses, and California, all the while deploring his times and their comfortable, ill-conceived faith in progress and social “usefulness.” Like most poets, he felt that we are here “too late, / and in the evening of human life” and he yearned for an idealized, “naïve” pre-lapsarian world, before the arrival of degenerate, “sentimental” self-consciousness, the awareness of illusions that carried with it the loss of a primal integrity and happiness. In the Zibaldone he describes what he called the “philosophical conversion … the passage from poetry to philosophy, from the ‘ancient’ to the modern condition,” in which the individual recapitulates the journey of the human spirit from a mythic wholeness and “ignorance” to alienated awareness.20 For him, poetry represents, and seeks to re-create and hence to recuperate, man’s ancient oneness with the world, when

Nature, Queen and Goddess once, ordained

a life that wasn’t suffering

and guilt, but free and pure in the forests.

In some ways Leopardi resembles today’s antiglobalist; he was a fierce opponent of triumphalist adventurism in politics and of the utilitarian notion that knowledge entails improvement. As the great Italian critic Francesco De Sanctis wrote, his “skepticism heralds the end of that world of theology and metaphysics, and the inauguration of the aridly true, of the real. Leopardi’s canti are the deepest, most occult voices of that laborious transition that was called ‘the nineteenth century’ … And what matters in this ‘century of progress’ … is the exploration of one’s own soul … This tenacious life of his inner world, in spite of the death of every philosophical and metaphysical world, is the original quality in Leopardi.”21

Leopardi was not a willing participant in life. He remained an “implacable innocent,”22 a kind of emotional child, and his constant lament for his unspent youth and his pleasure in desperation can sometimes seem more like unresolved adolescent angst than true Baudelairean spleen.23 Yet he bitterly rejected the criticism of some of his contemporaries that his negativity was in any way a subjective effect of his own situation. Cyril Connolly wrote in The Unquiet Grave (1945) that Pascal and Leopardi “are the Grand Inquisitors who break down our alibis of health and happiness. Are they pessimistic because they are ill? Or does their illness act as a short cut to reality—which is intrinsically tragic?”24 Leopardi insisted that love is an illusion. Yet, not unlike the Stevens who posits the necessity of “supreme fictions,” he also knew that such illusions are what make life worth living. This, perhaps, is why the Canti, this book of pain and grief, ends with the light and touching command to pursue one’s illusions, to live and love life as it occurs:

Ai presenti diletti

La breve età commetti.

[commit to present pleasure

your brief life.]

Nicola Gardini posits Leopardi’s approach to poetry as alternating between historical and pastoral modes—or, as others have put it, between thought and memory (one might even say between Latin and Greek inspirations)—in a book “centered around an ultimately insoluble conflict between decline and utopia.” Pastoral—the mode of the idylls, what we today think of as his “truest” poetry—represents “escape from history and oblivion of one’s own historicity: the only possible form of human happiness.”25 “The Canti,” Gardini adds, “are run through by constant, irresistible impulses to return to origins (something Leopardi shares with Vico) and to resolve or repair the negative—in a virtually infinite chain of attempts. Leopardi is not a poet of solutions … [but] of problems … [He] puts forward questions and provokes provisional answers that will eventually be superseded by new questions.”

All this is available to us as we ponder the staggering output of his rich and paradoxical mind, even when the intense musicality of his poetry cannot fully be brought over. It is hard to think of a poet in our tradition with such riches at his command. Let the translation committee form and reform, trying “in vain”—one of Leopardi’s favorite phrases—to catch his inimitable sound. However we fail, we are the better for it.

CANTI

I

ALL’ ITALIA

               O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi

            E le colonne e i simulacri e l’erme

            Torri degli avi nostri,

            Ma la gloria non vedo,

        5  Non vedo il lauro e il ferro ond’eran carchi

            I nostri padri antichi. Or fatta inerme,

            Nuda la fronte e nudo il petto mostri.

            Oimè quante ferite,

            Che lividor, che sangue! oh qual ti veggio,

      10  Formosissima donna! Io chiedo al cielo

            E al mondo: dite dite;

            Chi la ridusse a tale? E questo è peggio,

            Che di catene ha carche ambe le braccia;

            Sì che sparte le chiome e senza velo

      15  Siede in terra negletta e sconsolata,

            Nascondendo la faccia

            Tra le ginocchia, e piange.

            Piangi, che ben hai donde, Italia mia,

            Le genti a vincer nata

      20  E nella fausta sorte e nella ria.

               Se fosser gli occhi tuoi due fonti vive,

            Mai non potrebbe il pianto

            Adeguarsi al tuo danno ed allo scorno;

            Che fosti donna, or sei povera ancella.

      25  Chi di te parla o scrive,

            Che, rimembrando il tuo passato vanto,

            Non dica: già fu grande, or non è quella?

            Perchè, perchè? dov’è la forza antica,

            Dove l’armi e il valore e la constanza?

      30  Chi ti discinse il brando?

            Chi ti tradì? qual arte o qual fatica

            O qual tanta possanza

            Valse a spogliarti il manto e l’auree bende?

            Come cadesti o quando

      35  Da tanta altezza in così basso loco?

            Nessun pugna per te? non ti difende

            Nessun de’ tuoi? L’armi, qua l’armi: io solo

            Combatterò, procomberò sol io.

            Dammi, o ciel, che sia foco

      40  Agl’italici petti il sangue mio.

               Dove sono i tuoi figli? Odo suon d’armi

            E di carri e di voci e di timballi:

            In estranie contrade

            Pugnano i tuoi figliuoli.

      45  Attendi, Italia, attendi. Io veggio, o parmi,

            Un fluttuar di fanti e di cavalli,

            E fumo e polve, e luccicar di spade

            Come tra nebbia lampi.

            Nè ti conforti? e i tremebondi lumi

      50  Piegar non soffri al dubitoso evento?

            A che pugna in quei campi

            L’itala gioventude? O numi, o numi:

            Pugnan per altra terra itali acciari.

            Oh misero colui che in guerra è spento,

      55  Non per li patrii lidi e per la pia

            Consorte e i figli cari,

            Ma da nemici altrui

            Per altra gente, e non può dir morendo:

            Alma terra natia,

      60  La vita che mi desti ecco ti rendo.

               Oh venturose e care e benedette

            L’antiche età, che a morte

            Per la patria correan le genti a squadre;

            E voi sempre onorate e gloriose,

      65  O tessaliche strette,

            Dove la Persia e il fato assai men forte

            Fu di poch’alme franche e generose!

            Io credo che le piante e i sassi e l’onda

            E le montagne vostre al passeggere

      70  Con indistinta voce

            Narrin siccome tutta quella sponda

            Coprìr le invitte schiere

            De’ corpi ch’alla Grecia eran devoti.

            Allor, vile e feroce,

      75  Serse per l’Ellesponto si fuggia,

            Fatto ludibrio agli ultimi nepoti;

            E sul colle d’Antela, ove morendo

            Si sottrasse da morte il santo stuolo,

            Simonide salia,

      80  Guardando l’etra e la marina e il suolo.

               E di lacrime sparso ambe le guance,

            E il petto ansante, e vacillante il piede,

            Toglieasi in man la lira:

            Beatissimi voi,

      85  Ch’offriste il petto alle nemiche lance

            Per amor di costei ch’al Sol vi diede;

            Voi che la Grecia cole, e il mondo ammira.

            Nell’armi e ne’ perigli

            Qual tanto amor le giovanette menti,

      90  Qual nell’acerbo fato amor vi trasse?

            Come sì lieta, o figli,

            L’ora estrema vi parve, onde ridenti

            Correste al passo lacrimoso e duro?

            Parea ch’a danza e non a morte andasse

      95  Ciascun de’ vostri, o a splendido convito:

            Ma v’attendea lo scuro

            Tartaro, e l’onda morta;

            Nè le spose vi foro o i figli accanto

            Quando su l’aspro lito

    100  Senza baci moriste e senza pianto.

               Ma non senza de’ Persi orrida pena

            Ed immortale angoscia.

            Come lion di tori entro una mandra

            Or salta a quello in tergo e sì gli scava

    105  Con le zanne la schiena,

            Or questo fianco addenta or quella coscia;

            Tal fra le Perse torme infuriava

            L’ira de’ greci petti e la virtute.

            Ve’ cavalli supini e cavalieri;

    110  Vedi intralciare ai vinti

            La fuga i carri e le tende cadute,

            E correr fra’ primieri

            Pallido e scapigliato esso tiranno;

            Ve’ come infusi e tinti

    115  Del barbarico sangue i greci eroi,

            Cagione ai Persi d’infinito affanno,

            A poco a poco vinti dalle piaghe,

            L’un sopra l’altro cade. Oh viva, oh viva:

            Beatissimi voi

    120  Mentre nel mondo si favelli o scriva.

               Prima divelte, in mar precipitando,

            Spente nell’imo strideran le stelle,

            Che la memoria e il vostro

            Amor trascorra o scemi.

    125  La vostra tomba è un’ara; e qua mostrando

            Verran le madri ai parvoli le belle

            Orme del vostro sangue. Ecco io mi prostro,

            O benedetti, al suolo,

            E bacio questi sassi e queste zolle,

    130  Che fien lodate e chiare eternamente

            Dall’uno all’altro polo.

            Deh foss’io pur con voi qui sotto, e molle

            Fosse del sangue mio quest’alma terra.

            Che se il fato è diverso, e non consente

    135  Ch’io per la Grecia i moribondi lumi

            Chiuda prostrato in guerra,

            Così la vereconda

            Fama del vostro vate appo i futuri

            Possa, volendo i numi,

    140  Tanto durar quanto la vostra duri.

I

TO ITALY

               O my country, I can see the walls

            and arches and the columns and the statues

            and lonely towers of our ancestors,

            but I don’t see the glory;

        5  I don’t see the laurel and the sword

            our ancient fathers wore.

            Your forehead and your breast are naked,

            undefended. Ah, so many wounds,

            contusions, blood: beautiful lady,

      10  this is how you look! I ask heaven and earth

            to tell me, Who did this to her?

            And, worse, her arms

            are bound with chains;

            hair undone, without her veil,

      15  she sits alone and hopeless on the ground,

            her face between her knees,

            and weeps.

            Weep; for you have reason to, my Italy,

            born to outdo others

      20  in both happiness and misery.

               Even if your eyes were fountains,

            your tears could never equal

            your suffering and humiliation;

            you were a lady, and now you are a slave.

      25  Whoever speaks or writes about you,

            who, remembering you in your pride,

            wouldn’t say: She was great once; but no longer?

            Why? What happened to our ancient strength,

            the arms, the courage, the resolve?

      30  Who stripped you of your sword?

            Who betrayed you?

            What treachery, what sabotage, what power

            could take away your cloak and golden crown?

            When did you fall, and how,

      35  so low from such great heights?

            No one fights for you? None of your own defend you?

            To arms! Bring me my sword:

            I’ll fight alone, I’ll fall alone.

            Let my blood, O heaven,

      40  be inspiring to Italian hearts.

               Where are your sons? I hear the sound

            of arms and chariots, voices, drums:

            Your sons are making war

            in foreign lands.

      45  Hear me, Italy. I see

            a wave of infantry and cavalry,

            smoke and dust, and flashing swords

            like lightning in the fog.

            Does it comfort you? Or don’t you dare

      50  to witness the uncertain outcome?

            Why are young Italians

            fighting in those fields? Gods, O gods:

            Italian steel fights for another land.

            Oh miserable is he who dies in battle,

      55  not for his country’s soil, his faithful

            wife and precious children,

            but who dies serving someone else,

            dies at the hands of that man’s enemies,

            and can’t say at the end: Beloved native land,

      60  the life you gave me I give back to you.

               Oh happy and beloved and blessed

            were those ancient days, when whole battalions

            raced to die for their country;

            and you were ever honored and renowned,

      65  Thessalian passes,

            where Persia and destiny were far less strong

            than a few bold and noble souls!

            It seems to me your trees and rocks,

            your sea and mountains

      70  murmur to the passing traveler

            how the undefeated ranks

            covered the entire shore

            with undefeated bodies sworn to Greece.

            Then cowardly and vicious

      75  Xerxes fled by Hellespont, and became

            a figure of contempt to his descendants.

            And climbing the Antela hill, where

            the sacred band who died became immortal,

            Simonides surveyed

      80  the sky and shore and land.

            And, cheeks wet with tears,

            out of breath, unsteady,

            he lifted up his lyre:

            Most blessed, you

      85  whose chests took the foe’s spears

            for love of her who gave you to the Sun;

            you whom Greece adores and the world admires.

            What love was strong enough to send the young

            into the peril of battle,

      90  what kind of love sent you to bitter death?

            How happy, sons of ours,

            the last hour seemed,

            when you ran smiling toward the tearful end?

            It appeared that each of you was going

      95  to a dance or splendid banquet, not to death:

            yet dark Tartarus was waiting,

            and the somber river;

            nor were your wives or children with you

            when you died on that wild shore

    100  not kissed goodbye, unmourned.

               But not before inflicting horrible

            suffering and destruction on the Persians.

            The way a lion in a field of bulls

            pounces now on that one’s back

    105  and tears into him with his teeth,

            and now shreds this one’s flank and that one’s thigh;

            so the anger and the valor of Greek hearts

            tore the Persian hordes apart.

            Look! horses and their riders on the ground;

    110  Look! chariots and fallen tents

            blocking the defeated from escaping,

            and the coward tyrant,

            pale and disheveled, with the first to flee.

            See how, drenched

    115  in barbarian blood, the hero Greeks,

            cause of endless torment to the Persians,

            one by one, defeated by their wounds,

            fall on one another.

            Oh live, oh live, forever. You are blessed

    120  as long as men will live to tell your story.

               The stars will fall from the sky and into the sea

            and scream as they’re put out

            before we forget you

            and our love for you will die.

    125  Your tomb is an altar

            where mothers will bring their children

            to see your glorious bloodstains.

            I’ll lie down, blessed ones,

            and kiss these stones, this earth,

    130  which shall be praised and glorious forever

            from pole to pole.

            If only I were down below with you,

            and this sweet earth were wet with my blood, too.

            But if my fate is unlike yours,

    135  and will not let me shut my eyes

            dying fallen on the field for Greece,

            still may the modest glory of your bard,

            if the gods allow it,

            endure as long as yours

    140  in times to come.

II

SOPRA IL MONUMENTO DI DANTE CHE SI PREPARAVA IN FIRENZE

               Perchè le nostre genti

            Pace sotto le bianche ali raccolga,

            Non fien da’ lacci sciolte

            Dell’antico sopor l’itale menti

        5  S’ai patrii esempi della prisca etade

            Questa terra fatal non si rivolga.

            O Italia, a cor ti stia

            Far ai passati onor; che d’altrettali

            Oggi vedove son le tue contrade,

      10  Nè v’è chi d’onorar ti si convegna.

            Volgiti indietro, e guarda, o patria mia,

            Quella schiera infinita d’immortali,

            E piangi e di te stessa ti disdegna;

            Che senza sdegno omai la doglia è stolta:

      15  Volgiti e ti vergogna e ti riscuoti,

            E ti punga una volta

            Pensier degli avi nostri e de’ nepoti.

               D’aria e d’ingegno e di parlar diverso

            Per lo toscano suol cercando gia

      20  L’ospite desioso

            Dove giaccia colui per lo cui verso

            Il meonio cantor non è più solo.

            Ed, oh vergogna! udia

            Che non che il cener freddo e l’ossa nude

      25  Giaccian esuli ancora

            Dopo il funereo dì sott’altro suolo,

            Ma non sorgea dentro a tue mura un sasso,

            Firenze, a quello per la cui virtude

            Tutto il mondo t’onora.

      30  Oh voi pietosi, onde sì tristo e basso

            Obbrobrio laverà nostro paese!

            Bell’opra hai tolta e di ch’amor ti rende,

            Schiera prode e cortese,

            Qualunque petto amor d’Italia accende.

      35     Amor d’Italia, o cari,

            Amor di questa misera vi sproni,

            Ver cui pietade è morta

            In ogni petto omai, perciò che amari

            Giorni dopo il seren dato n’ha il cielo.

      40  Spirti v’aggiunga e vostra opra coroni

            Misericordia, o figli,

            E duolo e sdegno di cotanto affanno

            Onde bagna costei le guance e il velo.

            Ma voi di quale ornar parola o canto

      45  Si debbe, a cui non pur cure o consigli,

            Ma dell’ingegno e della man daranno

            I sensi e le virtudi eterno vanto

            Oprate e mostre nella dolce impresa?

            Quali a voi note invio, sì che nel core,

      50  Sì che nell’alma accesa

            Nova favilla indurre abbian valore?

               Voi spirerà l’altissimo subbietto,

            Ed acri punte premeravvi al seno.

            Chi dirà l’onda e il turbo

      55  Del furor vostro e dell’immenso affetto?

            Chi pingerà l’attonito sembiante?

            Chi degli occhi il baleno?

            Qual può voce mortal celeste cosa

            Agguagliar figurando?

      60  Lunge sia, lunge alma profana. Oh quante

            Lacrime al nobil sasso Italia serba!

            Come cadrà? come dal tempo rosa

            Fia vostra gloria o quando?

            Voi, di ch’il nostro mal si disacerba,

      65  Sempre vivete, o care arti divine,

            Conforto a nostra sventurata gente,

            Fra l’itale ruine

            Gl’itali pregi a celebrare intente.

               Ecco voglioso anch’io

      70  Ad onorar nostra dolente madre

            Porto quel che mi lice,

            E mesco all’opra vostra il canto mio,

            Sedendo u’ vostro ferro i marmi avviva.

            O dell’etrusco metro inclito padre,

      75  Se di cosa terrena,

            Se di costei che tanto alto locasti

            Qualche novella ai vostri lidi arriva,

            Io so ben che per te gioia non senti,

            Che saldi men che cera e men ch’arena,

      80  Verso la fama che di te lasciasti,

            Son bronzi e marmi; e dalle nostre menti

            Se mai cadesti ancor, s’unqua cadrai,

            Cresca, se crescer può, nostra sciaura,

            E in sempiterni guai

      85  Pianga tua stirpe a tutto il mondo oscura.

               Ma non per te; per questa ti rallegri

            Povera patria tua, s’unqua l’esempio

            Degli avi e de’ parenti

            Ponga ne’ figli sonnacchiosi ed egri

      90  Tanto valor che un tratto alzino il viso.

            Ahi, da che lungo scempio

            Vedi afflitta costei, che sì meschina

            Te salutava allora

            Che di novo salisti al paradiso!

      95  Oggi ridotta sì che a quel che vedi,

            Fu fortunata allor donna e reina.

            Tal miseria l’accora

            Qual tu forse mirando a te non credi.

            Taccio gli altri nemici e l’altre doglie;

    100  Ma non la più recente e la più fera,

            Per cui presso alle soglie

            Vide la patria tua l’ultima sera.

               Beato te che il fato

            A viver non dannò fra tanto orrore;

    105  Che non vedesti in braccio

            L’itala moglie a barbaro soldato;

            Non predar, non guastar cittadi e colti

            L’asta inimica e il peregrin furore;

            Non degl’itali ingegni

    110  Tratte l’opre divine a miseranda

            Schiavitude oltre l’alpe, e non de’ folti

            Carri impedita la dolente via;

            Non gli aspri cenni ed i superbi regni;

            Non udisti gli oltraggi e la nefanda

    115  Voce di libertà che ne schernia

            Tra il suon delle catene e de’ flagelli.

            Chi non si duol? che non soffrimmo? intatto

            Che lasciaron quei felli?

            Qual tempio, quale altare o qual misfatto?

    120     Perchè venimmo a sì perversi tempi?

            Perchè il nascer ne desti o perchè prima

            Non ne desti il morire,

            Acerbo fato? onde a stranieri ed empi

            Nostra patria vedendo ancella e schiava,

    125  E da mordace lima

            Roder la sua virtù, di null’aita

            E di nullo conforto

            Lo spietato dolor che la stracciava

            Ammollir ne fu dato in parte alcuna.

    130  Ahi non il sangue nostro e non la vita

            Avesti, o cara; e morto

            Io non son per la tua cruda fortuna.

            Qui l’ira al cor, qui la pietade abbonda:

            Pugnò, cadde gran parte anche di noi:

    135  Ma per la moribonda

            Italia no; per li tiranni suoi.

               Padre, se non ti sdegni,

            Mutato sei da quel che fosti in terra.

            Morian per le rutene

    140  Squallide piagge, ahi d’altra morte degni,

            Gl’itali prodi; e lor fea l’aere e il cielo

            E gli uomini e le belve immensa guerra.

            Cadeano a squadre a squadre

            Semivestiti, maceri e cruenti,

    145  Ed era letto agli egri corpi il gelo.

            Allor, quando traean l’ultime pene,

            Membrando questa desiata madre,

            Diceano: oh non le nubi e non i venti,

            Ma ne spegnesse il ferro, e per tuo bene,

    150  O patria nostra. Ecco da te rimoti,

            Quando più bella a noi l’età sorride,

            A tutto il mondo ignoti,

            Moriam per quella gente che t’uccide.

               Di lor querela il boreal deserto

    155  E conscie fur le sibilanti selve.

            Così vennero al passo,

            E i negletti cadaveri all’aperto

            Su per quello di neve orrido mare

            Dilaceràr le belve;

    160  E sarà il nome degli egregi e forti

            Pari mai sempre ed uno

            Con quel de’ tardi e vili. Anime care,

            Bench’infinita sia vostra sciagura,

            Datevi pace; e questo vi conforti

    165  Che conforto nessuno

            Avrete in questa o nell’età futura.

            In seno al vostro smisurato affanno

            Posate, o di costei veraci figli,

            Al cui supremo danno

    170  Il vostro solo è tal che s’assomigli.

               Di voi già non si lagna

            La patria vostra, ma di chi vi spines

            A pugnar contra lei,

            Sì ch’ella sempre amaramente piagna

    175  E il suo col vostro lacrimar confonda.

            Oh di costei ch’ogni altra gloria vines

            Pietà nascesse in core

            A tal de’ suoi ch’affaticata e lenta

            Di sì buia vorago e sì profonda

    180  La ritraesse! O glorioso spirto,

            Dimmi: d’Italia tua morto è l’amore?

            Dì: quella fiamma che t’accese, è spenta?

            Dì: nè più mai rinverdirà quel mirto

            Ch’alleggiò per gran tempo il nostro male?

    185  Nostre corone al suol fien tutte sparte?

            Nè sorgerà mai tale

            Che ti rassembri in qualsivoglia parte?

               In eterno perimmo? e il nostro scorno

            Non ha verun confine?

    190  Io mentre viva andrò sclamando intorno,

            Volgiti agli avi tuoi, guasto legnaggio;

            Mira queste ruine

            E le carte e le tele e i marmi e i templi;

            Pensa qual terra premi; e se destarti

    195  Non può la luce di cotanti esempli,

            Che stai? levati e parti.

            Non si conviene a sì corrotta usanza

            Questa d’animi eccelsi altrice e scola:

            Se di codardi è stanza,

    200  Meglio l’è rimaner vedova e sola.

II

ON THE MONUMENT TO DANTE BEING ERECTED IN FLORENCE

               Although Peace is gathering

            our people under her white wings,

            Italian minds will not be freed

            from their age-old drowsiness

        5  if this great land will not return

            to the example our forefathers set.

            O Italy, let it be in your heart

            to honor the ancients; for this land

            has no such men today,

      10  and no one to honor.

            Turn back, my country,

            look back on that infinity of immortals,

            and weep with shame;

            for grieving without shame is senseless:

      15  turn back and be ashamed and shake yourself awake

            and let the memory of those ancestors

            and what feebly followed stab you.

               A stranger, singular in attitude

            and cast of mind and speech,

      20  traveled through Tuscany

            seeking the tomb of the poet thanks to whom

            Homer doesn’t stand alone.

            And to our shame he learned

            that since that poet’s death

      25  his ashes and his bones still lie

            in exile, and, incredibly,

            not a single monument was raised

            within your walls to him whose greatness, Florence,

            means the whole world honors you.

      30  Oh patriots, who will set

            our country free from this disgrace!

            You undertake a noble task,

            generous and noble band, and anyone

            who loves Italy will love you for it.

      35     Love of Italy, my friends—let love

            for this unhappy country triumph in you

            since loyalty to her otherwise has gone,

            for after her bright day

            came bitter ones.

      40  Let mercy give you energy

            and bless your work, you patriots,

            who know so well how Italy’s misery

            floods her cheeks and veil with tears.

            But how to sing your praises, citizens,

      45  for the noble work you do,

            the care and wisdom that you showed,

            and the genius and gifts

            that will always bring you honor?

            What else can I say

      50  to strike a new spark in your heart

            that will inspire you?

               This greatest of all themes will spur you on

            and pierce your heart;

            who can tell the wave and whirlwind

      55  of your fury and enormous love?

            Who imagines your impassioned look,

            the lightning in your eyes?

            What human voice does justice

            describing something that’s celestial?

      60  Away, profane spirit. How many tears

            will Italy shed for this great monument!

            How or when

            will time erase your glory?

            You still live, O divine arts

      65  to console us in our misery,

            comfort for our luckless people,

            bent on celebrating

            Italian greatness in the ruins of Italy.

               Look: I want

      70  to honor our grieving mother, too;

            I bring what I have,

            and sing my song beside you as you work,

            sitting where your chisel brings the stone alive.

            O noble father of Tuscan poetry,

      75  if you hear some news of things on earth,

            or about the woman you so loved,

            I know that for yourself you feel no joy,

            that bronze and marble are less permanent

            than wax or sand next to the fame

      80  you left behind; and if you ever

            vanish from our minds again,

            may our unhappiness,

            if possible, increase

            and your descendants weep,

      85  unknown to the whole world, in endless misery.

               But not you; you’ll rejoice

            for your poor country,

            if the example of their ancestors

            ever gives its drowsy, sickly sons

      90  the courage to lift their eyes for once.

            You can tell

            what endless trouble worried her,

            she who so unhappily said farewell

            when you rose to paradise again!

      95  She is so reduced today

            that next to what you see she was a queen.

            Such misery assails her

            you won’t believe it, seeing her.

            I’ll ignore her other enemies and hardships;

    100  but not the newest and most cruel,

            because of which your country feared

            her final evening had arrived.

               You were lucky fate did not condemn you

            to live among these horrors;

    105  you didn’t see Italian wives

            in barbarian soldiers’ arms;

            you didn’t see the angry enemy

            lay waste to our cities and our fields,

            or divine works of Italian genius

    110  carted across the Alps to abject slavery,

            or the highway blocked by groaning wagons,

            the sharp looks and the insolent commands;

            you didn’t hear the insults

            and the abused word “freedom”

    115  they mocked us with

            amidst chains and whipping.

            Who doesn’t grieve? What have we not suffered?

            What did those felons leave untouched—

            what temple, altar, crime?

    120     How did we come to these corrupted times?

            Bitter fate, why give us life,

            or else why not an earlier death,

            when you see our country

            enslaved by profane foreigners,

    125  her virtue cut to ribbons

            by their biting steel?

            No help or comfort: we weren’t given

            any way of lessening

            the relentless pain that tore at her.

    130  Alas, you didn’t take our blood or life,

            beloved country,

            and I haven’t died for your cruel fate.

            So rage and pity overwhelm the heart,

            for many of us also fought and fell,

    135  but not for dying Italy:

            for her tyrants.

               Father (that is, if you don’t disdain us),

            you’re no longer what you were on earth.

            Brave Italians who deserved another death

    140  fell on the lonely Russian steppe,

            and the freezing weather

            pitilessly attacked both men and beasts.

            Squad after squad they fell,

            half naked, mangled, bloodied,

    145  and the ice became a bed for their poor bodies.

            And as they breathed their painful last

            they recalled the mother they had longed for,

            saying: Not clouds and wind, but iron

            should have killed us, and for you, our country.

    150  Here, so far away from you,

            while time smiles most benevolently on us,

            unknown to all the world, we die

            for those who are murdering you.

               The northern wasteland heard them cry,

    155  and the whispering woods were witness, too.

            So their moment came,

            and wild beasts

            tore up their deserted corpses

            on that enormous horrid sea of snow.

    160  And the stragglers and malingerers

            will always be remembered

            with the noble and the strong. Beloved spirits,

            though your agony will never end,

            be at peace, and let it comfort you

    165  that you will have no comfort

            now or in any future time.

            Rest on the breast

            of your unmeasured pain,

            O true sons of her whose final ruin

    170  only yours resembles.

               Your country doesn’t grieve for you

            but for him

            who made you fight against her;

            so she weeps as bitterly as ever

    175  and her tears are mixed with yours.

            If only pity for her whose glory

            excelled all others’ came alive

            in those who love her and can save her,

            exhausted and lethargic as she is,

    180  from such abyssal darkness! Glorious spirit,

            tell me: Has your love for your Italy died?

            Has the fire that gave you life gone cold?

            Will the myrtle that assuaged our sadness for so long

            never turn green again?

    185  Have all our crowns been scattered on the ground?

            Will she never rise again

            to resemble you in any way?

               Did we die for all eternity?

            Will our shame never end?

    190  I, while I’m alive, shall keep exhorting,

            Turn back to your ancestors, corrupted sons.

            Look at these ruins,

            these pages, canvases, these stones and temples.

            Think what earth you walk on. And if the light

    195  of these examples fails to inspire you,

            what are you waiting for? Arise and go.

            Such low behavior is unworthy

            of this nurse and teacher of great spirits.

            If she is the home of cowards,

    200  better she be a widow and alone.

III

AD ANGELO MAI

Quand’ebbe trovato i libri di Cicerone Della Repubblica

               Italo ardito, a che giammai non posi

            Di svegliar dalle tombe

            I nostri padri? ed a parlar gli meni

            A questo secol morto, al quale incombe

        5  Tanta nebbia di tedio? E come or vieni

            Sì forte a’ nostri orecchi e sì frequente,

            Voce antica de’ nostri,

            Muta sì lunga etade? e perchè tanti

            Risorgimenti? In un balen feconde

      10  Venner le carte; alla stagion presente

            I polverosi chiostri

            Serbaro occulti i generosi e santi

            Detti degli avi. E che valor t’infonde,

            Italo egregio, il fato? O con l’umano

      15  Valor forse contrasta il fato invano?

               Certo senza de’ numi alto consiglio

            Non è ch’ove più lento

            E grave è il nostro disperato obblio,

            A percoter ne rieda ogni momento

      20  Novo grido de’ padri. Ancora è pio

            Dunque all’Italia il cielo; anco si cura

            Di noi qualche immortale:

            Ch’essendo questa o nessun’altra poi

            L’ora da ripor mano alla virtude

      25  Rugginosa dell’itala natura,

            Veggiam che tanto e tale

            È il clamor de’ sepolti, e che gli eroi

            Dimenticati il suol quasi dischiude,

            A ricercar s’a questa età sì tarda

      30  Anco ti giovi, o patria, esser codarda.

               Di noi serbate, o gloriosi, ancora

            Qualche speranza? in tutto

            Non siam periti? A voi forse il futuro

            Conoscer non si toglie. Io son distrutto

      35  Nè schermo alcuno ho dal dolor, che scuro

            M’è l’avvenire, e tutto quanto io scerno

            È tal che sogno e fola

            Fa parer la speranza. Anime prodi,

            Ai tetti vostri inonorata, immonda

      40  Plebe successe; al vostro sangue è scherno

            E d’opra e di parola

            Ogni valor; di vostre eterne lodi

            Nè rossor più nè invidia; ozio circonda

            I monumenti vostri; e di viltade

      45  Siam fatti esempio alla futura etade.

               Bennato ingegno, or quando altrui non cale

            De’ nostri alti parenti,

            A te ne caglia, a te cui fato aspira

            Benigno sì che per tua man presenti

      50  Paion que’ giorni allor che dalla dira

               Obblivione antica ergean la chioma,

            Con gli studi sepolti,

            I vetusti divini, a cui natura

            Parlò senza svelarsi, onde i riposi

      55  Magnanimi allegràr d’Atene e Roma.

            Oh tempi, oh tempi avvolti

            In sonno eterno! Allora anco immatura

            La ruina d’Italia, anco sdegnosi

            Eravam d’ozio turpe, e l’aura a volo

      60  Più faville rapia da questo suolo.

               Eran calde le tue ceneri sante,

            Non domito nemico

            Della fortuna, al cui sdegno e dolore

            Fu più l’averno che la terra amico.

      65  L’averno: e qual non è parte migliore

            Di questa nostra? E le tue dolci corde

            Susurravano ancora

            Dal tocco di tua destra, o sfortunato

            Amante. Ahi dal dolor comincia e nasce

      70  L’italo canto. E pur men grava e morde

            Il mal che n’addolora

            Del tedio che n’affoga. Oh te beato,

            A cui fu vita il pianto! A noi le fasce

            Cinse il fastidio; a noi presso la culla

      75  Immoto siede, e su la tomba, il nulla.

               Ma tua vita era allor con gli astri e il mare,

            Ligure ardita prole,

            Quand’oltre alle colonne, ed oltre ai liti

            Cui strider l’onde all’attuffar del sole

      80  Parve udir su la sera, agl’infiniti

            Flutti commesso, ritrovasti il raggio

            Del Sol caduto, e il giorno

            Che nasce allor ch’ai nostri è giunto al fondo;

            E rotto di natura ogni contrasto,

      85  Ignota immensa terra al tuo viaggio

            Fu gloria, e del ritorno

            Ai rischi. Ahi ahi, ma conosciuto il mondo

            Non cresce, anzi si scema, e assai più vasto

            L’etra sonante e l’alma terra e il mare

      90  Al fanciullin, che non al saggio, appare.

               Nostri sogni leggiadri ove son giti

            Dell’ignoto ricetto

            D’ignoti abitatori, o del diurno

            Degli astri albergo, e del rimoto letto

      95  Della giovane Aurora, e del notturno

            Occulto sonno del maggior pianeta?

            Ecco svaniro a un punto,

            E figurato è il mondo in breve carta;

            Ecco tutto è simile, e discoprendo,

    100  Solo il nulla s’accresce. A noi ti vieta

            Il vero appena è giunto,

            O caro immaginar; da te s’apparta

            Nostra mente in eterno; allo stupendo

            Poter tuo primo ne sottraggon gli anni;

    105  E il conforto perì de’ nostri affanni.

               Nascevi ai dolci sogni intanto, e il primo

            Sole splendeati in vista,

            Cantor vago dell’arme e degli amori,

            Che in età della nostra assai men trista

    110  Empièr la vita di felici errori:

            Nova speme d’Italia. O torri, o celle,

            O donne, o cavalieri,

            O giardini, o palagi! a voi pensando,

            In mille vane amenità si perde

    115  La mente mia. Di vanità, di belle

            Fole e strani pensieri

            Si componea l’umana vita: in bando

            Li cacciammo: or che resta? or poi che il verde

            È spogliato alle cose? Il certo e solo

    120  Veder che tutto è vano altro che il duolo.

               O Torquato, o Torquato, a noi l’eccelsa

            Tua mente allora, il pianto

            A te, non altro, preparava il cielo.

            Oh misero Torquato! il dolce canto

    125  Non valse a consolarti o a sciorre il gelo

            Onde l’alma t’avean, ch’era sì calda,

            Cinta l’odio e l’immondo

            Livor privato e de’ tiranni. Amore,

            Amor, di nostra vita ultimo inganno,

    130  T’abbandonava. Ombra reale e salda

            Ti parve il nulla, e il mondo

            Inabitata piaggia. Al tardo onore

            Non sorser gli occhi tuoi; mercè, non danno,

            L’ora estrema ti fu. Morte domanda

    135  Chi nostro mal conobbe, e non ghirlanda.

               Torna torna fra noi, sorgi dal muto

            E sconsolato avello,

            Se d’angoscia sei vago, o miserando

            Esemplo di sciagura. Assai da quello

    140  Che ti parve sì mesto e sì nefando,

            È peggiorato il viver nostro. O caro,

            Chi ti compiangeria,

            Se, fuor che di se stesso, altri non cura?

            Chi stolto non direbbe il tuo mortale

    145  Affanno anche oggidì, se il grande e il raro

            Ha nome di follia;

            Nè livor più, ma ben di lui più dura

            La noncuranza avviene ai sommi? o quale,

            Se più de’ carmi, il computar s’ascolta,

    150  Ti appresterebbe il lauro un’altra volta?

               Da te fino a quest’ora uom non è sorto,

            O sventurato ingegno,

            Pari all’italo nome, altro ch’un solo,

            Solo di sua codarda etate indegno

    155  Allobrogo feroce, a cui dal polo

            Maschia virtù, non già da questa mia

            Stanca ed arida terra,

            Venne nel petto; onde privato, inerme,

            (Memorando ardimento) in su la scena

    160  Mosse guerra a’ tiranni: almen si dia

            Questa misera guerra

            E questo vano campo all’ire inferme

            Del mondo. Ei primo e sol dentro all’arena

            Scese, e nullo il seguì, che l’ozio e il brutto

    165  Silenzio or preme ai nostri innanzi a tutto.

               Disdegnando e fremendo, immacolata

            Trasse la vita intera,

            E morte lo scampò dal veder peggio.

            Vittorio mio, questa per te non era

    170  Età nè suolo. Altri anni ed altro seggio

            Conviene agli alti ingegni. Or di riposo

            Paghi viviamo, e scorti

            Da mediocrità; sceso il sapiente

            E salita è la turba a un sol confine,

    175  Che il mondo agguaglia. O scopritor famoso,

            Segui; risveglia i morti,

            Poi che dormono i vivi; arma le spente

            Lingue de’ prischi eroi; tanto che in fine

            Questo secol di fango o vita agogni

    180  E sorga ad atti illustri, o si vergogni.

III

TO ANGELO MAI

On His Finding the Manuscript of Cicero’s De re publica

               Ardent Italian, how is it you keep

            bringing our ancestors back to life;

            and let them speak to this dead century

            in its haze of tedium?

        5  And, language of our fathers

            silent so long, how is it

            we hear you loud and clear and often now?

            Why all these resurrections?

            Suddenly the pages

      10  wake and speak;

            dusty cloisters hid the precious writings

            of our ancestors till now.

            Great Italian,

            has destiny inspired you? Or does destiny

      15  contend with human courage to no end?

               Clearly it is the high will of the gods

            that just when we

            have wholly lost

            the memory of our heritage,

      20  our fathers rouse themselves to lead us on.

            Heaven does have charity for Italy;

            some god still cares for us:

            now is the moment—this is the hour—

            to regain the strength

      25  and valor of Italianness;

            the clamor from the tombs is loud,

            and the earth is setting

            our forgotten heroes free,

            asking, my countrymen, if you

      30  still want to be cowards.

               Glorious ancestors,

            is there still hope for us? Are we not wholly dead?

            Can you see the future? I’m exhausted,

            nothing shields me from suffering,

      35  the way ahead is dark, and all I see

            makes hope phantasmagorical.

            Noble spirits, rabble

            inherited your houses;

            your descendants

      40  disdain excellence in work or word;

            they resent your glory

            and neglect

            your monuments;

            and they have made us all

      45  exemplars of baseness for the future.

               Noble mind, now when no one else

            takes an interest in our noble forebears,

            be interested, for your inspired work

            brings back those days

      50  when the godlike ancients

            roused themselves from the oblivion

            that had buried them and their achievements—

            our fathers to whom nature used to speak,

            although she never showed herself,

      55  and pleased the great of Athens and of Rome.

            Oh times, snowbound in eternal sleep!

            Italy’s ruin then was still to come,

            we still looked down on idleness as shameful,

            and the wind still lifted countless sparks

      60  of inspiration from this soil.

               Your holy ashes still were warm,

            undefeated enemy of fortune,     [Dante]

            to whose disdain and pain

            hell was friendlier than earth.

      65  Yes, even hell: for what place isn’t preferable

            to ours? And your sweet strings

            still murmured at your hand’s touch,

            suffering lover.     [Petrarch]

            Ah, Italian song

      70  begins, is born, in pain. And yet the pain

            we’re suffering weighs us down and stings

            less than the tedium that’s stifling us.

            Oh happy one for whom lament was life!

            Boredom wrapped us in our swaddling clothes;

      75  and nothingness guards our cradle and our tomb.

               But your life then was with the stars and sea,

            bold son of Liguria,     [Columbus]

            when beyond the columns and the shores

            where it seemed one heard the waves

      80  screaming as the sun set,

            you ventured out onto the boundless ocean

            and happened on the light of the gone Sun,

            and the day that starts when He’s reached the end of ours;

            and having broken nature’s every bond,

      85  a boundless, unfamiliar earth was the glorious

            reward for your voyage and your perilous return.

            Alas, the world once known doesn’t expand:

            it shrinks; and the echoing heaven

            and the gentle earth and sea

      90  seem far vaster to the infant than to the sage.

               Where have they gone, our happy dreams

            of the exotic homelands

            of foreign peoples, or the stars’ diurnal

            resting place, or young Aurora’s distant bed,

      95  or the hidden sleep of the great planet?

            Look, they vanished in a moment,

            and the world’s described on one brief page;

            look, now everything’s the same,

            and discovery only adds to nothingness.

    100  Truth is taken from us

            in the moment it arrives,

            O sweet imaginination; our mind’s cut off

            from you forever; the years removed us

            from your stupendous primal power;

    105  and the comfort for our troubles died.

               But you were born to gentle dreams,

            and the early sun shone in your face,

            graceful bard of arms and loves     [Ariosto]

            which, in an age less malcontent than ours,

    110  filled life with glad illusions:

            new hope of Italy. O towers, chambers,

            damsels, knights, O gardens, palaces!

            When I think of you, my mind

            traces a thousand empty vagaries.

    115  Human life was made of vanities,

            glad fantasies, and strange ideas:

            we chased after them together; what survives,

            now that the green has been leached out of things?

            The certain, lonely knowledge

    120  that everything is vain but grief.

               O Torquato, Torquato, heaven made     [Tasso]

            your sublime mind for us,

            but only sorrow, nothing else, for you.

            Miserable Torquato! Your sweet song

    125  couldn’t console you, couldn’t melt the ice

            that the hatred and foul jealousy

            of men and tyrants locked your spirit in,

            that was so warm. Love,

            the last illusion of our life,

    130  deserted you. Nothingness to you

            seemed an actual, substantial shadow

            and the world a desert. You didn’t notice

            your late honors; your last moment

            was relief, not pain for you. He who has known

    135  our pain wants death and not a wreath.

               Come back, come back among us,

            rise out of the silent, lonely tomb,

            if you long for anguish, O unhappy

            exemplar of calamity. The life

    140  that seemed so dark and wrong to you

            has become far worse for us.

            Loved one, who would mourn you,

            if everyone cares only for himself?

            Who wouldn’t call your mortal struggle

    145  foolish too now, when the great and rare

            are called insane? Is it not mere jealousy

            but something far more cruel: indifference,

            that assaults the greatest?

            Who, when mathematics is preferred to song,

    150  would offer you the laurel wreath again?

               No man has appeared since you till now,

            O unfortunate intelligence,

            deserving of the name Italian, except one,

            one man unworthy of his cowardly age,     [Alfieri]

    155  fierce Allobrogian,

            endowed with manly courage from on high,

            not by this worn-out, arid land of mine;

            with it, as a simple citizen,

            and (memorable audacity) unarmed,

    160  he battled tyrants from the stage:

            so that this hopeless fight and empty field,

            at least, should be devoted to the powerless

            angers of the world. He was the first to go

            down into the ring alone, and no one followed,

    165  for idleness and brutal silence now own us most of all.

               Disdainful and enraged, he lived

            his whole life pure,

            and death prevented him from seeing worse.

            My Vittorio, this age and land

    170  were not for you. Other times, another place

            are fit for genius. Now we live

            ready for rest, with mediocrities

            as company: the wise man has descended

            and the crowd has risen to his level,

    175  with the world. O famed discoverer,     [Mai]

            continue. Raise the fallen,

            since the living sleep. Rearm the dead tongues

            of our pristine heroes, so at last

            this age of mud will either want to live

    180  and rise to noble action, or be shamed.

IV

NELLE NOZZE DELLA SORELLA PAOLINA

               Poi che del patrio nido

            I silenzi lasciando, e le beate

            Larve e l’antico error, celeste dono,

            Ch’abbella agli occhi tuoi quest’ermo lido,

        5  Te nella polve della vita e il suono

            Tragge il destin; l’obbrobriosa etate

            Che il duro cielo a noi prescrisse impara,

            Sorella mia, che in gravi

            E luttuosi tempi

      10  L’infelice famiglia all’infelice

            Italia accrescerai. Di forti esempi

            Al tuo sangue provvedi. Aure soavi

            L’empio fato interdice

            All’umana virtude,

      15  Nè pura in gracil petto alma si chiude.

               O miseri o codardi

            Figliuoli avrai. Miseri eleggi. Immenso

            Tra fortuna e valor dissidio pose

            Il corrotto costume. Ahi troppo tardi,

      20  E nella sera dell’umane cose,

            Acquista oggi chi nasce il moto e il senso.

            Al ciel ne caglia: a te nel petto sieda

            Questa sovr’ogni cura,

            Che di fortuna amici

      25  Non crescano i tuoi figli, e non di vile

            Timor gioco o di speme: onde felici

            Sarete detti nell’età futura:

            Poichè (nefando stile,

            Di schiatta ignava e finta)

      30  Virtù viva sprezziam, lodiamo estinta.

               Donne, da voi non poco

            La patria aspetta; e non in danno e scorno

            Dell’umana progenie al dolce raggio

            Delle pupille vostre il ferro e il foco

      35  Domar fu dato. A senno vostro il saggio

            E il forte adopra e pensa; e quanto il giorno

            Col divo carro accerchia, a voi s’inchina.

            Ragion di nostra etate

            Io chieggo a voi. La santa

      40  Fiamma di gioventù dunque si spegne

            Per vostra mano? attenuata e franta

            Da voi nostra natura? e le assonate

            Menti, e le voglie indegne,

            E di nervi e di polpe

      45  Scemo il valor natio, son vostre colpe?

               Ad atti egregi è sprone

            Amor, chi ben l’estima, e d’alto affetto

            Maestra è la beltà. D’amor digiuna

            Siede l’alma di quello a cui nel petto

      50  Non si rallegra il cor quando a tenzone

               Scendono i venti, e quando nembi aduna

               L’olimpo, e fiede le montagne il rombo

               Della procella. O spose,

               O verginette, a voi

      55  Chi de’ perigli è schivo, e quei che indegno

            È della patria e che sue brame e suoi

            Volgari affetti in basso loco pose,

            Odio mova e disdegno;

            Se nel femmineo core

      60  D’uomini ardea, non di fanciulle, amore.

               Madri d’imbelle prole

            V’incresca esser nomate. I danni e il pianto

            Della virtude a tollerar s’avvezzi

            La stirpe vostra, e quel che pregia e cole

      65  La vergognosa età, condanni e sprezzi;

            Cresca alla patria, e gli alti gesti, e quanto

            Agli avi suoi deggia la terra impari.

            Qual de’ vetusti eroi

            Tra le memorie e il grido

      70  Crescean di Sparta i figli al greco nome;

            Finchè la sposa giovanetta il fido

            Brando cingeva al caro lato, e poi

            Spandea le negre chiome

            Sul corpo esangue e nudo

      75  Quando e’ reddia nel conservato scudo.

               Virginia, a te la molle

            Gota molcea con le celesti dita

            Beltade onnipossente, e degli alteri

            Disdegni tuoi si sconsolava il folle

      80  Signor di Roma. Eri pur vaga, ed eri

            Nella stagion ch’ai dolci sogni invita,

            Quando il rozzo paterno acciar ti ruppe

            Il bianchissimo petto,

            E all’Erebo scendesti

      85  Volonterosa. A me disfiori e scioglia

            Vecchiezza i membri, o padre; a me s’appresti,

            Dicea, la tomba, anzi che l’empio letto

            Del tiranno m’accoglia.

            E se pur vita e lena

      90  Roma avrà dal mio sangue, e tu mi svena.

               O generosa, ancora

            Che più bello a’ tuoi dì splendesse il sole

            Ch’oggi non fa, pur consolata e paga

            È quella tomba cui di pianto onora

      95  L’alma terra nativa. Ecco alla vaga

            Tua spoglia intorno la romulea prole

            Di nova ira sfavilla. Ecco di polve

            Lorda il tiranno i crini;

            E libertade avvampa

    100  Gli obbliviosi petti; e nella doma

            Terra il marte latino arduo s’accampa

            Dal buio polo ai torridi confini.

            Così l’eterna Roma

            In duri ozi sepolta

    105  Femmineo fato avviva un’altra volta.

IV

ON THE MARRIAGE OF HIS SISTER PAOLINA

               Now you’re abandoning the peace and quiet

            of your parental nest, with its beloved

            ghosts and the old illusion, heaven’s gift,

            that makes this lonely place seem lovely to you,

        5  destiny leads you to the dust and noise

            of life. Learn the shame

            that cruel heaven

            ordained for us, sister:

            that in lamentable times

      10  you shall bear luckless children

            for unlucky Italy.

            Set them a strong example. Fate is heartless

            and denies fair weather

            to human courage,

      15  and a pure heart won’t survive in a weak breast.

               The children that you’ll have will either be

            cowards or unhappy. Let them be unhappy.

            Corruption opened up a yawning chasm

            between character and circumstance.

      20  Alas, a man who’s born today

            learns to act and feel too late,

            and in the evening of human life.

            That is heaven’s doing; but let this concern

            surpass all others: that your children not be raised

      25  as fortune’s friends or playthings

            of base fear or hope.

            For this you’ll be called happy in the future;

            for a lazy and false people

            tend to disdain virtue while it lives

      30  and praise it once it’s gone.

               Women, the fatherland expects

            much from you. And it wasn’t to harm and scorn

            the human race that the loving light of your eyes

            was given the power to tame both iron and fire.

      35  The wise and strong man acts and thinks

            according to your judgment; and everything

            that the sun circles in his heavenly chariot

            inclines to you.

            I ask you to explain our age:

      40  Did you put out youth’s holy fire?

            Have you weakened and debased our character?

            And our sleepy minds and low desires,

            our native strength

            that lack for nerve and fiber—

      45  are these your doing?

               Love, for him who sees it clearly,

            is a spur to noble actions,

            and beauty is the mistress of deep feeling.

            The man whose soul cannot take pleasure

      50  when the winds rage and the sky

            fills up with clouds and thunder strikes

            the hills, has not known love.

            Brides! Young virgins!

            may you despise the man

      55  who fears danger,

            who’s unworthy of the fatherland

            and squandered his desires and vulgar loves

            on worthless trifles.

            If you are women, let your hearts

      60  be warm with love for men and not for boys.

               Don’t be known as mothers of timid children.

            Let your offspring learn to bear the pains

            and sorrows of virtue,

            and condemn and hate

      65  what this shameful age admires.

            May they be brought up for their country and great deeds,

            and learn what their homeland owes their ancestors.

            So the sons of Sparta

            grew up hearing legends

      70  in praise of ancient heroes with Greek names,

            and the young bride belted

            her husband’s trusty sword to his loved side,

            and later spread her jet-black hair

            across his bloodless, naked corpse

      75  when he came home on the shield he’d saved.

               Virginia, all-powerful

            beauty touched your tender cheek

            with her celestial fingers, and your proud refusal

            incensed the insane

      80  ruler of Rome. You were still lovely,

            and in the season that inspires sweet dreams,

            when your father’s cruel blade

            pierced your snowy breast,

            and you went willingly to Erebus.

      85  Father, let age deflower me and loose my limbs;

            prepare the tomb for me, she said,

            rather than that the impious

            tyrant should have me.

            And if Rome may still draw life and breath

      90  from my blood, unvein me.

               Generous one, although the sun

            shone lovelier in your days than it does now,

            still your tomb, which the beloved homeland

            honors with her tears,

      95  is mourned and atoned for. See

            around your lovely corpse the sons of Romulus

            ignited by fresh anger. See

            the tyrant’s mane dragged in the dirt,

            as freedom inspires forgetful hearts,

    100  and in the conquered land

            the cruel Latin god of war

            rules from the dark North to the torrid South.

            So eternal Rome

            entombed in heavy sleep

    105  finds life again thanks to a woman’s death.

V

A UN VINCITORE NEL PALLONE

               Di gloria il viso e la gioconda voce,

            Garzon bennato, apprendi,

            E quanto al femminile ozio sovrasti

            La sudata virtude. Attendi attendi,

        5  Magnanimo campion (s’alla veloce

            Piena degli anni il tuo valor contrasti

            La spoglia di tuo nome), attendi e il core

            Movi ad alto desio. Te l’echeggiante

            Arena e il circo, e te fremendo appella

      10  Ai fatti illustri il popolar favore;

            Te rigoglioso dell’età novella

            Oggi la patria cara

            Gli antichi esempi a rinnovar prepara.

               Del barbarico sangue in Maratona

      15  Non colorò la destra

            Quei che gli atleti ignudi e il campo eleo,

            Che stupido mirò l’ardua palestra,

            Nè la palma beata e la corona

            D’emula brama il punse. E nell’Alfeo

      20  Forse le chiome polverose e i fianchi

            Delle cavalle vincitrici asterse

            Tal che le greche insegne e il greco acciaro

            Guidò de’ Medi fuggitivi e stanchi

            Nelle pallide torme; onde sonaro

      25  Di sconsolato grido

            L’alto sen dell’Eufrate e il servo lido.

            Vano dirai quel che disserra e scote Della virtù nativa

            Le riposte faville? e che del fioco

      30  Spirto vital negli egri petti avviva

            Il caduco fervor? Le meste rote

            Da poi che Febo instiga, altro che gioco

            Son l’opre de’ mortali? ed è men vano

            Della menzogna il vero? A noi di lieti

      35  Inganni e di felici ombre soccorse

            Natura stessa: e là dove l’insano

            Costume ai forti errori esca non porse,

            Negli ozi oscuri e nudi

            Mutò la gente i gloriosi studi.

      40     Tempo forse verrà ch’alle ruine

            Delle italiche moli

            Insultino gli armenti, e che l’aratro

            Sentano i sette colli; e pochi Soli

            Forse fien volti, e le città latine

      45  Abiterà la cauta volpe, e l’atro

            Bosco mormorerà fra le alte mura;

            Se la funesta delle patrie cose

            Obblivion dalle perverse menti

            Non isgombrano i fati, e la matura

      50  Clade non torce dalle abbiette genti

            Il ciel fatto cortese

            Dal rimembrar delle passate imprese.

               Alla patria infelice, o buon garzone,

            Sopravviver ti doglia.

      55  Chiaro per lei stato saresti allora

            Che del serto fulgea, di ch’ella è spoglia,

            Nostra colpa e fatal. Passò stagione;

            Che nullo di tal madre oggi s’onora:

            Ma per te stesso al polo ergi la mente.

      60  Nostra vita a che val? solo a spregiarla:

            Beata allor che ne’ perigli avvolta,

            Se stessa obblia, nè delle putri e lente

            Ore il danno misura e il flutto ascolta;

            Beata allor che il piede

      65  Spinto al varco leteo, più grata riede.

V

TO A CHAMPION AT PALLONE

               Learn the look and happy sound of glory,

            noble youth, and how much hard-won virtue

            has over girlish laziness.

            Hear, great-hearted champion

        5  (if your courage can protect your name

            from the threatening headlong flood of time),

            hear, and dedicate your heart to high ambition.

            The echoing arena and the stadium

            and the people’s thundering adulation

      10  urge you on to brilliant feats.

            Today your beloved fatherland

            calls you in the prime of youth

            to reenact the great deeds of the past.

               The man who wasn’t moved at seeing

      15  the nude athletes on the field at Elis

            or in its intimidating ring,

            was not the man

            who stained his hand

            with barbarian blood at Marathon,

      20  or coveted the sacred palm or crown.

            But he who wetted down the dusty manes and flanks

            of his victorious mares in the Alpheus

            may have raised Greek banners and Greek swords

            against the pale swarms of exhausted, fleeing Medes,

      25  whose desperate cries were heard across

            the deep Euphrates and its conquered shore.

            Will you say what reignites

            the scattered embers of our innate power,

            what rouses the flickering fervor

      30  in our faint hearts, is useless? From the moment

            Phoebus started spinning his sad wheels,

            have the works of men been anything but a game?

            And is the truth less meaningless than lies?

            Nature herself

      35  fed us on sweet illusions and happy phantoms:

            and, where unhealthy habits

            didn’t foment grandiose illusions,

            the people favored squalid laziness

            over glorious accomplishments.

      40     Maybe the time will come when herds

            will browse the ruins of Italian palaces

            and the seven hills will feel the plow.

            In a few years the wily vixen

            may live in Latin cities and dark forests

      45  will murmur within their high walls,

            if the fates do not erase

            fatal forgetting of what’s patriotic

            from corrupt minds,

            and heaven, turned benevolent again

      50  recalling the achievements of the past,

            won’t rescue an abject people

            from imminent destruction.

               Noble youth, may it be painful to you

            to live on after your unhappy country.

      55  You would have been great for her then,

            when the crown shone that she’s missing now,

            to our shame, and fate’s. The times have changed;

            for no son of this mother is honored now.

            Yet think of heaven, for your own sake.

      60  What is our life worth? Nothing but disdain.

            Blessed then, when, danger all around,

            it forgets itself and doesn’t count the loss

            of the slow, stagnant hours, or hear them ebb;

            blessed when, having grazed the shores of Lethe,

      65  it returns more cherished.

VI

BRUTO MINORE

               Poi che divelta, nella tracia polve

            Giacque ruina immensa

            L’italica virtute, onde alle valli

            D’Esperia verde, e al tiberino lido,

        5  Il calpestio de’ barbari cavalli

            Prepara il fato, e dalle selve ignude

            Cui l’Orsa algida preme,

            A spezzar le romane inclite mura

            Chiama i gotici brandi;

      10  Sudato, e molle di fraterno sangue,

            Bruto per l’atra notte in erma sede,

            Fermo già di morir, gl’inesorandi

            Numi e l’averno accusa,

            E di feroci note

      15  Invan la sonnolenta aura percote.

               Stolta virtù, le cave nebbie, i campi

            Dell’inquiete larve

            Son le tue scole, e ti si volge a tergo

            Il pentimento. A voi, marmorei numi,

      20  (Se numi avete in Flegetonte albergo

            O su le nubi) a voi ludibrio e scherno

            È la prole infelice

            A cui templi chiedeste, e frodolenta

            Legge al mortale insulta.

      25  Dunque tanto i celesti odii commove

            La terrena pietà? dunque degli empi

            Siedi, Giove, a tutela? e quando esulta

            Per l’aere il nembo, e quando

            Il tuon rapido spingi,

      30  Ne’ giusti e pii la sacra fiamma stringi?

               Preme il destino invitto e la ferrata

            Necessità gl’infermi

            Schiavi di morte: e se a cessar non vale

            Gli oltraggi lor, de’ necessarii danni

      35  Si consola il plebeo. Men duro è il male

            Che riparo non ha? dolor non sente

            Chi di speranza è nudo?

            Guerra mortale, eterna, o fato indegno,

            Teco il prode guerreggia,

      40  Di cedere inesperto; e la tiranna

            Tua destra, allor che vincitrice il grava,

            Indomito scrollando si pompeggia,

            Quando nell’alto lato

            L’amaro ferro intride,

      45  E maligno alle nere ombre sorride.

               Spiace agli Dei chi violento irrompe

            Nel Tartaro. Non fora

            Tanto valor ne’ molli eterni petti.

            Forse i travagli nostri, e forse il cielo

      50  I casi acerbi e gl’infelici affetti

            Giocondo agli ozi suoi spettacol pose?

            Non fra sciagure e colpe,

            Ma libera ne’ boschi e pura etade

            Natura a noi prescrisse,

      55  Reina un tempo e Diva. Or poi ch’a terra

            Sparse i regni beati empio costume,

            E il viver macro ad altre leggi addisse;

            Quando gl’infausti giorni

            Virile alma ricusa,

      60  Riede natura, e il non suo dardo accusa?

               Di colpa ignare e de’ lor proprii danni

            Le fortunate belve

            Serena adduce al non previsto passo

            La tarda età. Ma se spezzar la fronte

      65  Ne’ rudi tronchi, o da montano sasso

            Dare al vento precipiti le membra,

            Lor suadesse affanno;

            Al misero desio nulla contesa

            Legge arcana farebbe

      70  O tenebroso ingegno. A voi, fra quante

            Stirpi il cielo avvivò, soli fra tutte,

            Figli di Prometeo, la vita increbbe;

            A voi le morte ripe,

            Se il fato ignavo pende,

      75  Soli, o miseri, a voi Giove contende.

               E tu dal mar cui nostro sangue irriga,

            Candida luna, sorgi,

            E l’inquieta notte e la funesta

            All’ausonio valor campagna esplori.

      80  Cognati petti il vincitor calpesta,

            Fremono i poggi, dalle somme vette

            Roma antica ruina;

            Tu sì placida sei? Tu la nascente

            Lavinia prole, e gli anni

      85  Lieti vedesti, e i memorandi allori;

            E tu su l’alpe l’immutato raggio

            Tacita verserai quando ne’ danni

            Del servo italo nome,

            Sotto barbaro piede

      90  Rintronerà quella solinga sede.

              Ecco tra nudi sassi o in verde ramo

            E la fera e l’augello,

            Del consueto obblio gravido il petto,

            L’alta ruina ignora e le mutate

      95  Sorti del mondo: e come prima il tetto

            Rosseggerà del villanello industre,

            Al mattutino canto

            Quel desterà le valli, e per le balze

            Quella l’inferma plebe

    100  Agiterà delle minori belve.

            Oh casi! oh gener vano! abbietta parte

            Siam delle cose; e non le tinte glebe,

            Non gli ululati spechi

            Turbò nostra sciagura,

    105  Nè scolorò le stelle umana cura.

               Non io d’Olimpo o di Cocito i sordi

            Regi, o la terra indegna,

            E non la notte moribondo appello;

            Non te, dell’atra morte ultimo raggio,

    110  Conscia futura età. Sdegnoso avello

            Placàr singulti, ornàr parole e doni

            Di vil caterva? In peggio

            Precipitano i tempi; e mal s’affida

            A putridi nepoti

    115  L’onor d’egregie menti e la suprema

            De’ miseri vendetta. A me dintorno

            Le penne il bruno augello avido roti;

            Prema la fera, e il nembo

            Tratti l’ignota spoglia;

    120  E l’aura il nome e la memoria accoglia.

VI

BRUTUS

               Now that Italian valor lies uprooted,

            one huge ruin in the dust of Thrace,

            where fate is readying barbarian horses

            to trample the green valleys of Hesperia

        5  and Tiber’s shore,

            exhorting Gothic swordsmen

            from the wild forests

            lorded over by the freezing Bear

            to breach the venerable walls of Rome,

      10  Brutus, sweating, soaked in brothers’ blood,

            sitting the dark night out alone

            prepared to die,

            curses the implacable gods and hell itself,

            and assails the sleeping air in vain

      15  with savage cries:

               Foolish valor, empty mists

            and the fields of restless ghosts

            are where you dwell,

            and remorse dogs your footsteps. Gods of stone,

      20  (whether you live by Phlegethon

            or in the clouds), you mock and scorn

            the unhappy race from whom

            you exacted temples and a fraudulent

            law injurious to mortals.

      25  So, is this how piety on earth

            arouses heaven’s rage? Do you sit there, Jupiter,

            and protect the blasphemous? And when the storm cloud

            rages in the air and you let loose

            swift thunder, do you brandish sacred fire

      30  against the just and faithful?

               Omnipotent fate and iron necessity

            oppress the sickly slaves of death:

            and, without a means

            to end their suffering, the people

      35  seek comfort for the pain they can’t avoid.

            Is an incurable disease any less cruel?

            Does a man stripped of hope not suffer torment?

            The brave man, who’s incapable of surrender,

            fights you without quarter to the death,

      40  unworthy fate.

            And when your tyrant right hand pins him,

            undefeated he exults

            as the harsh blade

            slices deep into his side,

      45  and bitterly he smiles at the black shades.

               Breaking violently into Tartarus

            is displeasing to the Gods. No such power should be,

            according to those tender deathless hearts.

            Did heaven make a happy spectacle

      50  of our unhappiness, our cruel fates

            and miserable loves, for their amusement?

            Nature, Queen and Goddess once, ordained

            a life for us that wasn’t suffering

            and guilt, but free and pure in the forests.

      55  Now, since sacrilegious ways

            have destroyed the blessed realms on earth

            and subjected meager life to other laws,

            when a manly soul rejects his luckless life,

            does nature rear up and denounce

      60  the weapon that’s not hers?

               Serene old age delivers

            the lucky animals, unaware of sin

            and their own suffering, to an end

            they can’t foresee. And yet if torment

      65  made them beat their foreheads on rough trees

            or toss their bodies headlong to the winds

            from a mountain cliff,

            no arcane law or shadowy idea

            would make objection

      70  to their miserable wish.

            Only for you, of all the progeny

            that heaven gave breath to, children of Prometheus,

            was life made unendurable.

            Only you, unhappy ones, if death comes late,

      75  does Jove bar from the fatal shore.

               And you, bright moon, you rise

            out of the sea our blood turns red,

            and scan the unquiet night and the field

            that proved fatal to Italian courage.

      80  The victor tramples on his brothers’ bodies,

            the hillsides echo, ancient Rome

            crumbles from her heights—

            are you so calm?

            You saw Lavinia’s children born,

      85  their happy years and memorable victories,

            and still you’ll pour your changeless light

            silent on the mountain peaks

            when this lonely place will echo

            under the barbarian’s heel,

      90  staining the name of enslaved Italy.

               Here, among bare rocks or on green branches,

            beast and bird, breasts heavy

            with their usual oblivion,

            know nothing of the great decay

      95  and changed fate of the world:

            and once the toiling farmer’s roof turns red,

            the one will wake

            the valleys with its morning song

            while on the heights the other will go chasing

    100  the helpless multitude of little creatures.

            Oh fates! Oh worthless race! We are an abject

            part of things, and neither bloodstained earth

            nor the caves resounding with our cries

            were troubled by our torment;

    105  nor did human pain discolor the stars.

               I call not on the heedless kings

            of Olympus or Cocytus,

            nor on unworthy earth, nor night before I die;

            and not you, conscious future generation,

    110  last hope of lightless death. Will tears appease

            a scornful man’s tomb? Will the vile crowd’s

            praise and offerings make it beautiful?

            The times are swiftly worsening,

            and honoring great minds

    115  and the last vindication of the suffering

            are wrongly left to our corrupt descendants.

            Let the voracious bird flap his black wings

            above me, let the beast have at me,

            and the shades carry off my nameless corpse,

    120  and the wind take my name and memory.

VII

ALLA PRIMAVERA,
O DELLE FAVOLE ANTICHE

               Perchè i celesti danni

            Ristori il sole, e perchè l’aure inferme

            Zefiro avvivi, onde fugata e sparta

            Delle nubi la grave ombra s’avvalla;

        5  Credano il petto inerme

            Gli augelli al vento, e la diurna luce

            Novo d’amor desio, nova speranza

            Ne’ penetrati boschi e fra le sciolte

            Pruine induca alle commosse belve;

      10  Forse alle stanche e nel dolor sepolte

            Umane menti riede

            La bella età, cui la sciagura e l’atra

            Face del ver consunse

            Innanzi tempo? Ottenebrati e spenti

      15  Di febo i raggi al misero non sono

            In sempiterno? ed anco,

            Primavera odorata, inspiri e tenti

            Questo gelido cor, questo ch’amara

            Nel fior degli anni suoi vecchiezza impara?

      20     Vivi tu, vivi, o santa

            Natura? vivi e il dissueto orecchio

            Della materna voce il suono accoglie?

            Già di candide ninfe i rivi albergo,

            Placido albergo e specchio

      25  Furo i liquidi fonti. Arcane danze

            D’immortal piede i ruinosi gioghi

            Scossero e l’ardue selve (oggi romito

            Nido de’ venti): e il pastorel ch’all’ombre

            Meridiane incerte ed al fiorito

      30  Margo adducea de’ fiumi

            Le sitibonde agnelle, arguto carme

            Sonar d’agresti Pani

            Udì lungo le ripe; e tremar l’onda

            Vide, e stupì, che non palese al guardo

      35  La faretrata Diva

            Scendea ne’ caldi flutti, e dall’immonda

            Polve tergea della sanguigna caccia

            Il niveo lato e le verginee braccia.

               Vissero i fiori e l’erbe,

      40  Vissero i boschi un dì. Conscie le molli

            Aure, le nubi e la titania lampa

            Fur dell’umana gente, allor che ignuda

            Te per le piagge e i colli,

            Ciprigna luce, alla deserta notte

      45  Con gli occhi intenti il viator seguendo,

            Te compagna alla via, te de’ mortali

            Pensosa immaginò. Che se gl’impuri

            Cittadini consorzi e le fatali

            Ire fuggendo e l’onte,

      50  Gl’ispidi tronchi al petto altri nell’ime

            Selve remoto accolse,

            Viva fiamma agitar l’esangui vene,

            Spirar le foglie, e palpitar segreta

            Nel doloroso amplesso

      55  Dafne o la mesta Filli, o di Climene

            Pianger credè la sconsolata prole

            Quel che sommerse in Eridano il sole.

               Nè dell’umano affanno,

            Rigide balze, i luttuosi accenti

      60  Voi negletti ferìr mentre le vostre

            Paurose latebre Eco solinga,

            Non vano error de’ venti,

            Ma di ninfa abitò misero spirto,

            Cui grave amor, cui duro fato escluse

      65  Delle tenere membra. Ella per grotte,

            Per nudi scogli e desolati alberghi,

            Le non ignote ambasce e l’alte e rotte

            Nostre querele al curvo

            Etra insegnava. E te d’umani eventi

      70  Disse la fama esperto,

            Musico augel che tra chiomato bosco

            Or vieni il rinascente anno cantando,

            E lamentar nell’alto

            Ozio de’ campi, all’aer muto e fosco,

      75  Antichi danni e scellerato scorno,

            E d’ira e di pietà pallido il giorno.

               Ma non cognato al nostro

            Il gener tuo; quelle tue varie note

            Dolor non forma, e te di colpa ignudo,

      80  Men caro assai la bruna valle asconde.

            Ahi ahi, poscia che vote

            Son le stanze d’Olimpo, e cieco il tuono

            Per l’atre nubi e le montagne errando,

            Gl’iniqui petti e gl’innocenti a paro

      85  In freddo orror dissolve; e poi ch’estrano

            Il suol nativo, e di sua prole ignaro

            Le meste anime educa;

            Tu le cure infelici e i fati indegni

            Tu de’ mortali ascolta,

      90  Vaga natura, e la favilla antica

            Rendi allo spirto mio; se tu pur vivi,

            E se de’ nostri affanni

            Cosa veruna in ciel, se nell’aprica

            Terra s’alberga o nell’equoreo seno,

      95  Pietosa no, ma spettatrice almeno.

VII

TO SPRING,
OR ON THE ANCIENT MYTHS

               Now that the sun is working to repair

            the damage in the sky,

            a breeze is freshening the sickly air,

            and the clouds’ dark shadow, chased away, dispersed,

        5  fades in the valley; now the birds

            are trusting their defenseless breasts

            to the wind, and daylight brings

            new desire for love, new hope

            to the dappled woods and cattle

      10  restless amid the melting frosts;

            can that sweet time return perhaps

            for weary human minds shut up in sadness,

            the time calamity and the dark fire

            of knowledge ended too soon?

      15  Is Apollo’s light not hidden and gone forever

            for the unhappy? And, scented Spring,

            do you still inspire and tempt this frozen heart,

            this heart that learns of bitter age

            in the very prime of life?

      20     Are you living, holy Nature?

            Are you alive; is it your mother’s voice

            our unaccustomed ear is welcoming?

            Bright nymphs walked on your shores once,

            your clear springs were their tranquil home and mirror.

      25  Hidden dancing of immortal feet

            trampled the ruined heights

            and in the impenetrable forests

            (distant nest for winds today). And the shepherd boy

            who led his thirsty lambs among the fleeting

      30  noontime shadows and the flowering banks

            could hear the shrill of woodland Pans

            piping on the shores

            and saw the water’s surface

            shimmer and, in amazement,

      35  watched the arrow-bearing Goddess     [Diana]

            enter the warm waves unrecognized

            to wash the foul dust of the bloody hunt

            from her snow-white sides and virgin arms.

               Flowers and herbs bloomed once,

      40  the woods were green. The gentle breeze,

            the clouds, and the Titanic sun

            knew man, when the traveler

            followed you intently as he walked,

            pure Cyprian moonlight, in the desert night     [Venus]

      45  by shore and over hill, and thought of you

            as his companion, watching over mortals.

            Or if someone, fleeing corrupt crowds

            and the city’s murderous shame and rage,

            clung to shaggy trees in the dark forest,

      50  he could feel a living flame

            burn in their exhausted veins,

            the leaves themselves breathed

            as Daphne or sad Phyllis quivered

            hidden in his sorrowing embrace,

      55  while Clymene’s offspring

            mourned unconsoled

            for him who sank the sun in Eridanos.     [Phaeton]

               Nor did the mournful sound of human suffering

            strike you unheard, harsh cliffs,

      60  while lonely Echo

            was living in your fearful caves

            not as an empty, wandering wind

            but as the sad spirit of a nymph,

            whom unrequited love and cruel fate

      65  had severed from her tender body.

            In grottoes, on bare rocks, in lonely places,

            she repeated her familiar woes

            and our strident, broken-voiced laments

            to the overarching sky.

      70  And fame said you were versed in human doings,

            musical bird who in the leafy grove     [the nightingale]

            now comes to sing of the reviving year,

            and mourn in the deep languor of the fields

            and in the heavy, silent, still-dark air,

      75  ancient wrong and criminal disgrace,

            and the daylight, dimmed by rage and pity.

               But your race is not the same as ours.

            Suffering doesn’t shape your changing notes,

            and hidden in the dark valley, you sound guiltless

      80  and therefore that much less beloved by us.

            Alas, for the halls of Olympus

            are abandoned, and blind thunder

            echoes in the black clouds and the mountains,

            shattering evil and pure hearts alike

      85  with icy terror, while our native land,

            alien and ignorant of its offspring,

            nurtures sad souls. Hear the troubles

            and unworthy fates of mortals,

            lovely Nature, and imbue my spirit

      90  with the old spark—

            if you do live,

            if there is anything

            in heaven, on sunlit earth,

            or on the ocean’s breast that, if not pitying,

      95  can testify at least to what we suffer.

VIII

INNO AI PATRIARCHI,
O DE’ PRINCIPII DEL GENERE UMANO

               E voi de’ figli dolorosi il canto,

            Voi dell’umana prole incliti padri,

            Lodando ridirà; molto all’eterno

            Degli astri agitator più cari, e molto

        5  Di noi men lacrimabili nell’alma

            Luce prodotti. Immedicati affanni

            Al misero mortal, nascere al pianto,

            E dell’etereo lume assai più dolci

            Sortir l’opaca tomba e il fato estremo,

      10  Non la pietà, non la diritta impose

            Legge del cielo. E se di vostro antico

            Error che l’uman seme alla tiranna

            Possa de’ morbi e di sciagura offerse,

            Grido antico ragiona, altre più dire

      15  Colpe de’ figli, e irrequieto ingegno

            E demenza maggior l’offeso Olimpo

            N’armaro incontra, e la negletta mano

            Dell’altrice natura; onde la viva

            Fiamma n’increbbe, e detestato il parto

      20  Fu del grembo materno, e violento

            Emerse il disperato Erebo in terra.

               Tu primo il giorno, e le purpuree faci

            Delle rotanti sfere, e la novella

            Prole de’ campi, o duce antico e padre

      25  Dell’umana famiglia, e tu l’errante

            Per li giovani prati aura contempli:

            Quando le rupi e le deserte valli

            Precipite l’alpina onda feria

            D’inudito fragor; quando gli ameni

      30  Futuri seggi di lodate genti

            E di cittadi romorose, ignota

            Pace regnava; e gl’inarati colli

            Solo e muto ascendea l’aprico raggio

            Di febo e l’aurea luna. Oh fortunata,

      35  Di colpe ignara e di lugubri eventi,

            Erma terrena sede! Oh quanto affanno

            Al gener tuo, padre infelice, e quale

            D’amarissimi casi ordine immenso

            Preparano i destini! Ecco di sangue

      40  Gli avari colti e di fraterno scempio

            Furor novello incesta, e le nefande

            Ali di morte il divo etere impara.

            Trepido, errante il fratricida, e l’ombre

            Solitarie fuggendo e la secreta

      45  Nelle profonde selve ira de’ venti,

            Primo i civili tetti, albergo e regno

            Alle macere cure, innalza; e primo

            Il disperato pentimento i ciechi

            Mortali egro, anelante, aduna e stringe

      50  Ne’ consorti ricetti: onde negata

            L’improba mano al curvo aratro, e vili

            Fur gli agresti sudori; ozio le soglie

            Scellerate occupò, ne’ corpi inerti

            Domo il vigor natio, languide, ignave

      55  Giacquer le menti; e servitù le imbelli

            Umane vite, ultimo danno, accolse.

               E tu dall’etra infesto e dal mugghiante

            Su i nubiferi gioghi equoreo flutto

            Scampi l’iniquo germe, o tu cui prima

      60  Dall’aer cieco e da’ natanti poggi

            Segno arrecò d’instaurata spene

            La candida colomba, e delle antiche

            Nubi l’occiduo Sol naufrago uscendo,

            L’atro polo di vaga iri dipinse.

      65  Riede alla terra, e il crudo affetto e gli empi

            Studi rinnova e le seguaci ambasce

            La riparata gente. Agl’inaccessi

            Regni del mar vendicatore illude

            Profana destra, e la sciagura e il pianto

      70  A novi liti e nove stelle insegna.

               Or te, padre de’ pii, te giusto e forte,

            E di tuo seme i generosi alunni

            Medita il petto mio. Dirò siccome

            Sedente, oscuro, in sul meriggio all’ombre

      75  Del riposato albergo, appo le molli

            Rive del gregge tuo nutrici e sedi,

            Te de’ celesti peregrini occulte

            Beàr l’eteree menti; e quale, o figlio

            Della saggia Rebecca, in su la sera,

      80  Presso al rustico pozzo e nella dolce

            Di pastori e di lieti ozi frequente

            Aranitica valle, amor ti punse

            Della vezzosa Labanide: invitto

            Amor, ch’a lunghi esigli e lunghi affanni

      85  E di servaggio all’odiata soma

            Volenteroso il prode animo addisse.

               Fu certo, fu (nè d’error vano e d’ombra

            L’aonio canto e della fama il grido

            Pasce l’avida plebe) amica un tempo

      90  Al sangue nostro e dilettosa e cara

            Questa misera piaggia, ed aurea corse

            Nostra caduca età. Non che di latte

            Onda rigasse intemerata il fianco

            Delle balze materne, o con le greggi

      95  Mista la tigre ai consueti ovili

            Nè guidasse per gioco i lupi al fonte

            Il pastorel; ma di suo fato ignara

            E degli affanni suoi, vota d’affanno

            Visse l’umana stirpe; alle secrete

    100  Leggi del cielo e di natura indutto

            Valse l’ameno error, le fraudi, il molle

            Pristino velo; e di sperar contenta

            Nostra placida nave in porto ascese.

               Tal fra le vaste californie selve

    105  Nasce beata prole, a cui non sugge

            Pallida cura il petto, a cui le membra

            Fera tabe non doma; e vitto il bosco,

            Nidi l’intima rupe, onde ministra

            L’irrigua valle, inopinato il giorno

    110  Dell’atra morte incombe. Oh contra il nostro

            Scellerato ardimento inermi regni

            Della saggia natura! I lidi e gli antri

            E le quiete selve apre l’invitto

            Nostro furor; le violate genti

    115  Al peregrino affanno, agl’ignorati

            Desiri educa; e la fugace, ignuda

            Felicità per l’imo sole incalza.

VIII

HYMN TO THE PATRIARCHS,
OR ON THE ORIGINS OF THE HUMAN RACE

               Your grieving sons will sing in praise of you

            again, illustrious fathers of the race;

            will sing in praise of you, so much more loved

            than we are by the stars’ eternal mover,

        5  and born into nurturing daylight

            with far less cause for mourning. It wasn’t piety

            or the just law of heaven that ordained

            incurable pain for miserable mortals:

            to be born to weep, and have

      10  the dark tomb and death seem so much gentler

            than daylight. And if long tradition

            tells of your old transgression that betrayed

            humans to the tyrannizing power

            of illness and disaster, your children’s other,

      15  far worse failings, restlessness of mind

            and greater madness, armed offended Olympus

            and the neglected hand of Mother Nature

            against us; till the flame of life itself

            became inimical, and being born

      20  from a mother’s womb was hateful,

            and violent, hopeless Erebus appeared on earth.

               You, ancient guide and father     [Adam]

            of the human family, were the first to see the day,

            the purple fires of the revolving stars,

      25  the newborn flowering fields,

            the wind that blows across the freshened meadows,

            when the cascading alpine waters

            struck the cliffs and the unlived-in valleys

            with unheard sound; when unheard-of peace

      30  reigned in the pleasing future habitats

            of happy peoples and their noisy cities,

            when, silent and alone,

            Phoebus’s brilliant light and the gold moon

            climbed the unplowed hills.

      35  Oh blessed, gentle home on earth,

            unaware of sin and tragedy! Oh, how much pain

            does destiny imagine for your offspring,

            unhappy father, what a vast array

            of bitterness! See, new madness stains

      40  the parched fields with the blood

            of a brother’s murder, and the holy air     [Cain, murderer of Abel]

            knows the abominable wings of death.

            Wandering in fear, the fratricide,

            fleeing lonely shadows and the hidden winds

      45  that rage deep in the forest,

            builds the first houses in the city, home and realm

            of gnawing worry; and for the first time

            desperate repentance, gasping, miserable,

            gathers and pens blind mortals up

      50  in hiding together:

            so evil hands shunned the curved plow

            and farmwork was deemed inferior;

            laziness invaded corrupt families; minds decayed,

            sluggish in torpid bodies, their native strength

      55  gone slack; and slavery, the worst of evils,

            became the rule for cowardly human life.

               But you protect your wicked race     [Noah]

            from the angry sky and roaring ocean flood

            that drowned the cloud-supporting peaks, you to whom

      60  the white dove brought a first sign of new hope

            out of the blind air and the swimming hills,

            and the sunken setting Sun,

            emerging from the old clouds,

            paints the black sky bright with rainbows.

      65  The rescued race returns to earth,

            their sad desires and impious ways,

            and their attendant misery.

            A profane hand menaces unconquered lands

            beyond the jealous sea and teaches

      70  crimes and tears to new shores and new stars.

               My heart is meditating on you now,

            father of the faithful, just and strong,     [Abraham]

            and on your brave descendants. I shall tell

            how, as you sat alone at sunset in the shade

      75  of your peaceful house, along the gentle banks

            that fed and rested your flock,

            heaven’s holy pilgrims in disguise

            blessed you; also how,

            O son of wise Rebecca, in the evening,     [Jacob, son of Isaac]

      80  beside the well in the sweet Haran valley,

            home to shepherds and delightful ease,

            love for Laban’s fetching daughter pierced you:     [Rachel]

            unvanquished love, which bound your noble soul

            to exile and long labor

      85  and voluntary servitude

            under the hated yoke.

               Surely once this miserable place

            was friendly to our race (heroic song and story

            can’t satisfy an avid people

      90  with empty falsehood and obscurity);

            this place was loved and lovely,

            and our short life was golden.

            Not that an unsullied stream of milk

            carved the flanks of the maternal hills

      95  it flowed from, or that the shepherd led

            the tiger with his flock to their usual fold,

            or led wolves cavorting to the fountain;

            but the human race lived ignorant

            of its fate and troubles then,

    100  free of sadness; sweet illusions,

            fantasies, the gentle, pristine veil possessed the power

            to cloak the hidden laws of heaven and nature;

            and happy in hope our calm ship came to port.

               So in the boundless California forests

    105  a blessed race is born, whose breast

            is never nursed by pallid care, whose body

            implacable disease does not destroy;

            and with the woods for food, the hidden crags for nests,

            and the irrigated valley giving water,

    110  the day of dark death hangs over them unseen.

            Oh kingdoms of wise nature, undefended

            from our evil greed! Our boundless rage

            storms her shores and caves and peaceful forests,

            drives her assaulted natives to strange labor

    115  and desires they never knew,

            and hunts down fleeting, fragile happiness

            till the sun sets.

IX

ULTIMO CANTO DI SAFFO

               Placida notte, e verecondo raggio

            Della cadente luna; e tu che spunti

            Fra la tacita selva in su la rupe,

            Nunzio del giorno; oh dilettose e care

        5  Mentre ignote mi fur l’erinni e il fato,

            Sembianze agli occhi miei; già non arride

            Spettacol molle ai disperati affetti.

            Noi l’insueto allor gaudio ravviva

            Quando per l’etra liquido si volve

      10  E per li campi trepidanti il flutto

            Polveroso de’ Noti, e quando il carro,

            Grave carro di Giove a noi sul capo,

            Tonando, il tenebroso aere divide.

            Noi per le balze e le profonde valli

      15  Natar giova tra’ nembi, e noi la vasta

            Fuga de’ greggi sbigottiti, o d’alto

            Fiume alla dubbia sponda

            Il suono e la vittrice ira dell’onda.

               Bello il tuo manto, o divo cielo, e bella

      20  Sei tu, rorida terra. Ahi di cotesta

            Infinita beltà parte nessuna

            Alla misera Saffo i numi e l’empia

            Sorte non fenno. A’ tuoi superbi regni

            Vile, o natura, e grave ospite addetta,

      25  E dispregiata amante, alle vezzose

            Tue forme il core e le pupille invano

            Supplichevole intendo. A me non ride

            L’aprico margo, e dall’eterea porta

            Il mattutino albor; me non il canto

      30  De’ colorati augelli, e non de’ faggi

            Il murmure saluta: e dove all’ombra

            Degl’inchinati salici dispiega

            Candido rivo il puro seno, al mio

            Lubrico piè le flessuose linfe

      35  Disdegnando sottragge,

            E preme in fuga l’odorate spiagge.

               Qual fallo mai, qual sì nefando eccesso

            Macchiommi anzi il natale, onde sì torv

            Il ciel mi fosse e di fortuna il volto?

      40  In che peccai bambina, allor che ignara

            Di misfatto è la vita, onde poi scemo

            Di giovanezza, e disfiorato, al fuso

            Dell’indomita Parca si volvesse

            Il ferrigno mio stame? Incaute voci

      45  Spande il tuo labbro: i destinati eventi

            Move arcano consiglio. Arcano è tutto,

            Fuor che il nostro dolor. Negletta prole

            Nascemmo al pianto, e la ragione in grembo

            De’ celesti si posa. Oh cure, oh speme

      50  De’ più verd’anni! Alle sembianze il Padre,

            Alle amene sembianze eterno regno

            Diè nelle genti; e per virili imprese,

            Per dotta lira o canto,

            Virtù non luce in disadorno ammanto.

      55     Morremo. Il velo indegno a terra sparto,

            Rifuggirà l’ignudo animo a Dite,

            E il crudo fallo emenderà del cieco

            Dispensator de’ casi. E tu cui lungo

            Amore indarno, e lunga fede, e vano

      60  D’implacato desio furor mi strinse,

            Vivi felice, se felice in terra

            Visse nato mortal. Me non asperse

            Del soave licor del doglio avaro

            Giove, poi che perìr gl’inganni e il sogno

      65  Della mia fanciullezza. Ogni più lieto

            Giorno di nostra età primo s’invola.

            Sottentra il morbo, e la vecchiezza, e l’ombra

            Della gelida morte. Ecco di tante

            Sperate palme e dilettosi errori,

      70  Il Tartaro m’avanza; e il prode ingegno

            Han la tenaria Diva,

            E l’atra notte, e la silente riva.

IX

SAPPHO’S LAST SONG

               Tranquil night, and bashful light

            of the fading moon, and you, emerging

            from the quiet woods above the cliff,

            herald of day; oh you were joyous, much-loved

        5  sights when I was ignorant of torment

            and of fate, but now no gentle scene

            comforts my hopelessness.

            Unfamiliar joy excites us

            when the dust-filled tide of winds

      10  swirls in the bright sky and across

            the waving fields, and overhead

            Jove’s chariot, Jove’s heavy chariot,

            rumbles, shattering the darkened air.

            We like swimming in the clouds,

      15  along the high cliffs and deep in the valleys,

            we like the scattering of the nervous flocks,

            and the roaring anger of the rising

            river water from the threatened bank.

               Your cloak is lovely, divine heaven,

      20  and you are lovely also, dewy earth.

            Alas, the gods and pitiless fate

            saved none of this endless beauty for poor Sappho.

            In your proud kingdoms I am worthless, Nature,

            an uninvited guest, an unloved lover.

      25  My heart and eyes address your gracious form

            in hopeless supplication. The sunlit shore,

            or the bright dawn out of heaven’s gate,

            doesn’t smile on me. No brilliant birdsong

            or beeches’ murmur

      30  greets me:

            and where a bright brook

            shows its pure white curve

            in the shadow of the bending willows,

            its lilting water

      35  shrinks from my unsteady foot,

            running ahead to lap the fragrant bank.

               What failing was it, what heinous excess

            marked me before my birth, so heaven

            and the face of fortune were so stern with me?

      40  How did I sin as a child, when we can’t know

            what evil is, so that later, my youth gone

            and out of flower, my iron-colored thread

            got wound on the spindle of unyielding Fate?

            Your lips spill foolish words: mysterious wisdom

      45  determines destined things.

            All is mystery except our pain.

            Neglected children, we were born to weep,

            and the cause lies in the lap of the gods.

            Oh cares, oh hope of our greenest years.

      50  The Father granted

            eternal power over men to looks,

            to beauty; and, for doing manly deeds,

            for learned poetry or song,

            genius won’t shine in an unlovely form.

      55     We’re going to die. Once the unworthy veil

            falls to the ground, the naked soul will fly

            to Dis again, and right the cruel wrong

            of the blind decider of fates. And you,

            for whom long hopeless love, and faithfulness,

      60  and hopeless, raging, unfulfilled desire

            held me hostage, be happy on earth,

            if any who are born to die live happy.

            Zeus anointed me with none of that sweet liquor

            from his miser’s jar, once the illusions

      65  and the dream of childhood died. The happiest day

            of life is first to fly. Then sickness follows,

            and old age, and the shadow

            of cold death. So, after endless

            hoped-for honors and enjoyed illusions,

      70  only Tartarus remains,

            and the Tenarian goddess and black night

            and the still shore own the valiant mind.

X

IL PRIMO AMORE

               Tornami a mente il dì che la battaglia

            D’amor sentii la prima volta, e dissi:

            Oimè, se quest’è amor, com’ei travaglia!

               Che gli occhi al suol tuttora intenti e fissi

        5  Io mirava colei ch’a questo core

            Primiera il varco ed innocente aprissi.

               Ahi come mal mi governasti, amore!

            Perchè seco dovea sì dolce affetto

            Recar tanto desio, tanto dolore?

      10     E non sereno, e non intero e schietto,

            Anzi pien di travaglio e di lamento

            Al cor mi discendea tanto diletto?

               Dimmi, tenero core, or che spavento,

            Che angoscia era la tua fra quel pensiero

      15  Presso al qual t’era noia ogni contento?

               Quel pensier che nel dì, che lusinghiero

            Ti si offeriva nella notte, quando

            Tutto queto parea nell’emisfero:

               Tu inquieto, e felice e miserando,

      20  M’affaticavi in su le piume il fianco,

            Ad ogni or fortemente palpitando.

               E dove io tristo ed affannato e stanco

            Gli occhi al sonno chiudea, come per febre

            Rotto e deliro il sonno venia manco.

      25     Oh come viva in mezzo alle tenebre

            Sorgea la dolce imago, e gli occhi chiusi

            La contemplavan sotto alle palpebre!

               Oh come soavissimi diffusi

            Moti per l’ossa mi serpeano, oh come

      30  Mille nell’alma instabili, confusi

               Pensieri si volgean! qual tra le chiome

            D’antica selva zefiro scorrendo,

            Un lungo, incerto mormorar ne prome.

               E mentre io taccio, e mentre io non contendo,

      35  Che dicevi, o mio cor, che si partia

            Quella per che penando ivi e battendo?

               Il cuocer non più tosto io mi sentia

            Della vampa d’amor, che il venticello

            Che l’aleggiava, volossene via.

      40     Senza sonno io giacea sul dì novello,

            E i destrier che dovean farmi deserto,

            Battean la zampa sotto al patrio ostello.

               Ed io timido e cheto ed inesperto,

            Ver lo balcone al buio protendea

      45  L’orecchio avido e l’occhio indarno aperto,

               La voce ad ascoltar, se ne dovea

            Di quelle labbra uscir, ch’ultima fosse;

            La voce, ch’altro il cielo, ahi, mi togliea.

               Quante volte plebea voce percosse

      50  Il dubitoso orecchio, e un gel mi prese,

            E il core in forse a palpitar si mosse!

               E poi che finalmente mi discese

            La cara voce al core, e de’ cavai

            E delle rote il romorio s’intese;

      55     Orbo rimaso allor, mi rannicchiai

            Palpitando nel letto e, chiusi gli occhi,

            Strinsi il cor con la mano, e sospirai.

               Poscia traendo i tremuli ginocchi

            Stupidamente per la muta stanza,

      60  Ch’altro sarà, dicea, che il cor mi tocchi?

               Amarissima allor la ricordanza

            Locommisi nel petto, e mi serrava

            Ad ogni voce il core, a ogni sembianza.

               E lunga doglia il sen mi ricercava,

      65  Com’è quando a distesa Olimpo piove

            Malinconicamente e i campi lava.

               Ned io ti conoscea, garzon di nove

            E nove Soli, in questo a pianger nato

            Quando facevi, amor, le prime prove.

      70     Quando in ispregio ogni piacer, nè grato

            M’era degli astri il riso, o dell’aurora

            Queta il silenzio, o il verdeggiar del prato.

               Anche di gloria amor taceami allora

            Nel petto, cui scaldar tanto solea,

      75  Che di beltade amor vi fea dimora.

               Nè gli occhi ai noti studi io rivolgea,

            E quelli m’apparian vani per cui

            Vano ogni altro desir creduto avea.

               Deh come mai da me sì vario fui,

      80  E tanto amor mi tolse un altro amore?

            Deh quanto, in verità, vani siam nui!

               Solo il mio cor piaceami, e col mio core

            In un perenne ragionar sepolto,

            Alla guardia seder del mio dolore.

      85     E l’occhio a terra chino o in se raccolto,

            Di riscontrarsi fuggitivo e vago

            Nè in leggiadro soffria nè in turpe volto:

               Che la illibata, la candida imago

            Turbare egli temea pinta nel seno,

      90  Come all’aure si turba onda di lago.

               E quel di non aver goduto appieno

            Pentimento, che l’anima ci grava,

            E il piacer che passò cangia in veleno,

               Per li fuggiti dì mi stimolava

      95  Tuttora il sen: che la vergogna il duro

            Suo morso in questo cor già non oprava.

               Al cielo, a voi, gentili anime, io giuro

            Che voglia non m’entrò bassa nel petto,

            Ch’arsi di foco intaminato e puro.

    100     Vive quel foco ancor, vive l’affetto,

            Spira nel pensier mio la bella imago,

            Da cui, se non celeste, altro diletto

               Giammai non ebbi, e sol di lei m’appago.

X

FIRST LOVE

               That day comes back to mind when I first knew

            the strife of love, and said: Ah me,

            if this is love, it is such misery!

               When, with eyes still staring at the ground,

        5  I saw the one who, in all innocence,

            first opened up a way into this heart.

               Oh how badly did you treat me, love!

            Why did such sweet feeling have to bring

            so much desire and pain along with it?

      10     And why not tranquil, why not whole and pure,

            but full of suffering and lament instead,

            did so much joy descend into my heart?

               Tell me now, tender heart, about the fear,

            the anguish you felt, consumed by this idea

      15  compared to which all happiness was boredom?

               This idea that enticingly

            revealed itself to you both day and night,

            when all seemed quiet in the hemisphere:

               you exhausted me, so full of anguish,

      20  lying glad and suffering in bed,

            heart beating wildly all the while.

               And when sad, tormented, and exhausted,

            I closed my eyes to sleep, as in a fever,

            sleep, broken and delirious, wouldn’t come.

      25     Oh how the sweet image rose alive

            amidst the shadows, and how my closed eyes

            contemplated it beneath their lids!

               Oh how those soft, elusive movements

            snaked around my bones, oh how

      30  a thousand confused, uncertain thoughts

               roiled in my soul! The way a wind

            riffling in the hair of an old wood

            excites a long, uncertain murmuring.

               And though I was silent and uncomplaining,

      35  what did I say, my heart, when she for whom

            you were suffering and beating left?

               No sooner did I feel the burning heat

            of the flame of love than the little breeze

            that could relieve it up and flew away.

      40     I lay sleepless till the new day dawned,

            and the horses that soon would leave me lonely

            pawed the ground outside my father’s house.

               And I, afraid and still and clueless,

            leaned out my window in the dark

      45  watching in vain, cocking my eager ear

               to hear her voice, if it would only issue

            from those lips one final time; her voice,

            for heaven, alas, was taking the rest of her.

               How many times a peasant’s sounds assailed

      50  my unsure ear, a chill took hold of me,

            and my doubting heart began to throb!

               But finally, when the beloved voice

            entered my heart and the commotion

            of the horses and carriage wheels was heard,

      55     I was orphaned then, and hid myself

            trembling in my bed, and shut my eyes.

            I held my hand to my heart, and sighed.

               Then, stupefied, knees shaking, dragged

            myself across the silent room, and asked,

      60  What else will ever touch my heart again?

               Then the very bitter memory

            settled in my breast, and locked my heart

            against every other voice and face.

               And long suffering entered in my breast,

      65  as when Olympus rains down desolation

            everywhere around and floods the fields.

               Nor did I, a boy of eighteen, know you

            when you made your first experiments,

            Love, on him who was born to lament.

      70     When I disdained all pleasures, and the stars’

            smile was inimical, or the stillness

            of the calm dawn, or the meadow’s greening.

               Even the love of glory, which before

            had moved me so, was silenced in my breast then,

      75  for love had made it beauty’s dwelling place.

               Nor did I turn back to my normal work;

            for it seemed empty now, though it had made me

            think all other desires were empty once.

               Ah, how was I so alien to myself,

      80  And how did so much love replace another?

            Ah, in truth, how changeable we are!

               Only my heart pleased me; and being entombed

            in constant conversation with it,

            so as to safeguard my unhappiness.

      85     And my eyes, downcast or focused inward,

            fleeting and vague, would not allow themselves

            to meet a lovable or evil face:

               for they feared the blameless, candid image

            painted in my heart would be disturbed

      90  the way a lake is troubled by the wind.

               And that regret at not having fully

            enjoyed a thing, which weighs our spirits down

            and turns the pleasure that is past to poison,

               regret for bygone days still pierced

      95  my breast: for as of yet this heart

            had not experienced the pain of shame.

               Noble souls, to heaven and you I swear

            that no base desire entered my heart:

            I burned with pure, untainted fire.

    100     That fire is still alive, my love lives on,

            the lovely image breathes inside my mind

            from which I never had another joy

               than the divine, and only it fulfills me.

XI

IL PASSERO SOLITARIO

               D’in su la vetta della torre antica,

            Passero solitario, alla campagna

            Cantando vai finchè non more il giorno;

            Ed erra l’armonia per questa valle.

        5  Primavera dintorno

            Brilla nell’aria, e per li campi esulta,

            Sì ch’a mirarla intenerisce il core.

            Odi greggi belar, muggire armenti;

            Gli altri augelli contenti, a gara insieme

      10  Per lo libero ciel fan mille giri,

            Pur festeggiando il lor tempo migliore

            Tu pensoso in disparte il tutto miri;

            Non compagni, non voli,

            Non ti cal d’allegria, schivi gli spassi;

      15  Canti, e così trapassi

            Dell’anno e di tua vita il più bel fiore.

               Oimè, quanto somiglia

            Al tuo costume il mio! Sollazzo e riso,

            Della novella età dolce famiglia,

      20  E te german di giovinezza, amore,

            Sospiro acerbo de’ provetti giorni,

            Non curo, io non so come; anzi da loro

            Quasi fuggo lontano;

            Quasi romito, e strano

      25  Al mio loco natio,

            Passo del viver mio la primavera.

            Questo giorno ch’omai cede alla sera,

            Festeggiar si costuma al nostro borgo.

            Odi per lo sereno un suon di squilla,

      30  Odi spesso un tonar di ferree canne,

            Che rimbomba lontan di villa in villa.

            Tutta vestita a festa

            La gioventù del loco

            Lascia le case, e per le vie si spande;

      35  E mira ed è mirata, e in cor s’allegra.

            Io solitario in questa

            Rimota parte alla campagna uscendo,

            Ogni diletto e gioco

            Indugio in altro tempo: e intanto il guardo

      40  Steso nell’aria aprica

            Mi fere il Sol che tra lontani monti,

            Dopo il giorno sereno,

            Cadendo si dilegua, e par che dica

            Che la beata gioventù vien meno.

      45     Tu, solingo augellin, venuto a sera

            Del viver che daranno a te le stelle,

            Certo del tuo costume

            Non ti dorrai; che di natura è frutto

            Ogni vostra vaghezza.

      50  A me, se di vecchiezza

            La detestata soglia

            Evitar non impetro,

            Quando muti questi occhi all’altrui core,

            E lor fia vóto il mondo, e il dì futuro

      55  Del dì presente più noioso e tetro,

            Che parrà di tal voglia?

            Che di quest’anni miei? che di me stesso?

            Ahi pentirommi, e spesso,

            Ma sconsolato, volgerommi indietro.

XI

THE SOLITARY THRUSH

               High on the rooftop of the ancient tower,

            solitary thrush, you keep on singing

            to the countryside till the day dies,

            and your music wanders in the valley.

        5  All around, spring glistens in the air

            and glories in the fields,

            till the heart turns tender at the sight.

            You can hear flocks bleating and herds lowing;

            the other birds compete in happiness,

      10  taking a thousand turns in the wide sky,

            exulting in their best of times.

            Pensive and apart, you watch it all.

            No comrades and no flights,

            no happiness for you. You shun their games;

      15  you sing, and so you spend

            the high time of the year and of your life.

               Alas, how much your ways resemble mine!

            Delight and laughter,

            sweet companions of our early years,

      20  and you, youth’s sibling, love,

            bitter regret of later on,

            I take no notice of, I can’t say why.

            In fact, I seem to run away from them.

            Hermitlike,

      25  a stranger in my native place,

            I’m living out the springtime of my life.

            This day, which is now becoming evening,

            is a feast day in our town.

            You hear the sound of bells in the bright sky

      30  and often rifle-fire reports far off

            from farm to farm.

            Dressed to celebrate,

            the young people of the place

            leave their homes and gather in the streets,

      35  and, seeing and being seen, are glad.

            Only I, who make for this

            remote spot in the countryside,

            put off every pleasure and enjoyment

            to another time. And as I stare

      40  into the cloudless air

            the sun’s rays strike me,

            fading as it sets in the far hills

            after the clear day, as if to say

            that blessed youth is failing, too.

      45     Lonely bird, when you come to the evening

            of the life the stars will set for you,

            surely you won’t regret the way you lived,

            for every wish of yours

            is nature’s doing.

      50  But I, if I cannot avoid

            crossing the hateful

            threshold of old age,

            when these eyes say nothing to another’s heart,

            and the world is blank to them, and the day to come

      55  duller and darker than the one at hand,

            what will I think then of this wish of mine?

            And of my life? And my own self?

            Ah, I’ll repent, and often

            look back, unconsoled.

XII

L’INFINITO

               Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,

            E questa siepe, che da tanta parte

            Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.

            Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati

        5  Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani

            Silenzi, e profondissima quiete

            Io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco

            Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento

            Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello

      10  Infinito silenzio a questa voce

            Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,

            E le morte stagioni, e la presente

            E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa

            Immensità s’annega il pensier mio:

      15  E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.

XII

INFINITY

               This lonely hill was always dear to me,

            and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view

            of so much of the last horizon.

            But sitting here and gazing, I can see

        5  beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,

            and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,

            till what I feel

            is almost fear. And when I hear

            the wind stir in these branches, I begin

      10  comparing that endless stillness with this noise:

            and the eternal comes to mind,

            and the dead seasons, and the present

            living one, and how it sounds.

            So my mind sinks in this immensity:

      15  and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

XIII

LA SERA DEL DÌ DI FESTA

               Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento,

            E queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti

            Posa la luna, e di lontan rivela

            Serena ogni montagna. O donna mia,

        5  Già tace ogni sentiero, e pei balconi

            Rara traluce la notturna lampa:

            Tu dormi, che t’accolse agevol sonno

            Nelle tue chete stanze; e non ti morde

            Cura nessuna; e già non sai nè pensi

      10  Quanta piaga m’apristi in mezzo al petto.

            Tu dormi: io questo ciel, che sì benigno

            Appare in vista, a salutar m’affaccio,

            E l’antica natura onnipossente,

            Che mi fece all’affanno. A te la speme

      15  Nego, mi disse, anche la speme; e d’altro

            Non brillin gli occhi tuoi se non di pianto.

            Questo dì fu solenne: or da’ trastulli

            Prendi riposo; e forse ti rimembra

            In sogno a quanti oggi piacesti, e quanti

      20  Piacquero a te: non io, non già ch’io speri,

            Al pensier ti ricorro. Intanto io chieggo

            Quanto a viver mi resti, e qui per terra

            Mi getto, e grido, e fremo. Oh giorni orrendi

            In così verde etate! Ahi, per la via

      25  Odo non lunge il solitario canto

            Dell’artigian, che riede a tarda notte,

            Dopo i sollazzi, al suo povero ostello;

            E fieramente mi si stringe il core,

            A pensar come tutto al mondo passa,

      30  E quasi orma non lascia. Ecco è fuggito

            Il dì festivo, ed al festivo il giorno

            Volgar succede, e se ne porta il tempo

            Ogni umano accidente. Or dov’è il suono

            Di que’ popoli antichi? or dov’è il grido

      35  De’ nostri avi famosi, e il grande impero

            Di quella Roma, e l’armi, e il fragorio

            Che n’andò per la terra e l’oceano?

            Tutto è pace e silenzio, e tutto posa

            Il mondo, e più di lor non si ragiona.

      40  Nella mia prima età, quando s’aspetta

            Bramosamente il dì festivo, or poscia

            Ch’egli era spento, io doloroso, in veglia,

            Premea le piume; ed alla tarda notte

            Un canto che s’udia per li sentieri

      45  Lontanando morire a poco a poco,

            Già similmente mi stringeva il core.

XIII

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY

               The night is soft and bright and without wind,

            and the moon hangs still above the roofs

            and kitchen gardens, showing every mountain

            clear in the distance. O my lady,

        5  every lane is quiet now, and night lights

            glow in the windows only here and there.

            You sleep, for sleep came easily to you

            in your still room. No worry troubles you,

            nor can you imagine

      10  what a wound you opened in my heart.

            Yes, you sleep, while I come to my window

            to salute this sky that seems so kind,

            and eternal, all-commanding nature

            who created me for suffering.

      15  I deny you hope, she told me, even hope;

            let your eyes never shine except with tears.

            This was a holiday. Tonight you rest

            from play, and in your sleep perhaps

            dream of all the men you charmed today,

      20  and those who charmed you, too; but I don’t come to mind,

            not that I hoped to. So I ask myself

            what’s left of life for me,

            and fall down on the ground and rage, and shake.

            Horrific days at such a tender age!

      25  On the road not far from me I hear

            the lonely song of the workman, coming late

            from his evening out to his poor home,

            and my heart is stricken

            to think how everything in this world passes

      30  and barely leaves a trace. Look,

            the holiday is gone, the workday follows,

            and time makes off with every human accident.

            Where is the clamor of those ancient peoples?

            Where is the renown

      35  of our famed ancestors, and the great empire

            of their Rome, her armies,

            and the din she made on land and sea?

            Everything is peace and quiet now,

            the world is calm, and speaks no more of them.

      40  In my young years, in the time of life

            when we wait impatiently for Sunday,

            afterward I’d lie awake unhappy,

            and late at night a song heard on the road

            dying note by note as it passed by

      45  would pierce my heart

            the same way even then.

XIV

ALLA LUNA

               O graziosa luna, io mi rammento

            Che, or volge l’anno, sovra questo colle

            Io venia pien d’angoscia a rimirarti:

            E tu pendevi allor su quella selva

        5  Siccome or fai, che tutta la rischiari.

            Ma nebuloso e tremulo dal pianto

            Che mi sorgea sul ciglio, alle mie luci

            Il tuo volto apparia, che travagliosa

            Era mia vita: ed è, nè cangia stile,

      10  O mia diletta luna. E pur mi giova

            La ricordanza, e il noverar l’etate

            Del mio dolore. Oh come grato occorre

            Nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo

            La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso,

      15  Il rimembrar delle passate cose,

            Ancor che triste, e che l’affanno duri!

XIV

TO THE MOON

               O graceful moon, I can remember, now

            the year has turned, how, full of anguish,

            I came here to this hill to gaze at you,

            and you were hanging then above those woods

        5  the way you do now, lighting everything.

            But your face was cloudy,

            swimming in my eyes, due to the tears

            that filled them, for my life

            was torment, and it is, it doesn’t change,

      10  beloved moon of mine.

            And yet it helps me, thinking back, reliving

            the time of my unhappiness.

            Oh in youth, when hope has a long road ahead

            and the way of memory is short,

      15  how sweet it is remembering what happened,

            though it was sad, and though the pain endures!

XV

IL SOGNO

               Era il mattino, e tra le chiuse imposte

            Per lo balcone insinuava il sole

            Nella mia cieca stanza il primo albore;

            Quando in sul tempo che più leve il sonno

        5  E più soave le pupille adombra,

            Stettemi allato e riguardommi in viso

            Il simulacro di colei che amore

            Prima insegnommi, e poi lasciommi in pianto.

            Morta non mi parea, ma trista, e quale

      10  Degl’infelici è la sembianza. Al capo

            Appressommi la destra, e sospirando,

            Vivi, mi disse, e ricordanza alcuna

            Serbi di noi? Donde, risposi, e come

            Vieni, o cara beltà? Quanto, deh quanto

      15  Di te mi dolse e duol: nè mi credea

            Che risaper tu lo dovessi; e questo

            Facea più sconsolato il dolor mio.

            Ma sei tu per lasciarmi un’altra volta?

            Io n’ho gran tema. Or dimmi, e che t’avvenne?

      20  Sei tu quella di prima? E che ti strugge

            Internamente? Obblivione ingombra

            I tuoi pensieri, e gli avviluppa il sonno,

            Disse colei. Son morta, e mi vedesti

            L’ultima volta, or son più lune. Immensa

      25  Doglia m’oppresse a queste voci il petto.

            Ella seguì: nel fior degli anni estinta,

            Quand’è il viver più dolce, e pria che il core

            Certo si renda com’è tutta indarno

            L’umana speme. A desiar colei

      30  Che d’ogni affanno il tragge, ha poco andare

            L’egro mortal; ma sconsolata arriva

            La morte ai giovanetti, e duro è il fato

            Di quella speme che sotterra è spenta.

            Vano è saper quel che natura asconde

      35  Agl’inesperti della vita, e molto

            All’immatura sapienza il cieco

            Dolor prevale. Oh sfortunata, oh cara,

            Taci, taci, diss’io, che tu mi schianti

            Con questi detti il cor. Dunque sei morta,

      40  O mia diletta, ed io son vivo, ed era

            Pur fisso in ciel che quei sudori estremi

            Cotesta cara e tenerella salma

            Provar dovesse, a me restasse intera

            Questa misera spoglia? Oh quante volte

      45  In ripensar che più non vivi, e mai

            Non avverrà ch’io ti ritrovi al mondo,

            Creder nol posso. Ahi ahi, che cosa è questa

            Che morte s’addimanda? Oggi per prova

            Intenderlo potessi, e il capo inerme

      50  Agli atroci del fato odii sottrarre.

            Giovane son, ma si consuma e perde

            La giovanezza mia come vecchiezza;

            La qual pavento, e pur m’è lunge assai.

            Ma poco da vecchiezza si discorda

      55  Il fior dell’età mia. Nascemmo al pianto,

            Disse, ambedue; felicità non rise

            Al viver nostro; e dilettossi il cielo

            De’ nostri affanni. Or se di pianto il ciglio,

            Soggiunsi, e di pallor velato il viso

      60  Per la tua dipartita, e se d’angoscia

            Porto gravido il cor; dimmi: d’amore

            Favilla alcuna, o di pietà, giammai

            Verso il misero amante il cor t’assalse

            Mentre vivesti? Io disperando allora

      65  E sperando traea le notti e i giorni;

            Oggi nel vano dubitar si stanca

            La mente mia. Che se una volta sola

            Dolor ti strinse di mia negra vita,

            Non mel celar, ti prego, e mi soccorra

      70  La rimembranza or che il futuro è tolto

            Ai nostri giorni. E quella: ti conforta,

            O sventurato. Io di pietade avara

            Non ti fui mentre vissi, ed or non sono,

            Che fui misera anch’io. Non far querela

      75  Di questa infelicissima fanciulla.

            Per le sventure nostre, e per l’amore

            Che mi strugge, esclamai; per lo diletto

            Nome di giovanezza e la perduta

            Speme dei nostri dì, concedi, o cara,

      80  Che la tua destra io tocchi. Ed ella, in atto

            Soave e tristo, la porgeva. Or mentre

            Di baci la ricopro, e d’affannosa

            Dolcezza palpitando all’anelante

            Seno la stringo, di sudore il volto

      85  Ferveva e il petto, nelle fauci stava

            La voce, al guardo traballava il giorno.

            Quando colei teneramente affissi

            Gli occhi negli occhi miei, già scordi, o caro,

            Disse, che di beltà son fatta ignuda?

      90  E tu d’amore, o sfortunato, indarno

            Ti scaldi e fremi. Or finalmente addio.

            Nostre misere menti e nostre salme

            Son disgiunte in eterno. A me non vivi

            E mai più non vivrai: già ruppe il fato

      95  La fe che mi giurasti. Allor d’angoscia

            Gridar volendo, e spasimando, e pregne

            Di sconsolato pianto le pupille,

            Dal sonno mi disciolsi. Ella negli occhi

            Pur mi restava, e nell’incerto raggio

    100  Del Sol vederla io mi credeva ancora.

XV

THE DREAM

               It was morning, and the sun’s first light

            was filtering into my dark room

            through the closed shutters;

            at the time when sleep

        5  most lightly, gently veils the eyes,

            the image of the woman who first showed me love,

            then left me in tears, stood next to me,

            and looked into my eyes. She wasn’t dead, it seemed,

            but downcast, the way unhappy people are.

      10  She laid her right hand on my head and sighed,

            and said, Are you alive? Do you remember anything

            about us? I answered, Where have you come from,

            and how, O lovely thing? Oh, how I’ve grieved

            and grieve for you. But I never thought

      15  you’d know it, and this made my grief

            all the more inconsolable. Are you leaving

            me again? I’m so afraid you will.

            Now tell me, what became of you?

            Are you who you once were?

      20  And what’s devouring you inside?

            Forgetfulness disturbs your way of thinking,

            and sleep has overwhelmed it,

            she answered, I am dead; you saw me

            for the last time many months ago.

      25  At her words huge grief weighed on my heart.

            She continued: I died in my prime,

            when life is sweetest, long before the heart

            knows for sure all human hope is vain.

            It’s not long till the miserable mortal

      30  desires what will cure him of all suffering;

            but there’s no consoling a child’s death,

            and it’s a cruel fate indeed

            when that hope gets buried underground.

            Those without experience of life

      35  can’t know what nature hides from them,

            and blind pain overpowers untested wisdom.

            Enough, unhappy one, I said, be still.

            You’re breaking my heart

            with these words. So you are dead,

      40  my love, and I’m alive,

            and was it already decreed in heaven

            that your beloved, tender body

            had to undergo that extreme suffering,

            while my miserable flesh remained untouched?

      45  Oh how often, remembering

            that you are not alive and I won’t see you

            in the world again, I can’t believe it.

            What is this thing called death? If only I

            could know it now myself, and save

      50  my unprotected head from savage fate.

            I’m young, and yet my youth is being spent

            and lost like old age,

            which I am afraid of, though it’s distant.

            But sweet youth isn’t very different

      55  from age for me. The two of us

            were born for suffering, she said.

            There was nothing happy in our lives,

            and heaven took pleasure in our pain.

            Now since my eyes are blind with tears, I answered,

      60  and since my face is pale because you’re leaving

            and my heart is heavy with anxiety:

            tell me: Did the slightest spark

            of love or pity for your miserable lover

            ever strike your heart while you were living?

      65  In despair and hope then, I dragged out

            the nights and days, and my mind is riven still

            by pointless doubt. So if even once

            you felt pity for my lightless life, I beg you

            not to hide it from me, let the memory

      70  help me, now the future has been taken

            from us. And she said: Be comforted,

            unhappy one. I wasn’t without pity for you

            while I was alive, nor am I now;

            I was unhappy, too. Don’t grieve

      75  for this child who was so miserable.

            By our unhappiness, and by the love

            that’s tearing me apart, I cried,

            in the beloved name of youth

            and the lost hope of our days,

      80  let me touch your hand, my dear. And gently,

            sadly she extended it to me. Now, as I covered it

            with kisses, and pressed it to my heaving heart,

            throbbing with pain and sweetness, my hot face

            and chest were bathed in sweat, my voice

      85  was in my throat, and the day swayed before me.

            Then tenderly she looked me in the eye

            and said, My dear, have you already forgotten

            that I’ve been stripped of beauty and you’re inflamed,

            trembling with hopeless love,

      90  unlucky man. Now finally, farewell.

            Our unhappy minds and bodies

            are separated for eternity. You’re not alive for me,

            nor will you ever come to life again.

            Fate has already broken the vow you swore me.

      95  Wanting to rage with anguish then,

            and shaking, my eyes brimming

            with disconsolate tears,

            I roused myself from sleep. But she was there

            in front of me, and in the sun’s veiled light

    100  I kept on believing I could see her.

XVI

LA VITA SOLITARIA

               La mattutina pioggia, allor che l’ale

            Battendo esulta nella chiusa stanza

            La gallinella, ed al balcon s’affaccia

            L’abitator de’ campi, e il Sol che nasce

        5  I suoi tremuli rai fra le cadenti

            Stille saetta, alla capanna mia

            Dolcemente picchiando, mi risveglia;

            E sorgo, e i lievi nugoletti, e il primo

            Degli augelli susurro, e l’aura fresca,

      10  E le ridenti piagge benedico:

            Poichè voi, cittadine infauste mura,

            Vidi e conobbi assai, là dove segue

            Odio al dolor compagno; e doloroso

            Io vivo, e tal morrò, deh tosto! Alcuna

      15  Benchè scarsa pietà pur mi dimostra

            Natura in questi lochi, un giorno oh quanto

            Verso me più cortese! E tu pur volgi

            Dai miseri lo sguardo; e tu, sdegnando

            Le sciagure e gli affanni, alla reina

      20  Felicità servi, o natura. In cielo,

            In terra amico agl’infelici alcuno

            E rifugio non resta altro che il ferro.

               Talor m’assido in solitaria parte,

            Sovra un rialto, al margine d’un lago

      25  Di taciturne piante incoronato.

            Ivi, quando il meriggio in ciel si volve,

            La sua tranquilla imago il Sol dipinge,

            Ed erba o foglia non si crolla al vento,

            E non onda incresparsi, e non cicala

      30  Strider, nè batter penna augello in ramo,

            Nè farfalla ronzar, nè voce o moto

            Da presso nè da lunge odi nè vedi.

            Tien quelle rive altissima quiete;

            Ond’io quasi me stesso e il mondo obblio

      35  Sedendo immoto; e già mi par che sciolte

            Giaccian le membra mie, nè spirto o senso

            Più le commova, e lor quiete antica

            Co’ silenzi del loco si confonda.

               Amore, amore, assai lungi volasti

      40  Dal petto mio, che fu sì caldo un giorno,

            Anzi rovente. Con sua fredda mano

            Lo strinse la sciaura, e in ghiaccio è volto

            Nel fior degli anni. Mi sovvien del tempo

            Che mi scendesti in seno. Era quel dolce

      45  E irrevocabil tempo, allor che s’apre

            Al guardo giovanil questa infelice

            Scena del mondo, e gli sorride in vista

            Di paradiso. Al garzoncello il core

            Di vergine speranza e di desio

      50  Balza nel petto; e già s’accinge all’opra

            Di questa vita come a danza o gioco

            Il misero mortal. Ma non sì tosto,

            Amor, di te m’accorsi, e il viver mio

            Fortuna avea già rotto, ed a questi occhi

      55  Non altro convenia che il pianger sempre.

            Pur se talvolta per le piagge apriche,

            Su la tacita aurora o quando al sole

            Brillano i tetti e i poggi e le campagne,

            Scontro di vaga donzelletta il viso;

      60  O qualor nella placida quiete

            D’estiva notte, il vagabondo passo

            Di rincontro alle ville soffermando,

            L’erma terra contemplo, e di fanciulla

            Che all’opre di sua man la notte aggiunge

      65  Odo sonar nelle romite stanze

            L’arguto canto; a palpitar si move

            Questo mio cor di sasso: ahi, ma ritorna

            Tosto al ferreo sopor; ch’è fatto estrano

            Ogni moto soave al petto mio.

      70     O cara luna, al cui tranquillo raggio

            Danzan le lepri nelle selve; e duolsi

            Alla mattina il cacciator, che trova

            L’orme intricate e false, e dai covili

            Error vario lo svia; salve, o benigna

      75  Delle notti reina. Infesto scende

            Il raggio tuo fra macchie e balze o dentro

            A deserti edifici, in su l’acciaro

            Del pallido ladron ch’a teso orecchio

            Il fragor delle rote e de’ cavalli

      80  Da lungi osserva o il calpestio de’ piedi

            Su la tacita via; poscia improvviso

            Col suon dell’armi e con la rauca voce

            E col funereo ceffo il core agghiaccia

            Al passegger, cui semivivo e nudo

      85  Lascia in breve tra’ sassi. Infesto occorre

            Per le contrade cittadine il bianco

            Tuo lume al drudo vil, che degli alberghi

            Va radendo le mura e la secreta

            Ombra seguendo, e resta, e si spaura

      90  Delle ardenti lucerne e degli aperti

            Balconi. Infesto alle malvage menti,

            A me sempre benigno il tuo cospetto

            Sarà per queste piagge, ove non altro

            Che lieti colli e spaziosi campi

      95  M’apri alla vista. Ed ancor io soleva,

            Bench’innocente io fossi, il tuo vezzoso

            Raggio accusar negli abitati lochi,

            Quand’ei m’offriva al guardo umano, e quando

            Scopriva umani aspetti al guardo mio.

    100  Or sempre loderollo, o ch’io ti miri

            Veleggiar tra le nubi, o che serena

            Dominatrice dell’etereo campo,

            Questa flebil riguardi umana sede.

            Me spesso rivedrai solingo e muto

    105  Errar pe’ boschi e per le verdi rive,

            O seder sovra l’erbe, assai content

            Se core e lena a sospirar m’avanza.

XVI

THE SOLITARY LIFE

               The morning rain—now that the hen

            shut in her pen exults and beats her wings,

            and the field hand gazes out his window,

            and, coming alive, the Sun shoots glistening rays

        5  among the falling droplets gently

            beating on my roof—the morning rain

            wakes me; and as I rise, I bless

            the puffy little clouds,

            the birds’ first cooing,

      10  and the cool air and the sunstruck hills:

            for I have seen enough of you,

            unhappy city walls, where hate

            treads on the heel of his companion, pain;

            where I live painfully and will die too,

      15  let it be soon! Yet nature now and then

            still shows me a little kindness here,

            though she was once far gentler.

            For you too turn away from those in pain,

            ignoring their troubles and calamities,

      20  you too serve Queen Felicity, O Nature.

            In heaven and on earth, the luckless have

            no other friend and refuge but the sword.

               Sometimes I sit alone, apart,

            on a hillside, by a lake

      25  ringed by silent reeds and bushes.

            There, when high noon fills the sky,

            the Sun paints his undisturbed reflection,

            and no blade of grass or leaf

            stirs in the wind, you neither see nor hear

      30  wave break nor cicada shriek; no bird

            moves a feather on a branch, no butterfly

            flitters—there’s no sound or movement, far or near.

            Deepest quiet fills those shores,

            and, sitting still, I seem to forget

      35  myself and the world; my limbs relax,

            no longer ruled by mind or spirit,

            their immemorial calm

            dissolving in the silence of the place.

               Love, love, you flew far away

      40  out of my heart, which once had been so warm,

            burning even. Sorrow held it

            in her cold hand, and it turned to ice

            in the prime of life. I can remember

            when you came into my heart. It was that sweet

      45  moment we can’t bring back when a young man

            is first shown the world’s unhappy scene,

            which smiles on him and looks like paradise.

            A heart of virgin hope and desire

            surges in his youthful breast,

      50  and the miserable mortal girds himself

            for the hard labor of this life

            as for a dance or game. But, love,

            no sooner had I learned of you

            than fate destroyed my life,

      55  and all that my eyes knew were endless tears.

            Still, if sometimes on an open hill,

            in the silent dawn, or when the roofs

            and hills and fields are gleaming in the sun,

            I see a beautiful young woman’s face,

      60  or, in the languid calm of a summer night,

            slowing in my wandering

            as I come to houses once again,

            I contemplate the lonely countryside,

            or hear the soft song of a girl

      65  continuing her handiwork

            in her lonely room at night, this heart of stone

            starts racing. But then soon enough, alas,

            it falls back to its leaden sleep, for every tender

            feeling has become alien to my heart.

      70     Dear moon, underneath whose tranquil light

            hares dance in the woods; and in the morning

            the hunter curses their confusing,

            scrambled tracks, their many trails

            that hide their warrens: hail to you,

      75  O benevolent queen of nights. Your light

            falls unwelcome onto cliffs and thickets

            or, in abandoned buildings, on the knife

            of the pallid thief who cocks his ear to hear

            the sound of wheels and horses in the distance

      80  or footsteps on the silent road; who suddenly,

            with weapons drawn, rough words,

            and murderous stare, will chill the heart

            of the traveler, whom he soon abandons

            half alive and naked on the rocks.

      85  Your white light shines unwelcome, too,

            on the vile adulterer in the city,

            who hugs the walls of houses

            and lurks in shadows, hanging back afraid

            of lit lanterns and unshuttered windows.

      90  The sight of you will always be unwelcome

            to evil minds, but ever sweet to me

            here on these slopes,

            where all you show me

            are glad hills and open fields.

      95  Yet, though I was innocent,

            I used to resent your lovely light

            in crowded places,

            when I could be seen by other men,

            and saw them, too.

    100  Now I’ll always praise it, when I watch you

            sail among the clouds, or you look down,

            serene mistress of the heavenly plains,

            on this miserable human home.

            Often you’ll see me silent and alone

    105  wandering in the woods, on the green banks,

            or sitting on the grass, happy enough

            that I have heart and breath to heave a sigh.

XVII

CONSALVO

               Presso alla fin di sua dimora in terra,

            Giacea Consalvo; disdegnoso un tempo

            Del suo destino; or già non più, che a mezzo

            Il quinto lustro, gli pendea sul capo

        5  Il sospirato obblio. Qual da gran tempo,

            Così giacea nel funeral suo giorno

            Dai più diletti amici abbandonato:

            Ch’amico in terra al lungo andar nessuno

            Resta a colui che della terra è schivo.

      10  Pur gli era al fianco, da pietà condotta

            A consolare il suo deserto stato,

            Quella che sola e sempre eragli a mente,

            Per divina beltà famosa Elvira;

            Conscia del suo poter, conscia che un guardo

      15  Suo lieto, un detto d’alcun dolce asperso,

            Ben mille volte ripetuto e mille

            Nel costante pensier, sostegno e cibo

            Esser solea dell’infelice amante:

            Benchè nulla d’amor parola udita

      20  Avess’ella da lui. Sempre in quell’alma

            Era del gran desio stato più forte

            Un sovrano timor. Così l’avea

            Fatto schiavo e fanciullo il troppo amore.

               Ma ruppe alfin la morte il nodo antico

      25  Alla sua lingua. Poichè certi i segni

            Sentendo di quel dì che l’uom discioglie,

            Lei, già mossa a partir, presa per mano,

            E quella man bianchissima stringendo,

            Disse: tu parti, e l’ora omai ti sforza:

      30  Elvira, addio. Non ti vedrò, ch’io creda,

            Un’altra volta. Or dunque addio. Ti rendo

            Qual maggior grazia mai delle tue cure

            Dar possa il labbro mio. Premio daratti

            Chi può , se premio ai pii dal ciel si rende.

      35  Impallidia la bella, e il petto anelo

            Udendo le si fea: che sempre stringe

            All’uomo il cor dogliosamente, ancora

            Ch’estranio sia, chi si diparte e dice,

            Addio per sempre. E contraddir voleva,

      40  Dissimulando l’appressar del fato,

            Al moribondo. Ma il suo dir prevenne

            Quegli, e soggiunse: desiata, e molto,

            Come sai, ripregata a me discende,

            Non temuta, la morte; e lieto apparmi

      45  Questo feral mio dì. Pesami, è vero,

            Che te perdo per sempre. Oimè per sempre

            Parto da te. Mi si divide il core

            In questo dir. Più non vedrò quegli occhi,

            Nè la tua voce udrò! Dimmi: ma pria

      50  Di lasciarmi in eterno, Elvira, un bacio

            Non vorrai tu donarmi? un bacio solo

            In tutto il viver mio? Grazia ch’ei chiegga

            Non si nega a chi muor. Nè già vantarmi

            Potrò del dono, io semispento, a cui

      55  Straniera man le labbra oggi fra poco

            Eternamente chiuderà. Ciò detto

            Con un sospiro, all’adorata destra

            Le fredde labbra supplicando affisse.

               Stette sospesa e pensierosa in atto

      60  La bellissima donna; e fiso il guardo,

            Di mille vezzi sfavillante, in quello

            Tenea dell’infelice, ove l’estrema

            Lacrima rilucea. Nè dielle il core

            Di sprezzar la dimanda, e il mesto addio

      65  Rinacerbir col niego; anzi la vinse

            Misericordia dei ben noti ardori.

            E quel volto celeste, e quella bocca,

            Già tanto desiata, e per molt’anni

            Argomento di sogno e di sospiro,

      70  Dolcemente appressando al volto afflitto

            E scolorato dal mortale affanno,

            Più baci e più, tutta benigna e in vista

            D’alta pietà, su le convulse labbra

            Del trepido, rapito amante impresse.

      75     Che divenisti allor? quali appariro

            Vita, morte, sventura agli occhi tuoi,

            Fuggitivo Consalvo? Egli la mano,

            Ch’ancor tenea, della diletta Elvira

            Postasi al cor, che gli ultimi battea

      80  Palpiti della morte e dell’amore,

            Oh, disse, Elvira, Elvira mia! ben sono

            In su la terra ancor; ben quelle labbra

            Fur le tue labbra, e la tua mano io stringo!

            Ahi vision d’estinto, o sogno, o cosa

      85  Incredibil mi par. Deh quanto, Elvira,

            Quanto debbo alla morte! Ascoso innanzi

            Non ti fu l’amor mio per alcun tempo;

            Non a te, non altrui; che non si cela

            Vero amore alla terra. Assai palese

      90  Agli atti, al volto sbigottito, agli occhi,

            Ti fu: ma non ai detti. Ancora e sempre

            Muto sarebbe l’infinito affetto

            Che governa il cor mio, se non l’avesse

            Fatto ardito il morir. Morrò content

      95  Del mio destino omai, nè più mi dolgo

            Ch’aprii le luci al dì. Non vissi indarno,

            Poscia che quella bocca alla mia bocca

            Premer fu dato. Anzi felice estimo

            La sorte mia. Due cose belle ha il mondo:

    100  Amore e morte. All’una il ciel mi guida

            In sul fior dell’età; nell’altro, assai

            Fortunato mi tengo. Ah, se una volta,

            Solo una volta il lungo amor quieto

            E pago avessi tu, fora la terra

    105  Fatta quindi per sempre un paradiso

            Ai cangiati occhi miei. Fin la vecchiezza,

            L’abborrita vecchiezza, avrei sofferto

            Con riposato cor: che a sostentarla

            Bastato sempre il rimembrar sarebbe

    110  D’un solo istante, e il dir: felice io fui

            Sovra tutti i felici. Ahi, ma cotanto

            Esser beato non consente il cielo

            A natura terrena. Amar tant’oltre

            Non è dato con gioia. E ben per patto

    115  In poter del carnefice ai flagelli,

            Alle ruote, alle faci ito volando

            Sarei dalle tue braccia; e ben disceso

            Nel paventato sempiterno scempio.

               O Elvira, Elvira, oh lui felice, oh sovra

    120  Gl’immortali beato, a cui tu schiuda

            Il sorriso d’amor! felice appresso

            Chi per te sparga con la vita il sangue!

            Lice, lice al mortal, non è già sogno

            Come stimai gran tempo, ahi lice in terra

    125  Provar felicità. Ciò seppi il giorno

            Che fiso io ti mirai. Ben per mia morte

            Questo m’accadde. E non però quel giorno

            Con certo cor giammai, fra tante ambasce,

            Quel fiero giorno biasimar sostenni.

    130     Or tu vivi beata, e il mondo abbella,

            Elvira mia, col tuo sembiante. Alcuno

            Non l’amerà quant’io l’amai. Non nasce

            Un altrettale amor. Quanto, deh quanto

            Dal misero Consalvo in sì gran tempo

    135  Chiamata fosti, e lamentata, e pianta!

            Come al nome d’Elvira, in cor gelando,

            Impallidir; come tremar son uso

            All’amaro calcar della tua soglia,

            A quella voce angelica, all’aspetto

    140  Di quella fronte, io ch’al morir non tremo!

            Ma la lena e la vita or vengon meno

            Agli accenti d’amor. Passato è il tempo,

            Nè questo dì rimemorar m’è dato.

            Elvira, addio. Con la vital favilla

    145  La tua diletta immagine si parte

            Dal mio cor finalmente. Addio. Se grave

            Non ti fu quest’affetto, al mio feretro

            Dimani all’annottar manda un sospiro.

               Tacque: nè molto andò, che a lui col suono

    150  Mancò lo spirto; e innanzi sera il primo

            Suo dì felice gli fuggia dal guardo.

XVII

CONSALVO

               Consalvo was coming to the end

            of his stay on earth. Once he’d disdained

            his fate, but not now, for at twenty-two

            the oblivion he’d sighed for was at hand.

        5  He lay there on his dying day,

            as he long had,

            deserted by his most beloved friends:

            for in the end he who disdains this earth

            finds no one on earth is still his friend.

      10  Yet by his side, come out of pity

            to console him in his solitude,

            was the woman who was always on his mind,

            Elvira, famous for her godly beauty,

            conscious of her power, aware a happy

      15  look of hers, or some sweet phrase

            repeated over and over a thousand times

            in his obsessive mind, had once been comfort

            and sustenance for her unhappy lover—

            although she’d never heard him say

      20  a single word of love. A great timidity

            had always had more power over his soul

            than his great desire. And so excessive love

            had made him into a slave and a child.

               But in the end, death loosened the age-old

      25  knot in his tongue. For, seeing clear indications

            of the day that sets man free, he took

            her snow-white hand and held it as she rose

            to go, and said: You’re leaving now,

            it’s late and time to go. Farewell, Elvira.

      30  I don’t think I’ll ever see you again.

            Farewell. I want to offer you the greatest

            thanks that words can say for your concern.

            He who can, will reward you, if heaven

            rewards the faithful. The lovely woman

      35  went pale hearing him, and her breast

            started to heave: for the heart is always

            struck with sadness when someone,

            even a stranger, says as he is leaving,

            Goodbye forever. For she wished

      40  to contradict him and conceal his coming end

            from the dying man. But he cut her off,

            adding: The death that comes to me is wished for,

            and, you know, much prayed for and not feared;

            and my dying day seems happy to me.

      45  True, it weighs on me I’m losing you

            forever. Yes, alas, I’m leaving you forever.

            My heart breaks saying this. I’ll never see

            these eyes, or hear your voice again. But first,

            before you leave me for eternity,

      50  Elvira, don’t you want to give me a kiss?

            One kiss in an entire life? You can’t deny

            a dying man’s last favor.

            Nor can I boast about your gift,

            since I’m half gone already, and a strange hand

      55  will close my lips forever before long.

            Sighing as he spoke,

            he kissed her adored right hand

            in supplication with his frigid lips.

                 The lovely one sat hesitant

      60  and lost in thought; and her eyes,

            scintillating with a thousand beauties,

            met the dying man’s,

            in which a last tear glistened.

            She didn’t have the heart to tell him no

      65  and embitter their sad parting with refusal;

            rather, pity for his patent ardor

            won her over.

            And gently bringing that celestial face,

            that mouth so long desired,

      70  the stuff of dreams and sighs for years,

            to his afflicted face, pale with the pain of dying,

            she printed many kisses, all benign

            signs of deep pity, on the fevered lips

            of her trembling and enraptured lover.

      75     What did you become then? How did life,

            death, and unhappiness seem, Consalvo,

            as you departed? Placing the hand

            of his beloved Elvira on his heart

            beating with the final pulse

      80  of death and love, he said: Oh, Elvira,

            my Elvira! I know I’m still on earth,

            for those clearly were your lips, and this

            is your hand I’m holding. This is like

            a dead man’s vision, or a dream, or something

      85  unbelievable. Ah how much, Elvira,

            how much I owe to death! My love was never

            concealed from you before at any time,

            not from you and not from anyone,

            for true love can’t be concealed on earth.

      90  It was clear to you from what I did,

            from my unhappy face and eyes—though not from what

            I said. The endless love that rules my heart

            would always have kept silent

            if my dying hadn’t lent it courage.

      95  Now I’ll die happy with my destiny,

            and won’t complain again my eyes saw daylight.

            I didn’t live in vain: I was allowed

            to put my mouth on yours. Indeed,

            I think my fate is happy. There are two

    100  fair things in this world: love and death.

            Heaven brought me one in the prime of my youth;

            as for the other, I count myself

            lucky indeed. Ah, if once, just once,

            you’d have solaced and appeased

    105  my long love, the world would have been

            a heaven in my transformed eyes forever.

            I’d even have endured old age,

            abhorred old age, with equanimity:

            for always remembering a single moment

    110  and saying, I was happy above all happy men,

            would have been enough for me to bear it.

            Ah, but heaven does not allow

            an earthly being to be blessed this way.

            We can’t love this deeply and with joy.

    115  Yet in exchange I would have delivered myself

            out of your arms to the executioner,

            the whip, the rack, the bonfire, and even gone

            into terrifying eternal torment.

               O Elvira, Elvira, happy is the man,

    120  more blessed than the immortals,

            on whom you smile in love! And he who sheds

            his blood and gives his life for you

            is nearly as blessed! It’s allowed, it’s given to men,

            not just a dream, as I believed so long:

    125  we mortals can know happiness on earth.

            I knew this the day that I set eyes on you.

            And, for me, the reason was my death.

            And yet, in spite of so much anguish, never,

            never could I blame that cruel day.

    130     Now live blessed, my Elvira,

            and let your beauty beautify the world.

            No one will love it as I have.

            Another love like this will never be.

            How often, yes, how often

    135  and how long were you called to and lamented

            and wept over by miserable Consalvo!

            How pale I turned hearing the name Elvira,

            how my heart froze, how I used to tremble

            as I crossed your threshold bitterly,

    140  hearing that angelic voice, seeing that forehead,

            I who don’t quake in the face of death!

            But breath and life both fail me for words of love now.

            That time is over, nor will I be able

            to recall this day. Farewell, Elvira.

    145  With the breath of life, your adored image

            leaves my heart at last. Farewell.

            If this love of mine was not a burden,

            send a sigh to my bier tomorrow at nightfall.

               He was silent: and not much time passed

    150  before his spirit, like his voice, departed,

            and by night his first glad day had left his sight.

XVIII

ALLA SUA DONNA

               Cara beltà che amore

            Lunge m’inspiri o nascondendo il viso,

            Fuor se nel sonno il core

            Ombra diva mi scuoti,

        5  O ne’ campi ove splenda

            Più vago il giorno e di natura il riso;

            Forse tu l’innocente

            Secol beasti che dall’oro ha nome,

            Or leve intra la gente

      10  Anima voli? o te la sorte avara

            Ch’a noi t’asconde, agli avvenir prepara?

               Viva mirarti omai

            Nulla spene m’avanza;

            S’allor non fosse, allor che ignudo e solo

      15  Per novo calle a peregrina stanza

            Verrà lo spirto mio. Già sul novello

            Aprir di mia giornata incerta e bruna,

            Te viatrice in questo arido suolo

            Io mi pensai. Ma non è cosa in terra

      20  Che ti somigli; e s’anco pari alcuna

            Ti fosse al volto, agli atti, alla favella,

            Saria, così conforme, assai men bella.

               Fra cotanto dolore

            Quanto all’umana età propose il fato,

      25  Se vera e quale il mio pensier ti pinge,

            Alcun t’amasse in terra, a lui pur fora

            Questo viver beato:

            E ben chiaro vegg’io siccome ancora

            Seguir loda e virtù qual ne’ prim’anni

      30  L’amor tuo mi farebbe. Or non aggiunse

            Il ciel nullo conforto ai nostri affanni;

            E teco la mortal vita saria

            Simile a quella che nel cielo india.

               Per le valli, ove suona

      35  Del faticoso agricoltore il canto,

            Ed io seggo e mi lagno

            Del giovanile error che m’abbandona;

            E per li poggi, ov’io rimembro e piagno

            I perduti desiri, e la perduta

      40  Speme de’ giorni miei; di te pensando,

            A palpitar mi sveglio. E potess’io,

            Nel secol tetro e in questo aer nefando,

            L’alta specie serbar; che dell’imago,

            Poi che del ver m’è tolto, assai m’appago.

      45     Se dell’eterne idee

            L’una sei tu, cui di sensibil forma

            Sdegni l’eterno senno esser vestita,

            E fra caduche spoglie

            Provar gli affanni di funerea vita;

      50  O s’altra terra ne’ superni giri

            Fra’ mondi innumerabili t’accoglie,

            E più vaga del Sol prossima stella

            T’irraggia, e più benigno etere spiri;

            Di qua dove son gli anni infausti e brevi,

      55  Questo d’ignoto amante inno ricevi.

XVIII

TO HIS LADY

               Beloved beauty who inspires

            love from afar, your face concealed

            except when your celestial image

            stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields

        5  where light and nature’s laughter

            shine more lovely;

            was it maybe you who blessed

            the innocent age called golden,

            and do you now, blithe spirit,

      10  soar among men? Or does the miser, fate,

            who hides you from us save you for the future?

               No hope of seeing you alive

            remains for me now,

            except when, naked and alone,

      15  my soul will go down a new street

            to an unfamiliar home. Already, at the dawning

            of my dark, uncertain day,

            I imagined you a fellow traveler

            on this parched ground. But no thing on earth

      20  compares with you; and if someone

            who had a face like yours resembled you

            in word and deed, still she would be less lovely.

               In spite of all the suffering

            that fate assigned to human life,

      25  if there was anyone on earth

            who truly loved you as my thought portrays you,

            this life for him would be a joy.

            And I see clearly how your love

            would still inspire me to seek praise and virtue,

      30  the way I used to in my early years.

            Though heaven gave no comfort for our suffering,

            still mortal life with you would be

            like what in heaven becomes divinity.

               In the valleys, where you hear

      35  the weary farmer singing

            and I sit and mourn

            my youth’s illusions leaving me;

            and on the hills where I turn back

            and lament my lost desires,

      40  my life’s lost hope, I think of you

            and start to shake. In this sad age

            and sickly atmosphere, I try

            to keep your noble look in mind;

            without the real thing, I enjoy the image.

      45     Whether you are the one and only

            eternal idea that eternal wisdom

            disdains to see arrayed in sensible form,

            to know the pains of mournful life

            in transitory dress;

      50  or if in the supernal spheres another earth

            from among unnumbered worlds receives you,

            and a near star lovelier than the Sun

            warms you and you breathe benigner ether,

            from here, where years are both ill-starred and brief,

      55  accept this hymn from your unnoticed lover.

XIX

AL CONTE CARLO PEPOLI

               Questo affannoso e travagliato sonno

            Che noi vita nomiam, come sopporti,

            Pepoli mio? di che speranze il core

            Vai sostentando? in che pensieri, in quanto

        5  O gioconde o moleste opre dispensi

            L’ozio che ti lasciàr gli avi remoti,

            Grave retaggio e faticoso? È tutta,

            In ogni umano stato, ozio la vita,

            Se quell’oprar, quel procurar che a degno

      10  Obbietto non intende, o che all’intento

            Giunger mai non potria, ben si conviene

            Ozioso nomar. La schiera industre

            Cui franger glebe o curar piante e greggi

            Vede l’alba tranquilla e vede il vespro,

      15  Se oziosa dirai, da che sua vita

            È per campar la vita, e per se sola

            La vita all’uom non ha pregio nessuno,

            Dritto e vero dirai. Le notti e i giorni

            Tragge in ozio il nocchiero; ozio il perenne

      20  Sudar nelle officine, ozio le vegghie

            Son de’ guerrieri e il perigliar nell’armi;

            E il mercatante avaro in ozio vive:

            Che non a se, non ad altrui, la bella

            Felicità, cui solo agogna e cerca

      25  La natura mortal, veruno acquista

            Per cura o per sudor, vegghia o periglio.

            Pure all’aspro desire onde i mortali

            Già sempre infin dal dì che il mondo nacque

            D’esser beati sospiraro indarno,

      30  Di medicina in loco apparecchiate

            Nella vita infelice avea natura

            Necessità diverse, a cui non senza

            Opra e pensier si provvedesse, e pieno,

            Poi che lieto non può, corresse il giorno

      35  All’umana famiglia; onde agitato

            E confuso il desio, men loco avesse

            Al travagliarne il cor. Così de’ bruti

            La progenie infinita, a cui pur solo,

            Nè men vano che a noi, vive nel petto

      40  Desio d’esser beati; a quello intenta

            Che a lor vita è mestier, di noi men tristo

            Condur si scopre e men gravoso il tempo,

            Nè la lentezza accagionar dell’ore.

            Ma noi, che il viver nostro all’altrui mano

      45  Provveder commettiamo, una più grave

            Necessità, cui provveder non puote

            Altri che noi, già senza tedio e pena

            Non adempiam: necessitate, io dico,

            Di consumar la vita: improba, invitta

      50  Necessità, cui non tesoro accolto,

            Non di greggi dovizia, o pingui campi,

            Non aula puote e non purpureo manto

            Sottrar l’umana prole. Or s’altri, a sdegno

            I vóti anni prendendo, e la superna

      55  Luce odiando, l’omicida mano,

            I tardi fati a prevenir condotto,

            In se stesso non torce; al duro morso

            Della brama insanabile che invano

            Felicità richiede, esso da tutti

      60  Lati cercando, mille inefficaci

            Medicine procaccia, onde quell’una

            Cui natura apprestò, mal si compensa.

               Lui delle vesti e delle chiome il culto

            E degli atti e dei passi, e i vani studi

      65  Di cocchi e di cavalli, e le frequenti

            Sale, e le piazze romorose, e gli orti,

            Lui giochi e cene e invidiate danze

            Tengon la notte e il giorno; a lui dal labbro

            Mai non si parte il riso; ahi, ma nel petto,

      70  Nell’imo petto, grave, salda, immota

            Come colonna adamantina, siede

            Noia immortale, incontro a cui non puote

            Vigor di giovanezza, e non la crolla

            Dolce parola di rosato labbro,

      75  E non lo sguardo tenero, tremante,

            Di due nere pupille, il caro sguardo,

            La più degna del ciel cosa mortale.

               Altri, quasi a fuggir volto la trista

            Umana sorte, in cangiar terre e climi

      80  L’età spendendo, e mari e poggi errando,

            Tutto l’orbe trascorre, ogni confine

            Degli spazi che all’uom negl’infiniti

            Campi del tutto la natura aperse,

            Peregrinando aggiunge. Ahi ahi, s’asside

      85  Su l’alte prue la negra cura, e sotto

            Ogni clima, ogni ciel, si chiama indarno

            Felicità, vive tristezza e regna.

               Havvi chi le crudeli opre di marte

            Si elegge a passar l’ore, e nel fraterno

      90  Sangue la man tinge per ozio; ed havvi

            Chi d’altrui danni si conforta, e pensa

            Con far misero altrui far se men tristo,

            Sì che nocendo usar procaccia il tempo.

            E chi virtute o sapienza ed arti

      95  Perseguitando; e chi la propria gente

            Conculcando e l’estrane, o di remoti

            Lidi turbando la quiete antica

            Col mercatar, con l’armi, e con le frodi,

            La destinata sua vita consuma.

    100     Te più mite desio, cura più dolce

            Regge nel fior di gioventù, nel bello

            April degli anni, altrui giocondo e primo

            Dono del ciel, ma grave, amaro, infest

            A chi patria non ha. Te punge e move

    105  Studio de’ carmi e di ritrar parlando

            Il bel che raro e scarso e fuggitivo

            Appar nel mondo, e quel che più benigna

            Di natura e del ciel, fecondamente

            A noi la vaga fantasia produce

    110  E il nostro proprio error. Ben mille volte

            Fortunato colui che la caduca

            Virtù del caro immaginar non perde

            Per volger d’anni; a cui serbare eterna

            La gioventù del cor diedero i fati;

    115  Che nella ferma e nella stanca etade,

            Così come solea nell’età verde,

            In suo chiuso pensier natura abbella,

            Morte, deserto avviva. A te conceda

            Tanta ventura il ciel; ti faccia un tempo

    120  La favilla che il petto oggi ti scalda,

            Di poesia canuto amante. Io tutti

            Della prima stagione i dolci inganni

            Mancar già sento, e dileguar dagli occhi

            Le dilettose immagini, che tanto

    125  Amai, che sempre infino all’ora estrema

            Mi fieno, a ricordar, bramate e piante.

            Or quando al tutto irrigidito e freddo

            Questo petto sarà, nè degli aprichi

            Campi il sereno e solitario riso,

    130  Nè degli augelli mattutini il canto

            Di primavera, nè per colli e piagge

            Sotto limpido ciel tacita luna

            Commoverammi il cor; quando mi fia

            Ogni beltate o di natura o d’arte,

    135  Fatta inanime e muta; ogni alto senso,

            Ogni tenero affetto, ignoto e strano;

            Del mio solo conforto allor mendico,

            Altri studi men dolci, in ch’io riponga

            L’ingrato avanzo della ferrea vita,

    140  Eleggerò. L’acerbo vero, i ciechi

            Destini investigar delle mortali

            E dell’eterne cose; a che prodotta,

            A che d’affanni e di miserie carca

            L’umana stirpe; a quale ultimo intent

    145  Lei spinga il fato e la natura; a cui

            Tanto nostro dolor diletti o giovi;

            Con quali ordini e leggi a che si volva

            Questo arcano universo; il qual di lode

            Colmano i saggi, io d’ammirar son pago.

    150     In questo specolar gli ozi traendo

            Verrò: che conosciuto, ancor che tristo,

            Ha suoi diletti il vero. E se del vero

            Ragionando talor, fieno alle genti

            O mal grati i miei detti o non intesi,

    155  Non mi dorrò, che già del tutto il vago

            Desio di gloria antico in me fia spento:

            Vana Diva non pur, ma di fortuna

            E del fato e d’amor, Diva più cieca.

XIX

TO COUNT CARLO PEPOLI

               How do you bear this tortured and tormented

            sleep that we call life, my Pepoli?

            What hopes do you keep feeding to your heart?

            What are the ideas, the many happy

        5  or unhappy doings on which you spend

            the idleness that your forefathers left you,

            solemn, burdensome inheritance?

            All life is idleness, at every human level,

            if doing or getting with no worthy aim,

      10  or that could never reach the goal

            it aims for, can be seen as idle.

            If you say the hardworking crowd is idle

            who see the tranquil sunrise and the sunset

            while they break clods or tend to crops or herds

      15  you’ll say the truth, because they spend their lives

            in living, and life in and of itself

            has no value whatsoever for man.

            The helmsman drags his nights and days

            out idly, and the endless sweat

      20  in factories is idle, the soldiers’ watch

            and peril in battle are idle,

            and the greedy merchant lives in idleness:

            since, by care or effort, watchfulness or daring,

            no one wins himself or anyone sweet happiness,

      25  which is all mortal beings want and seek.

            Yet, in answer to the sharp desire

            that they have pined in vain for since the day

            the world was created: to be happy,

            nature, instead of remedies for misery,

      30  invented various necessities

            that only can be won by work and thought,

            making the day chock-full instead of glad

            for the human family, so if a man’s desire

            was aroused but left unsatisfied,

      35  it would have less time to trouble him.

            So with the countless species of the animals,

            who also only wish for happiness

            (and do so no less hopelessly than we);

            for them, concentrated on this aim

      40  that is their whole life’s work, time seems to pass

            less sadly than for us, and weighs less heavily,

            and they don’t complain about its sluggishness.

            But we, who delegate the task

            of managing our lives to others,

      45  can’t satisfy a deeper need,

            which only we can answer,

            without pain and boredom—

            the need, I say, to use life up:

            cruel, invincible necessity,

      50  which not accumulated wealth,

            the husbanding of herds or fertile fields,

            or palaces or purple robes

            can free man of. So, if someone detests

            his empty life and hates the heavenly light

      55  and wants to hurry his slow fate along

            not turning a murderous hand upon himself,

            stung by the incurable desire

            that searches hopelessly for happiness,

            he is forced to go look everywhere,

      60  chasing a thousand useless cures

            for which the only one that nature offers

            is small recompense.

               For one, the cult of clothing and hairdressing,

            of doing, coming, and going, the empty interest

      65  in carriages and horses,

            busy salons and noisy squares and gardens,

            games and dinners and exclusive dances,

            takes up his attention night and day.

            Laughter never falls from his lips: but in his heart, alas,

      70  deep down, heavy, massive, motionless,

            immortal boredom sits like adamant,

            against which all the energy of youth

            is useless. Not even a sweet word

            from a rosy lip will send it packing,

      75  or the tender, trembling glance

            of two dark eyes, the loving look,

            the human thing that is most worthy of heaven.

               Another, as if determined to escape

            unhappy human fate by spending his days

      80  in other lands and climates, wandering the seas and hills,

            travels the whole globe, and, as he journeys, comes

            to every end of the earth that nature opened to man

            in the boundless spaces of the universe.

      85  Alas, black care sits on his ship’s high prow,

            and in every climate, under every sky,

            where we seek hopelessly for happiness,

            sadness lives and reigns.

               Others choose to spend their days

            doing the cruel work of Mars, and idly

      90  stain their hands with their brothers’ blood;

            some take comfort in the woes of others,

            and think that making others miserable

            makes them less sad, and so they spend their time

            doing evil. And there are those who use

      95  their fated life up chasing after virtues,

            wisdom, or the arts. Others oppress

            their own, or someone else,

            or trouble the age-old peace of distant shores

            with commerce, armies, and dishonesty.

    100     A gentler wish, a kindlier concern

            rules you in the noontime of your youth,

            the gentle April of your years,

            heaven’s glad first gift to some,

            but heavy, bitter, hostile

    105  to the man who has no country.

            The study of song moves you and inspires you

            to portray in words

            the rare and scarce and fleeting beauty

            we find in this world, which most benignly,

    110  fruitfully creates our lovely fantasies

            of nature and heaven for us, and our illusions.

            He is fortunate a thousand times

            who doesn’t lose the fleeting power

            of sweet imagination with the passing years,

    115  whom fate let keep his heart’s eternal freshness,

            who in adulthood and in tired old age

            makes nature lovely in his inner thought

            the way he did in his green age,

            and brings the desert, death, to life.

    120  May heaven grant you such good luck;

            may the spark that warms your heart now make you

            a white-haired lover of poetry one day.

            I feel the sweet illusions of my youth

            all failing already, and the pleasing images

    125  I loved so much are fading from my eyes;

            recalling them I’ll yearn and mourn forever,

            till my last hour. When this heart

            goes wholly hard and cold, not the serene,

            lonely laughter of the sun-drenched fields

    130  nor the morning song of birds in spring,

            nor the still moon over hill and shore

            under an open sky will move my heart;

            when every beauty

            of nature or of art

    135  will be dead and meaningless for me,

            and every deep emotion, every tender

            feeling will be foreign and unfamiliar,

            without my only consolation then,

            I shall choose less pleasant occupations

    140  to turn to during the unwelcome onset

            of inexorable old age. To learn

            the bitter truth, and the blind fates of mortal

            and eternal things—why the human race was made,

            why it suffers pain and misery,

    145  where ultimately fate and nature drive us,

            whom our enormous pain brings pleasure

            or profit to, according to what rules and laws

            this mysterious universe revolves:

            what the wise praise I’m happy to admire.

    150     I shall spend my idleness

            in speculating thus; because the truth, once known,

            though it is sad, has pleasures of its own.

            And if, speaking the truth, my words at times

            will be unwelcome or misunderstood,

    155  I shall not grieve, for all my fine desire

            for the old glory will have run its course—

            glory, not only a vain Goddess, but a Goddess

            blinder still than fortune, fate, and love.

XX

IL RISORGIMENTO

               Credei ch’al tutto fossero

            In me, sul fior degli anni,

            Mancati i dolci affanni

            Della mia prima età:

        5     I dolci affanni, i teneri

            Moti del cor profondo,

            Qualunque cosa al mondo

            Grato il sentir ci fa.

               Quante querele e lacrime

      10  Sparsi nel novo stato,

            Quando al mio cor gelato

            Prima il dolor mancò!

               Mancàr gli usati palpiti,

            L’amor mi venne meno,

      15  E irrigidito il seno

            Di sospirar cessò!

               Piansi spogliata, esanime

            Fatta per me la vita;

            La terra inaridita,

      20  Chiusa in eterno gel;

               Deserto il dì; la tacita

            Notte più sola e bruna;

            Spenta per me la luna,

            Spente le stelle in ciel.

      25     Pur di quel pianto origine

            Era l’antico affetto:

            Nell’intimo del petto

            Ancor viveva il cor.

               Chiedea l’usate immagini

      30  La stanca fantasia;

            E la tristezza mia

            Era dolore ancor.

               Fra poco in me quell’ultimo

            Dolore anco fu spento,

      35  E di più far lamento

            Valor non mi restò.

               Giacqui: insensato, attonito,

            Non dimandai conforto:

            Quasi perduto e morto,

      40  Il cor s’abbandonò.

               Qual fui! quanto dissimile

            Da quel che tanto ardore,

            Che sì beato errore

            Nutrii nell’alma un dì!

      45     La rondinella vigile,

            Alle finestre intorno

            Cantando al novo giorno,

            Il cor non mi ferì:

               Non all’autunno pallido

      50  In solitaria villa,

            La vespertina squilla,

            Il fuggitivo Sol.

               Invan brillare il vespero

            Vidi per muto calle,

      55  Invan sonò la valle

            Del flebile usignol.

               E voi, pupille tenere,

            Sguardi furtivi, erranti,

            Voi de’ gentili amanti

      60  Primo, immortale amor,

               Ed alla mano offertami

            Candida ignuda mano,

            Foste voi pure invano

            Al duro mio sopor.

      65     D’ogni dolcezza vedovo,

            Tristo; ma non turbato,

            Ma placido il mio stato,

            Il volto era seren.

               Desiderato il termine

      70  Avrei del viver mio;

            Ma spento era il desio

            Nello spossato sen.

               Qual dell’età decrepita

            L’avanzo ignudo e vile,

      75  Io conducea l’aprile

            Degli anni miei così:

               Così quegl’ineffabili

            Giorni, o mio cor, traevi,

            Che sì fugaci e brevi

      80  Il cielo a noi sortì.

               Chi dalla grave, immemore

            Quiete or mi ridesta?

            Che virtù nova è questa,

            Questa che sento in me?

      85  Moti soavi, immagini,

            Palpiti, error beato,

            Per sempre a voi negato

            Questo mio cor non è?

               Siete pur voi quell’unica

      90  Luce de’ giorni miei?

            Gli affetti ch’io perdei

            Nella novella età?

               Se al ciel, s’ai verdi margini,

            Ovunque il guardo mira,

      95  Tutto un dolor mi spira,

            Tutto un piacer mi dà.

               Meco ritorna a vivere

            La piaggia, il bosco, il monte;

            Parla al mio core il fonte,

    100  Meco favella il mar.

               Chi mi ridona il piangere

            Dopo cotanto obblio?

            E come al guardo mio

            Cangiato il mondo appar?

    105     Forse la speme, o povero

            Mio cor, ti volse un riso?

            Ahi della speme il viso

            Io non vedrò mai più.

               Proprii mi diede i palpiti,

    110  Natura, e i dolci inganni.

            Sopiro in me gli affanni

            L’ingenita virtù;

               Non l’annullàr: non vinsela

            Il fato e la sventura;

    115  Non con la vista impura

            L’infausta verità.

               Dalle mie vaghe immagini

            So ben ch’ella discorda:

            So che natura è sorda,

    120  Che miserar non sa.

               Che non del ben sollecita

            Fu, ma dell’esser solo:

            Purchè ci serbi al duolo,

            Or d’altro a lei non cal.

    125      So che pietà fra gli uomini

            Il misero non trova;

            Che lui, fuggendo, a prova

            Schernisce ogni mortal.

               Che ignora il tristo secolo

    130  Gl’ingegni e le virtudi;

            Che manca ai degni studi

            L’ignuda gloria ancor.

               E voi, pupille tremule,

            Voi, raggio sovrumano,

    135  So che splendete invano,

            Che in voi non brilla amor.

               Nessuno ignoto ed intimo

            Affetto in voi non brilla:

            Non chiude una favilla

    140  Quel bianco petto in se.

               Anzi d’altrui le tenere

            Cure suol porre in gioco;

            E d’un celeste foco

            Disprezzo è la mercè.

    145     Pur sento in me rivivere

            Gl’inganni aperti e noti;

            E de’ suoi proprii moti

            Si maraviglia il sen.

               Da te, mio cor, quest’ultimo

    150  Spirto, e l’ardor natio,

            Ogni conforto mio

            Solo da te mi vien.

               Mancano, il sento, all’anima

            Alta, gentile e pura,

    155  La sorte, la natura,

            Il mondo e la beltà.

               Ma se tu vivi, o misero,

            Se non concedi al fato,

            Non chiamerò spietato

    160  Chi lo spirar mi dà.

XX

THE REAWAKENING

               I felt, on the verge

            of the springtime of life,

            that I had missed all

            the sweet torments of youth:

        5       sweet torments, the inner

            heart’s tender emotions,

            what in the world

            makes us happy to feel.

               How hard I cried,

      10  in this new state of mine,

            when pain was first gone

            from my iced-over heart.

               The throbbing was missing,

            love left me alone,

      15  and my newly hard heart

            didn’t sigh anymore.

               I was crying because

            life was barren and dead,

            the earth had dried up,

      20  locked in permanent ice.

               Day was a desert,

            the silent night lonely.

            The moon had died out

            with the stars in the sky.

      25     But my old feelings

            gave birth to those tears:

            deep in my breast

            my heart was alive.

               My tired-out fantasies

      30  sought the old images,

            and my unhappiness

            still felt like pain.

               Soon that last pain

            had died in me, too;

      35  I had no power

            to keep on complaining.

               I lay without feeling,

            not wanting relief.

            My heart had surrendered,

      40  forgotten and gone.

               How different I was

            from the man who had fed

            such ardor, so much

            blessed pain in his soul!

      45     The sentinel swallow

            that sang at my window

            at daybreak, he couldn’t

            break into my heart,

               nor, in pale autumn

      50  alone on the farm,

            could the church bell at dusk,

            or the Sun as it fled.

               I watched the sun glowing

            in the still street,

      55  and heard the lament

            of the bird in the valley.

               And you, gentle eyes,

            with your wandering glances,

            you first, undying

      60  sweet lovers’ love,

               and the white, naked hand

            that my own hand was given—

            you were no help

            in my cruel sleep.

      65     Deprived of all sweetness,

            sad but untroubled,

            my state was calm

            and my look was serene.

               I could have wanted

      70  my life to end then,

            but desire had died out

            in my powerless heart.

               Like the bare, hateful

            remains of old age,

      75  I lived the April

            of my young life.

               Thus, heart, you lived

            the incredible days

            that heaven allotted us,

      80  fleeting and brief.

               Who is it wakes me

            from this leaden old calm?

            What is this new power

            I’m sensing inside?

      85     Sweet feelings, visions,

            throbbings, illusions—

            aren’t you always forbidden

            to this heart of mine?

               Are you the singular

      90  light of my days,

            the love that I lost

            in this new age?

               Wherever I look,

            at the green banks, the sky—

      95  all of it’s pain,

            all of it’s joy.

               The shore, grove, and mountain

            have come back to life.

            The fountain is talking,

    100  the sea speaks to me.

               Who gives me tears now

            after so much forgetting?

            How can the world

            look so different to me?

    105     Is hope maybe smiling

            on you, my poor heart?

            I’ll never ever

            see hope again.

               Nature gave me my heart

    110  and my own sweet illusions.

            My pain had extinguished

            my own native power;

               but fate and ill luck

            didn’t ruin or defeat it,

    115  nor did the blind sight

            of unlucky truth.

               I know it conflicts

            with my own glad illusions.

            I know nature’s deaf,

    120  and can’t share in our pain,

               she won’t care about good,

            what matters is being.

            All that she wants

            is to save us for pain.

    125     I know the unhappy man

            has no real fellows,

            that everyone turns

            against him as he flees;

               that this sad century

    130  knows nothing of genius,

            that great work’s still lacking

            the praise it deserves.

               And you, trembling eyes,

            you, heavenly light,

    135  I know what’s shining

            in you isn’t love.

               No hidden emotion

            glimmers in you,

            that white breast is hiding

    140  no spark of its own.

               In fact, it laughs

            at the troubles of others;

            disdain’s the reward

            for celestial fire.

    145  Yet I feel the familiar

            illusions reviving,

            my breast is amazed

            at all that it feels.

               From you, heart, this spirit,

    150  and my innate fire:

            all of my comfort

            is coming from you.

               I know that the high and pure

            soul is deprived

    155  of destiny, nature,

            the world and its beauty.

               But if you live, sad one,

            and don’t bow to fate,

            I won’t call heartless

    160  who gives me breath.

XXI

A SILVIA

               Silvia, rimembri ancora

            Quel tempo della tua vita mortale,

            Quando beltà splendea

            Negli occhi tuoi ridenti e fuggitivi,

        5  E tu, lieta e pensosa, il limitare

            Di gioventù salivi?

               Sonavan le quiete

            Stanze, e le vie dintorno,

            Al tuo perpetuo canto,

      10  Allor che all’opre femminili intenta

            Sedevi, assai contenta

            Di quel vago avvenir che in mente avevi.

            Era il maggio odoroso: e tu solevi

            Così menare il giorno.

      15     Io gli studi leggiadri

            Talor lasciando e le sudate carte,

            Ove il tempo mio primo

            E di me si spendea la miglior parte,

            D’in su i veroni del paterno ostello

      20  Porgea gli orecchi al suon della tua voce,

            Ed alla man veloce

            Che percorrea la faticosa tela.

            Mirava il ciel sereno,

            Le vie dorate e gli orti,

      25  E quinci il mar da lungi, e quindi il monte.

            Lingua mortal non dice

            Quel ch’io sentiva in seno.

               Che pensieri soavi,

            Che speranze, che cori, o Silvia mia!

      30  Quale allor ci apparia

            La vita umana e il fato!

            Quando sovviemmi di cotanta speme,

            Un affetto mi preme

            Acerbo e sconsolato,

      35  E tornami a doler di mia sventura.

            O natura, o natura,

            Perchè non rendi poi

            Quel che prometti allor? perchè di tanto

            Inganni i figli tuoi?

      40     Tu pria che l’erbe inaridisse il verno,

            Da chiuso morbo combattuta e vinta,

            Perivi, o tenerella. E non vedevi

            Il fior degli anni tuoi;

            Non ti molceva il core

      45  La dolce lode or delle negre chiome,

            Or degli sguardi innamorati e schivi;

            Nè teco le compagne ai dì festivi

            Ragionavan d’amore.

               Anche peria fra poco

      50  La speranza mia dolce: agli anni miei

            Anche negaro i fati

            La giovanezza. Ahi come,

            Come passata sei,

            Cara compagna dell’età mia nova,

      55  Mia lacrimata speme!

            Questo è quel mondo? questi

            I diletti, l’amor, l’opre, gli eventi

            Onde cotanto ragionammo insieme?

            Questa la sorte dell’umane genti?

      60  All’apparir del vero

            Tu, misera, cadesti: e con la mano

            La fredda morte ed una tomba ignuda

            Mostravi di lontano.

XXI

TO SILVIA

               Silvia, do you remember still

            that moment in your mortal life

            when beauty shimmered

            in your smiling, startled eyes

        5  as, bright and pensive, you arrived

            at the threshold of youth?

               The quiet rooms

            and streets outside

            echoed with your endless song

      10  as you sat, bending to your woman’s work,

            happy enough with the hazy

            future in your head.

            It was fragrant May:

            and so you spent your day.

      15     Sometimes I left the cherished

            books and the belabored pages

            on which my young years

            and the best of me were spent,

            to listen from my father’s balcony

      20  for the sound of your singing

            and your swift hand’s back-and-forth

            on the heavy loom.

            I looked out on the cloudless sky,

            the golden streets, the gardens,

      25  and, far off, the sea here and mountains there.

            No mortal tongue can tell

            all that I felt.

               What light thoughts,

            what hopes, what hearts, my Silvia!

      30  What human life and fate

            were to us then!

            When I remember so much hope

            I’m overcome,

            bitter, inconsolable,

      35  and rage against my own ill luck.

            O Nature, Nature,

            why don’t you deliver later

            what you promised then? Why do you lead on

            your children so?

      40     You, before winter had withered the grass,

            stricken then overcome by hidden sickness,

            died, gentle girl. You didn’t see

            your years come into flower.

            Sweet flattery about your raven hair

      45  or your beguiling, guarded glance

            never melted your heart,

            and on holidays you never talked

            about love with your friends.

               Before long, my sweet hope

      50  died, too; the fates

            denied me youth also.

            Ah, how truly

            past you are,

            dear companion of my innocence,

      55  my much-lamented hope!

            Is this that world? Are these

            the joys, love, deeds, experience

            we spoke so often of?

            Is this man’s fate?

      60  When the truth dawned

            you fell away, poor thing, and from afar

            pointed out cold death

            and a naked grave.

Translated with Tim Parks

XXII

LE RICORDANZE

               Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, io non credea

            Tornare ancor per uso a contemplarvi

            Sul paterno giardino scintillanti,

            E ragionar con voi dalle finestre

        5  Di questo albergo ove abitai fanciullo,

            E delle gioie mie vidi la fine.

            Quante immagini un tempo, e quante fole

            Creommi nel pensier l’aspetto vostro

            E delle luci a voi compagne! allora

      10  Che, tacito, seduto in verde zolla,

            Delle sere io solea passar gran parte

            Mirando il cielo, ed ascoltando il canto

            Della rana rimota alla campagna!

            E la lucciola errava appo le siepi

      15  E in su l’aiuole, susurrando al vento

            I viali odorati, ed i cipressi

            Là nella selva; e sotto al patrio tetto

            Sonavan voci alterne, e le tranquille

            Opre de’ servi. E che pensieri immensi,

      20  Che dolci sogni mi spirò la vista

            Di quel lontano mar, quei monti azzurri,

            Che di qua scopro, e che varcare un giorno

            Io mi pensava, arcani mondi, arcana

            Felicità fingendo al viver mio!

      25  Ignaro del mio fato, e quante volte

            Questa mia vita dolorosa e nuda

            Volentier con la morte avrei cangiato.

               Nè mi diceva il cor che l’età verde

            Sarei dannato a consumare in questo

      30  Natio borgo selvaggio, intra una gente

            Zotica, vil; cui nomi strani, e spesso

            Argomento di riso e di trastullo,

            Son dottrina e saper; che m’odia e fugge,

            Per invidia non già, che non mi tiene

      35  Maggior di se, ma perchè tale estima

            Ch’io mi tenga in cor mio, sebben di fuori

            A persona giammai non ne fo segno.

            Qui passo gli anni, abbandonato, occulto,

            Senz’amor, senza vita; ed aspro a forza

      40  Tra lo stuol de’ malevoli divengo:

            Qui di pietà mi spoglio e di virtudi,

            E sprezzator degli uomini mi rendo,

            Per la greggia ch’ho appresso: e intanto vola

            Il caro tempo giovanil; più caro

      45  Che la fama e l’allor, più che la pura

            Luce del giorno, e lo spirar: ti perdo

            Senza un diletto, inutilmente, in questo

            Soggiorno disumano, intra gli affanni,

            O dell’arida vita unico fiore.

      50     Viene il vento recando il suon dell’ora

            Dalla torre del borgo. Era conforto

            Questo suon, mi rimembra, alle mie notti,

            Quando fanciullo, nella buia stanza,

            Per assidui terrori io vigilava,

      55  Sospirando il mattin. Qui non è cosa

            Ch’io vegga o senta, onde un’immagin dentro

            Non torni, e un dolce rimembrar non sorga.

            Dolce per se; ma con dolor sottentra

            Il pensier del presente, un van desio

      60  Del passato, ancor tristo, e il dire: io fui.

            Quella loggia colà, volta agli estremi

            Raggi del dì; queste dipinte mura,

            Quei figurati armenti, e il Sol che nasce

            Su romita campagna, agli ozi miei

      65  Porser mille diletti allor che al fianco

            M’era, parlando, il mio possente errore

            Sempre, ov’io fossi. In queste sale antiche,

            Al chiaror delle nevi, intorno a queste

            Ampie finestre sibilando il vento,

      70  Rimbombaro i sollazzi e le festose

            Mie voci al tempo che l’acerbo, indegno

            Mistero delle cose a noi si mostra

            Pien di dolcezza; indelibata, intera

            Il garzoncel, come inesperto amante,

      75  La sua vita ingannevole vagheggia,

            E celeste beltà fingendo ammira.

               O speranze, speranze; ameni inganni

            Della mia prima età! sempre, parlando,

            Ritorno a voi; che per andar di tempo,

      80  Per variar d’affetti e di pensieri,

            Obbliarvi non so. Fantasmi, intendo,

            Son la gloria e l’onor; diletti e beni

            Mero desio; non ha la vita un frutto,

            Inutile miseria. E sebben vóti

      85  Son gli anni miei, sebben deserto, oscuro

            Il mio stato mortal, poco mi toglie

            La fortuna, ben veggo. Ahi, ma qualvolta

            A voi ripenso, o mie speranze antiche,

            Ed a quel caro immaginar mio primo;

      90  Indi riguardo il viver mio sì vile

            E sì dolente, e che la morte è quello

            Che di cotanta speme oggi m’avanza;

            Sento serrarmi il cor, sento ch’al tutto

            Consolarmi non so del mio destino.

      95  E quando pur questa invocata morte

            Sarammi allato, e sarà giunto il fine

            Della sventura mia; quando la terra

            Mi fia straniera valle, e dal mio sguardo

            Fuggirà l’avvenir; di voi per certo

    100  Risovverrammi; e quell’imago ancora

            Sospirar mi farà, farammi acerbo

            L’esser vissuto indarno, e la dolcezza

            Del dì fatal tempererà d’affanno.

               E già nel primo giovanil tumulto

    105  Di contenti, d’angosce e di desio,

            Morte chiamai più volte, e lungamente

            Mi sedetti colà su la fontana

            Pensoso di cessar dentro quell’acque

            La speme e il dolor mio. Poscia, per cieco

    110  Malor, condotto della vita in forse,

            Piansi la bella giovanezza, e il fiore

            De’ miei poveri dì, che sì per tempo

            Cadeva: e spesso all’ore tarde, assiso

            Sul conscio letto, dolorosamente

    115  Alla fioca lucerna poetando,

            Lamentai co’ silenzi e con la notte

            Il fuggitivo spirto, ed a me stesso

            In sul languir cantai funereo canto.

               Chi rimembrar vi può senza sospiri,

    120  O primo entrar di giovinezza, o giorni

            Vezzosi, inenarrabili, allor quando

            Al rapito mortal primieramente

            Sorridon le donzelle; a gara intorno

            Ogni cosa sorride; invidia tace,

    125  Non desta ancora ovver benigna; e quasi

            (Inusitata maraviglia!) il mondo

            La destra soccorrevole gli porge,

            Scusa gli errori suoi, festeggia il novo

            Suo venir nella vita, ed inchinando

    130  Mostra che per signor l’accolga e chiami?

            Fugaci giorni! a somigliar d’un lampo

            Son dileguati. E qual mortale ignaro

            Di sventura esser può, se a lui già scorsa

            Quella vaga stagion, se il suo buon tempo,

    135  Se giovanezza, ahi giovanezza, è spenta?

               O Nerina! e di te forse non odo

            Questi luoghi parlar? caduta forse

            Dal mio pensier sei tu? Dove sei gita,

            Che qui sola di te la ricordanza

    140  Trovo, dolcezza mia? Più non ti vede

            Questa Terra natal: quella finestra,

            Ond’eri usata favellarmi, ed onde

            Mesto riluce delle stelle il raggio,

            È deserta. Ove sei, che più non odo

    145  La tua voce sonar, siccome un giorno,

            Quando soleva ogni lontano accento

            Del labbro tuo, ch’a me giungesse, il volto

            Scolorarmi? Altro tempo. I giorni tuoi

            Furo, mio dolce amor. Passasti. Ad altri

    150  Il passar per la terra oggi è sortito,

            E l’abitar questi odorati colli.

            Ma rapida passasti; e come un sogno

            Fu la tua vita. Ivi danzando; in fronte

            La gioia ti splendea, splendea negli occhi

    155  Quel confidente immaginar, quel lume

            Di gioventù, quando spegneali il fato,

            E giacevi. Ahi Nerina! In cor mi regna

            L’antico amor. Se a feste anco talvolta,

            Se a radunanze io movo, infra me stesso

    160  Dico: o Nerina, a radunanze, a feste

            Tu non ti acconci più, tu più non movi.

            Se torna maggio, e ramoscelli e suoni

            Van gli amanti recando alle fanciulle,

            Dico: Nerina mia, per te non torna

    165  Primavera giammai, non torna amore.

            Ogni giorno sereno, ogni fiorita

            Piaggia ch’io miro, ogni goder ch’io sento,

            Dico: Nerina or più non gode; i campi,

            L’aria non mira. Ahi tu passasti, eterno

    170  Sospiro mio: passasti: e fia compagna

            D’ogni mio vago immaginar, di tutti

            I miei teneri sensi, i tristi e cari

            Moti del cor, la rimembranza acerba.

XXII

THE RECOLLECTIONS

               Shimmering stars of the Bear, I never thought

            that I’d be back again to see you shine

            over my father’s garden,

            and talk with you from the windows

        5  of this house I lived in as a child,

            where I saw my happiness come to an end.

            How many images, how many fantasies

            seeing you and your companion-lights

            created in my mind

      10  when, sitting on the grass,

            I used to spend a good part of the evening

            watching the sky, and listening to the song

            of the frog out in the countryside.

            And the firefly floated over the hedges

      15  and flower beds, while the perfumed avenues

            and the cypresses there in the grove

            whispered in the wind, and I heard voices

            under my father’s roof, and the servants

            peaceably at work. And what immense ideas,

      20  what tender dreams the sight of that far sea

            inspired in me, those blue hills I can see

            from here and planned to cross one day

            as I invented secret worlds,

            hidden gladness in my life!

      25  ignorant of my fate and of how often

            I would gladly have exchanged

            this sad and barren life of mine with death.

               Nor did my heart tell me that I’d be condemned

            to waste my green age here in this barbaric

      30  native place of mine, among a rude, low people

            for whom learning and wisdom are strange notions,

            and often the occasion

            of ridicule and sport, who hate and shun me,

            not really out of envy, for they don’t feel

      35  I’m better than they are, but because they sense

            I think so in my heart, though outwardly

            I make no sign of this to anyone.

            I spend my years secluded here, shut in,

            with no love and no life, and against my will

      40  turn hard toward the crowd of my ill-wishers:

            I strip myself of gentleness and kindness,

            becoming someone who despises men,

            thanks to the herd around me. And all the while

            youth’s beloved moment flies, more dear

      45  than fame and laurel, dearer than the simple

            light of day and breath: O single flower

            of my arid life, I’m losing you

            joylessly, for no good reason,

            in this inhuman place beset by suffering.

      50     The wind comes, with the hour that tolls

            from the town tower. This sound, I can recall,

            was a comfort to my nights,

            when as a child I lay in my dark room

            prey to unrelenting terrors, sighing for morning.

      55  There’s nothing here I see or feel

            but that some image doesn’t live in me again,

            some sweet memory come to light.

            Sweet in itself; but knowledge of the present

            replaces it with pain, and a vain desire

      60  for the past, however sad, and the wish

            to say: I was. That loggia there, which faces

            the day’s last rays, these painted walls,

            those pictured herds, and the Sun that rises

            over lonely country, offered a thousand

      65  pleasures as I lay with my omnipotent

            imagination, ever eloquent

            and always with me. In these ancient rooms

            reflecting the snow’s brightness, with the wind

            whistling in these wide windows,

      70  the sound of games and my glad shouting

            echoed in the moment when the cruel,

            unworthy mystery of things appears to us

            as full of sweetness. The young boy,

            like an untried lover, fantasizes

      75  his illusionary life intact, untasted,

            and wonders, dreaming of celestial beauty.

               Hopes, hopes: O bright illusions

            of my early years! Whenever I talk

            I come around to you, for though time passes

      80  and affections and ideas change,

            I can’t forget you. Yes, I understand

            glory and honor are phantoms;

            joys and things mere wishes; life produces nothing,

            only senseless suffering. Yet though my years

      85  are empty, though my mortal life

            is barren and lightless, I can see

            that fate’s depriving me of little.

            Yet sometimes I think back on you, old hopes of mine,

            and my sweet first imagining, and then

      90  I look at my life, so purposeless, so painful,

            and see that death

            is what remains for me of so much hope.

            I feel my heart break, and I’m totally

            inconsolable about my fate.

      95  And when at last this death I’ve prayed for

            is upon me and the end

            of my misadventure will have come,

            when earth will be an unfamiliar valley

            and the future flies from view, I’m sure

    100  I’ll think of you again, and my imagining

            will make me sigh again, will make me bitter

            that I lived in vain, and the sweet release

            of my last day will be alloyed with suffering.

            But already, in the early youthful tumult

    105  of happiness and anguish and desire,

            there were many times I prayed for death,

            and sat long by that fountain there,

            thinking I’d end my hope and suffering

            in its waters. Later, when cruel illness

    110  put my life in danger,

            I wept for lovely youth, and for the best

            of my unhappy days that died so soon.

            And often, sitting late at night

            on the bed that was my witness, miserably

    115  writing poetry by my faint lantern,

            I mourned my fleeting life

            to the quiet night and sang myself

            a song of lamentation, languishing.

               Who can remember you without a sigh,

    120  first entry into youth, delusive,

            unsayable days, when girls first smile

            on an enraptured mortal? Every thing

            competes in smiling, envy holds its tongue,

            either not yet excited or benign,

    125  and it seems (rare miracle!)

            that the world offers him a helping hand,

            forgives his failings,

            celebrates his fresh

            arrival into life, and, with a bow

    130  seems to acknowledge him and call him master.

            Fleeting days! Like lightning they were gone.

            And what mortal can stay unacquainted

            with ill luck once that lovely season’s over,

            once his good time, youth,

    135  ah youth, is spent?

               O Nerina! Isn’t it of you

            I hear these places speaking?

            Could I have possibly forgotten you?

            Where have you gone, that all that I find here

    140  are memories of you, my sweetness?

            This Earth where you were born sees you no more:

            that window where you used to talk to me,

            and which reflects the sad light of the stars,

            is empty. Where are you, that I no longer

    145  hear your voice the way I did,

            when the slightest murmur from your lips

            would turn me pale? Another time.

            Your days are over, my sweet love.

            You’re gone.

    150  Others walk the earth today

            and live in these fragrant hills.

            But you went quickly; and your life

            was like a dream. You danced; joy glistened

            on your forehead, and that confident

    155  imagining, the light of youth,

            shone in your eyes,

            till fate extinguished them

            and you fell. Ah, Nerina! The old love

            rules in my heart. If now and then I go

    160  to gatherings or parties, I say to myself:

            O Nerina, you don’t dress your hair for parties,

            you don’t go to gatherings. When May returns

            and boys give flowering branches to their girls

            and sing to them, I say: My Nerina, neither spring

    165  nor love will ever come for you again.

            Each brilliant day, each blooming hill I see,

            whatever I enjoy, I say:

            Nerina enjoys nothing now. She doesn’t see

            the fields, the air. You’re gone,

    170  lifelong regret of mine, you’re gone;

            and the bitter memory will last

            with all my fond imagining, each tender feeling,

            and every sad, sweet motion of my heart.

XXIII

CANTO NOTTURNO DI UN PASTORE ERRANTE DELL’ASIA

               Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai,

            Silenziosa luna?

            Sorgi la sera, e vai,

            Contemplando i deserti; indi ti posi.

        5  Ancor non sei tu paga

            Di riandare i sempiterni calli?

            Ancor non prendi a schivo, ancor sei vaga

            Di mirar queste valli?

            Somiglia alla tua vita

      10  La vita del pastore.

            Sorge in sul primo albore;

            Move la greggia oltre pel campo, e vede

            Greggi, fontane ed erbe;

            Poi stanco si riposa in su la sera:

      15  Altro mai non ispera.

            Dimmi, o luna: a che vale

            Al pastor la sua vita,

            La vostra vita a voi? dimmi: ove tende

            Questo vagar mio breve,

      20  Il tuo corso immortale?

               Vecchierel bianco, infermo,

            Mezzo vestito e scalzo,

            Con gravissimo fascio in su le spalle,

            Per montagna e per valle,

      25  Per sassi acuti, ed alta rena, e fratte,

            Al vento, alla tempesta, e quando avvampa

            L’ora, e quando poi gela,

            Corre via, corre, anela,

            Varca torrenti e stagni,

      30  Cade, risorge, e più e più s’affretta,

            Senza posa o ristoro,

            Lacero, sanguinoso; infin ch’arriva

            Colà dove la via

            E dove il tanto affaticar fu volto:

      35  Abisso orrido, immenso,

            Ov’ei precipitando, il tutto obblia.

            Vergine luna, tale

            È la vita mortale.

               Nasce l’uomo a fatica,

      40  Ed è rischio di morte il nascimento.

            Prova pena e tormento

            Per prima cosa; e in sul principio stesso

            La madre e il genitore

            Il prende a consolar dell’esser nato.

      45  Poi che crescendo viene,

            L’uno e l’altro il sostiene, e via pur sempre

            Con atti e con parole

            Studiasi fargli core,

            E consolarlo dell’umano stato:

      50  Altro ufficio più grato

            Non si fa da parenti alla lor prole.

            Ma perchè dare al sole,

            Perchè reggere in vita

            Chi poi di quella consolar convenga?

      55  Se la vita è sventura,

            Perchè da noi si dura?

            Intatta luna, tale

            È lo stato mortale.

            Ma tu mortal non sei,

      60  E forse del mio dir poco ti cale.

               Pur tu, solinga, eterna peregrina,

            Che sì pensosa sei, tu forse intendi,

            Questo viver terreno,

            Il patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia;

      65  Che sia questo morir, questo supremo

            Scolorar del sembiante,

            E perir dalla terra, e venir meno

            Ad ogni usata, amante compagnia.

            E tu certo comprendi

      70  Il perchè delle cose, e vedi il frutto

            Del mattin, della sera,

            Del tacito, infinito andar del tempo.

            Tu sai, tu certo, a qual suo dolce amore

            Rida la primavera,

      75  A chi giovi l’ardore, e che procacci

            Il verno co’ suoi ghiacci.

            Mille cose sai tu, mille discopri,

            Che son celate al semplice pastore.

            Spesso quand’io ti miro

      80  Star così muta in sul deserto piano,

            Che, in suo giro lontano, al ciel confina;

            Ovver con la mia greggia

            Seguirmi viaggiando a mano a mano;

            E quando miro in cielo arder le stelle;

      85  Dico fra me pensando:

            A che tante facelle?

            Che fa l’aria infinita, e quel profondo

            Infinito seren? che vuol dir questa

            Solitudine immensa? ed io che sono?

      90  Così meco ragiono: e della stanza

            Smisurata e superba,

            E dell’innumerabile famiglia;

            Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti

            D’ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,

      95  Girando senza posa,

            Per tornar sempre là donde son mosse;

            Uso alcuno, alcun frutto

            Indovinar non so. Ma tu per certo,

            Giovinetta immortal, conosci il tutto.

    100  Questo io conosco e sento,

            Che degli eterni giri,

            Che dell’esser mio frale,

            Qualche bene o contento

            Avrà fors’altri; a me la vita è male.

    105     O greggia mia che posi, oh te beata,

            Che la miseria tua, credo, non sai!

            Quanta invidia ti porto!

            Non sol perchè d’affanno

            Quasi libera vai;

    110  Ch’ogni stento, ogni danno,

            Ogni estremo timor subito scordi;

            Ma più perchè giammai tedio non provi.

            Quando tu siedi all’ombra, sovra l’erbe,

            Tu se’ queta e contenta;

    115  E gran parte dell’anno

            Senza noia consumi in quello stato.

            Ed io pur seggo sovra l’erbe, all’ombra,

            E un fastidio m’ingombra

            La mente, ed uno spron quasi mi punge

    120  Sì che, sedendo, più che mai son lunge

            Da trovar pace o loco.

            E pur nulla non bramo,

            E non ho fino a qui cagion di pianto.

            Quel che tu goda o quanto,

    125  Non so già dir; ma fortunata sei.

            Ed io godo ancor poco,

            O greggia mia, nè di ciò sol mi lagno.

            Se tu parlar sapessi, io chiederei:

            Dimmi: perchè giacendo

    130  A bell’agio, ozioso,

            S’appaga ogni animale;

            Me, s’io giaccio in riposo, il tedio assale?

               Forse s’avess’io l’ale

            Da volar su le nubi,

    135  E noverar le stelle ad una ad una,

            O come il tuono errar di giogo in giogo,

            Più felice sarei, dolce mia greggia,

            Più felice sarei, candida luna.

            O forse erra dal vero,

    140  Mirando all’altrui sorte, il mio pensiero:

            Forse in qual forma, in quale

            Stato che sia, dentro covile o cuna,

            È funesto a chi nasce il dì natale.

XXIII

NIGHT SONG OF A WANDERING SHEPHERD IN ASIA

               What are you doing, moon, up in the sky;

            what are you doing, tell me, silent moon?

            You rise at night and go,

            observing the deserts. Then you set.

        5  Aren’t you tired

            of plying the eternal byways?

            Aren’t you bored? Do you still want

            to look down on these valleys?

            The shepherd’s life

      10  is like your life.

            He rises at first light,

            moves his flock across the fields, and sees

            sheep, springs, and grass,

            then, weary, rests at evening,

      15  and hopes for nothing more.

            Tell me, moon, what good

            is the shepherd’s life to him

            or yours to you? Tell me: where is it tending,

            my brief wandering,

      20  your immortal journey?

               Little old white-haired man,

            weak, half naked, barefoot,

            with an enormous burden on his back,

            up mountain and down valley,

      25  over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken,

            through wind and storm,

            in burning, freezing weather,

            runs on, running till he’s out of breath,

            crosses rivers, wades through swamps,

      30  falls and climbs and rushes on

            ever faster, no rest or relief,

            battered, bloodied; till at last he comes

            to where his way

            and all his effort led him:

      35  terrible, immense abyss

            into which he falls, forgetting everything.

            This, O virgin moon,

            is human life.

               Man is born by labor,

      40  and birth itself means risking death.

            The first thing that he feels

            is pain and torment, and from the start

            mother and father

            seek to comfort him for being born.

      45  As he grows,

            they nurture him,

            and constantly by word and deed

            seek to instill courage,

            consoling him for being human.

      50  Parents can do no more loving

            thing for their children.

            But why bring to light,

            why educate

            someone we’ll console for living later?

      55  If life is misery,

            why do we endure it?

            This, unblemished moon,

            is mortal nature.

            But you’re not mortal,

      60  and what I say may matter little to you.

               Yet you, eternal solitary wanderer,

            you who are so pensive,

            understand this life on earth, perhaps,

            what our suffering and sighing is,

      65  what this death is, this last

            paling of the face,

            and leaving earth behind, deserting

            all familiar, loving company.

            And certainly you comprehend

      70  the why of things, and see the usefulness

            of morning, evening,

            and the silent, endless pace of time.

            Certainly you know for whose sweet love

            spring smiles,

      75  who enjoys the heat,

            and what winter and its ice are for.

            You know and understand a thousand things

            that are hidden to a simple shepherd.

            Often, when I watch you

      80  standing still above the empty plain

            whose last horizon closes with the sky,

            or moving with me step by step

            as I wander with my flock,

            or when I see the stars burn up in heaven,

      85  I ask myself:

            Why all these lights?

            What does the endless air do, and that deep

            eternal blue? What is the meaning of

            this enormous solitude? And what am I?

      90  I ask myself: about this boundless,

            wondrous space

            and its numberless inhabitants,

            and all these works and all this movement

            of all heavenly and earthly things,

      95  revolving without rest,

            only to return to where they started;

            any purpose, any usefulness

            I cannot see. But you, immortal maiden,

            surely understand it all.

    100  This I know and feel:

            that from the eternal motions,

            from my fragile being,

            others may derive

            some good or gladness; life for me is wrong.

    105     O resting flock of mine, you blessed beings,

            who don’t, I think, know your own misery!

            How I envy you!

            Not just because you travel

            as if nearly trouble-free

    110  and soon forget each need, each pain,

            each deathly fear,

            but more because you’re never bored.

            When you lie down in the shade,

            on the grass, you’re calm, content,

    115  and so you spend the great part of the year

            and feel no boredom.

            I sit on the grass, too, in the shade,

            but an anxiousness invades my mind

            as if a thorn were pricking me,

    120  so that sitting there I’m even further

            from finding peace or resting place.

            Yet I want nothing, and so far

            I have no reason for complaint.

            What you enjoy or how,

    125  I can’t say, but you’re fortunate.

            I enjoy much less, O flock of mine,

            but it’s not only this I mourn.

            If you could speak, I’d ask you:

            Tell me why it is

    130  all animals are happy

            resting, at ease, while I, if I lie down,

            am plagued with tedium?

               Maybe if I had wings

            to fly above the clouds

    135  and count the stars out one by one,

            or, like thunder, graze from peak to peak,

            I’d be happier, my gentle flock,

            happier, bright moon.

            Or maybe my mind’s straying from the truth,

    140  imagining the destinies of others.

            Maybe in whatever form or state,

            be it in stall or cradle,

            the day we’re born is cause for mourning.

XXIV

LA QUIETE DOPO LA TEMPESTA

               Passata è la tempesta:

            Odo augelli far festa, e la gallina,

            Tornata in su la via,

            Che ripete il suo verso. Ecco il sereno

        5  Rompe là da ponente, alla montagna;

            Sgombrasi la campagna,

            E chiaro nella valle il fiume appare.

            Ogni cor si rallegra, in ogni lato

            Risorge il romorio

      10  Torna il lavoro usato.

            L’artigiano a mirar l’umido cielo,

            Con l’opra in man, cantando,

            Fassi in su l’uscio; a prova

            Vien fuor la femminetta a còr dell’acqua

      15  Della novella piova;

            E l’erbaiuol rinnova

            Di sentiero in sentiero

            Il grido giornaliero.

            Ecco il Sol che ritorna, ecco sorride

      20  Per li poggi e le ville. Apre i balconi,

            Apre terrazzi e logge la famiglia:

            E, dalla via corrente, odi lontano

            Tintinnio di sonagli; il carro stride

            Del passegger che il suo cammin ripiglia.

      25     Si rallegra ogni core.

            Sì dolce, sì gradita

            Quand’è, com’or, la vita?

            Quando con tanto amore

            L’uomo a’ suoi studi intende?

      30  O torna all’opre? o cosa nova imprende?

            Quando de’ mali suoi men si ricorda?

            Piacer figlio d’affanno;

            Gioia vana, ch’è frutto

            Del passato timore, onde si scosse

      35  E paventò la morte

            Chi la vita abborria;

            Onde in lungo tormento,

            Fredde, tacite, smorte,

            Sudàr le genti e palpitàr, vedendo

      40  Mossi alle nostre offese

            Folgori, nembi e vento.

               O natura cortese,

            Son questi i doni tuoi,

            Questi i diletti sono

      45  Che tu porgi ai mortali. Uscir di pena

            È diletto fra noi.

            Pene tu spargi a larga mano; il duolo

            Spontaneo sorge: e di piacer, quel tanto

            Che per mostro e miracolo talvolta

      50  Nasce d’affanno, è gran guadagno. Umana

            Prole cara agli eterni! assai felice

            Se respirar ti lice

            D’alcun dolor: beata

            Se te d’ogni dolor morte risana.

XXIV

THE CALM AFTER THE STORM

               The storm is over:

            I hear birds rejoicing, and the hen

            is back in the road,

            rehearsing her song. See, the brightness

        5  breaks through in the west, above the hills.

            The countryside unveils,

            and the river shimmers in the valley.

            Every heart is happy,

            and everywhere the hum revives,

      10  the day’s work starts anew.

            The artisan comes to his door

            singing, with his work in hand,

            and stares up at the glistening sky. The young girl

            rushes out to gather

      15  fresh rainwater,

            and the vegetable seller cries

            his daily cry again

            from lane to lane.

            Here’s the Sun returning, see him smile

      20  on hills and farms. The servants

            open windows, terraces, and loggias.

            And from the highway I can hear

            bells chiming in the distance; the carriage shrieks

            as the traveler sets off again.

      25     Every heart is happy.

            When is life as sweet,

            as much enjoyed as now?

            When does a man attend to what he does

            with such devotion,

      30  return to work, or take up something new?

            When is he less conscious of his troubles?

            Pleasure, child of suffering,

            empty joy, effect

            of dread that’s past

      35  which made the man who hated life

            tremble with fear of death,

            which turned the people

            cold and mute and pale

            and made them sweat and shiver in long torment

      40  seeing lightning, clouds, and wind

            arrayed against us.

               O gentle Nature,

            these are what you give us,

            these are the delights

      45  you offer mortals. Surcease from suffering

            is happiness for us.

            You dole pain with a liberal hand: grieving

            rises spontaneous, and the brief enjoyment

            that now and then by miracle and marvel

      50  is born of anguish, is great gain.

            Race of men beloved of the immortals!

            Happy indeed if you’re allowed

            respite from sorrow, blessed when

            death cures you of all sorrow.

XXV

IL SABATO DEL VILLAGGIO

               La donzelletta vien dalla campagna,

            In sul calar del sole,

            Col suo fascio dell’erba; e reca in mano

            Un mazzolin di rose e di viole,

        5  Onde, siccome suole,

            Ornare ella si appresta

            Dimani, al dì di festa, il petto e il crine.

            Siede con le vicine

            Su la scala a filar la vecchierella,

      10  Incontro là dove si perde il giorno;

            E novellando vien del suo buon tempo,

            Quando ai dì della festa ella si ornava,

            Ed ancor sana e snella

            Solea danzar la sera intra di quei

      15  Ch’ebbe compagni dell’età più bella.

            Già tutta l’aria imbruna,

            Torna azzurro il sereno, e tornan l’ombre

            Giù da’ colli e da’ tetti,

            Al biancheggiar della recente luna.

      20  Or la squilla dà segno

            Della festa che viene;

            Ed a quel suon diresti

            Che il cor si riconforta.

            I fanciulli gridando

      25  Su la piazzuola in frotta,

            E qua e là saltando,

            Fanno un lieto romore:

            E intanto riede alla sua parca mensa,

            Fischiando, il zappatore,

      30  E seco pensa al dì del suo riposo.

               Poi quando intorno è spenta ogni altra face,

            E tutto l’altro tace,

            Odi il martel picchiare, odi la sega

            Del legnaiuol, che veglia

      35  Nella chiusa bottega alla lucerna,

            E s’affretta, e s’adopra

            Di fornir l’opra anzi il chiarir dell’alba.

               Questo di sette è il più gradito giorno,

            Pien di speme e di gioia:

      40  Diman tristezza e noia

            Recheran l’ore, ed al travaglio usato

            Ciascuno in suo pensier farà ritorno.

               Garzoncello scherzoso,

            Cotesta età fiorita

      45  È come un giorno d’allegrezza pieno,

            Giorno chiaro, sereno,

            Che precorre alla festa di tua vita.

            Godi, fanciullo mio; stato soave,

            Stagion lieta è cotesta.

      50  Altro dirti non vo’; ma la tua festa

            Ch’anco tardi a venir non ti sia grave.

XXV

SATURDAY IN THE VILLAGE

               The young girl comes in from the country

            as the sun is setting, carrying

            her sheaf of grass, and in her hand

            she holds a bunch of violets and roses

        5  that, as always, she intends to use

            to decorate her breast and hair

            tomorrow, on the holiday.

            The little old crone sits on the stairs

            and spins with her neighbors,

      10  facing where day is dying,

            and goes on telling stories of her good times,

            when she adorned herself on Sundays, too,

            and danced the night away,

            still light and lithe,

      15  in her salad days, with all her beaux.

            Now the air is darkening everywhere,

            the sky turns blue again, and shadows

            fall again from hills and roofs,

            while the new moon goes white.

      20  Now the bell announces

            the coming holiday,

            and you could say the heart

            takes comfort at the sound.

            The crowd of children

      25  shouting in the little square

            and running everywhere

            make happy noises,

            while the cobbler

            goes home, whistling, to his frugal meal,

      30  looking forward to his day of rest.

               Later, when every other light around is out,

            and everything beside is still,

            you hear the beating hammer and the saw

            of the carpenter,

      35  up late in his shuttered shop,

            hurrying as he works by lantern light

            to have his job done before dawn.

               This day is the most welcome of the seven,

            alive with hope and joy.

      40  Tomorrow time again will bring

            sadness and boredom, and everyone

            will turn back to his same preoccupations.

               Playful boy,

            this time in bloom

      45  is like a day alive with happiness:

            bright day, bright blue prelude

            to the feast day of your life.

            Enjoy it, child of mine: it is a gentle

            hour, a radiant moment.

      50  I won’t say more, but may your Sunday

            that’s so slow to come not disappoint you.

XXVI

IL PENSIERO DOMINANTE

               Dolcissimo, possente

            Dominator di mia profonda mente;

            Terribile, ma caro

            Dono del ciel; consorte

        5  Ai lúgubri miei giorni,

            Pensier che innanzi a me sì spesso torni.

               Di tua natura arcana

            Chi non favella? il suo poter fra noi

            Chi non sentì? Pur sempre

      10  Che in dir gli effetti suoi

            Le umane lingue il sentir propio sprona,

            Par novo ad ascoltar ciò ch’ei ragiona.

               Come solinga è fatta

            La mente mia d’allora

      15  Che tu quivi prendesti a far dimora!

            Ratto d’intorno intorno al par del lampo

            Gli altri pensieri miei

            Tutti si dileguàr. Siccome torre

            In solitario campo,

      20  Tu stai solo, gigante, in mezzo a lei.

               Che divenute son, fuor di te solo,

            Tutte l’opre terrene,

            Tutta intera la vita al guardo mio!

            Che intollerabil noia

      25  Gli ozi, i commerci usati,

            E di vano piacer la vana spene,

            Allato a quella gioia,

            Gioia celeste che da te mi viene!

               Come da’ nudi sassi

      30  Dello scabro Apennino

            A un campo verde che lontan sorrida

            Volge gli occhi bramoso il pellegrino;

            Tal io dal secco ed aspro

            Mondano conversar vogliosamente,

      35  Quasi in lieto giardino, a te ritorno,

            E ristora i miei sensi il tuo soggiorno.

               Quasi incredibil parmi

            Che la vita infelice e il mondo sciocco

            Già per gran tempo assai

      40  Senza te sopportai;

            Quasi intender non posso

            Come d’altri desiri,

            Fuor ch’a te somiglianti, altri sospiri.

               Giammai d’allor che in pria

      45  Questa vita che sia per prova intesi,

            Timor di morte non mi strinse il petto.

            Oggi mi pare un gioco

            Quella che il mondo inetto,

            Talor lodando, ognora abborre e trema,

      50  Necessitade estrema;

            E se periglio appar, con un sorriso

            Le sue minacce a contemplar m’affiso.

               Sempre i codardi, e l’alme

            Ingenerose, abbiette

      55  Ebbi in dispregio. Or punge ogni atto indegno

            Subito i sensi miei;

            Move l’alma ogni esempio

            Dell’umana viltà subito a sdegno.

            Di questa età superba,

      60  Che di vote speranze si nutrica,

            Vaga di ciance, e di virtù nemica;

            Stolta, che l’util chiede,

            E inutile la vita

            Quindi più sempre divenir non vede;

      65  Maggior mi sento. A scherno

            Ho gli umani giudizi; e il vario volgo

            A’ bei pensieri infesto,

            E degno tuo disprezzator, calpesto.

               A quello onde tu movi,

      70  Quale affetto non cede?

            Anzi qual altro affetto

            Se non quell’uno intra i mortali ha sede?

            Avarizia, superbia, odio, disdegno,

            Studio d’onor, di regno,

      75  Che sono altro che voglie

            Al paragon di lui? Solo un affetto

            Vive tra noi: quest’uno,

            Prepotente signore,

            Dieder l’eterne leggi all’uman core.

      80     Pregio non ha, non ha ragion la vita

            Se non per lui, per lui ch’all’uomo è tutto;

            Sola discolpa al fato,

            Che noi mortali in terra

            Pose a tanto patir senz’altro frutto;

      85  Solo per cui talvolta,

            Non alla gente stolta, al cor non vile

            La vita della morte è più gentile.

               Per còr le gioie tue, dolce pensiero,

            Provar gli umani affanni,

      90  E sostener molt’anni

            Questa vita mortal, fu non indegno;

            Ed ancor tornerei,

            Così qual son de’ nostri mali esperto,

            Verso un tal segno a incominciare il corso:

      95  Che tra le sabbie e tra il vipereo morso,

            Giammai finor sì stanco

            Per lo mortal deserto

            Non venni a te, che queste nostre pene

            Vincer non mi paresse un tanto bene.

    100     Che mondo mai, che nova

            Immensità, che paradiso è quello

            Là dove spesso il tuo stupendo incanto

            Parmi innalzar! dov’io,

            Sott’altra luce che l’usata errando,

    105  Il mio terreno stato

            E tutto quanto il ver pongo in obblio!

            Tali son, credo, i sogni

            Degl’immortali. Ahi finalmente un sogno

            In molta parte onde s’abbella il vero

    110  Sei tu, dolce pensiero;

            Sogno e palese error. Ma di natura,

            Infra i leggiadri errori,

            Divina sei; perchè sì viva e forte,

            Che incontro al ver tenacemente dura,

    115  E spesso al ver s’adegua,

            Nè si dilegua pria, che in grembo a morte.

               E tu per certo, o mio pensier, tu solo

            Vitale ai giorni miei,

            Cagion diletta d’infiniti affanni,

    120  Meco sarai per morte a un tempo spento:

            Ch’a vivi segni dentro l’alma io sento

            Che in perpetuo signor dato mi sei.

            Altri gentili inganni

            Soleami il vero aspetto

    125  Più sempre infievolir. Quanto più torno

            A riveder colei

            Della qual teco ragionando io vivo,

            Cresce quel gran diletto,

            Cresce quel gran delirio, ond’io respiro.

    130  Angelica beltade!

            Parmi ogni più bel volto, ovunque io miro,

            Quasi una finta imago

            Il tuo volto imitar. Tu sola fonte

            D’ogni altra leggiadria,

    135  Sola vera beltà parmi che sia.

               Da che ti vidi pria,

            Di qual mia seria cura ultimo obbietto

            Non fosti tu? quanto del giorno è scorso,

            Ch’io di te non pensassi? ai sogni miei

    140  La tua sovrana imago

            Quante volte mancò? Bella qual sogno,

            Angelica sembianza,

            Nella terrena stanza,

            Nell’alte vie dell’universo intero,

    145  Che chiedo io mai, che spero

            Altro che gli occhi tuoi veder più vago?

            Altro più dolce aver che il tuo pensiero?

XXVI

THE DOMINANT IDEA

               Sweetest, potent

            lord of my deep mind,

            terrible but precious

            gift of heaven, companion of

        5  my grieving days,

            idea that recurs to me so often.

               Who doesn’t speak

            of your mysterious nature?

            Who hasn’t felt its power among us?

      10  Yet, whenever their emotion

            moves men to explain your influence,

            what they have to say seems new to hear.

               How unitary

            has my mind become

      15  since you took up residence.

            As swift as lightning

            every other thought of mine

            vanished everywhere around.

            Like a tower in an empty field,

      20  you stand alone, gigantic, in my thinking.

               What are they in my eyes now

            next to you,

            all earthly works, the whole of life!

            What intolerable boredom

      25  are idleness and small talk

            and the empty hope for empty pleasure,

            next to the joy, the heavenly joy

            that comes to me from you!

               As from the barren boulders

      30  of the craggy Apennine

            the pilgrim turns his eager eyes

            toward a green field smiling in the distance,

            so I from arid, acrid,

            worldly chatter willingly

      35  return to you as to a joyous garden,

            and my stay with you restores my senses.

               It seems almost incredible to me

            that I endured unhappy life

            and the idiotic world

      40  so long without you.

            I can barely understand

            how another man can sigh

            desiring something else that isn’t like you.

               Before this I had no experience

      45  that told me what this world is like,

            fear of dying didn’t grip my heart.

            Today extreme necessity,

            which the inept world abhors and dreads,

            though they sometimes praise it,

      50  seems ridiculous.

            And if danger comes, I steel myself

            to contemplate its menace with a smile.

               I’ve always had contempt

            for cowards and ungenerous, mean spirits.

      55  Now each unworthy act offends me instantly;

            every type of human baseness

            swiftly moves my spirit to disdain.

            I disdain this prideful age,

            which feeds itself on empty hopes,

      60  in love with slogans, enemy of virtue,

            this foolish age, which wants what’s useful

            and so doesn’t see that life

            is becoming constantly more useless.

            I feel superior, and have contempt

      65  for human judgment; and the motley crowd,

            the enemies of beautiful ideas

            who by nature denigrate you,

            I trample on.

               What love doesn’t give up pride of place

      70  to the one from which you move?

            Indeed, what other love holds sway

            among mortal men but this?

            Greed, pride, hatred, and disdain,

            desire for honor and the crown—

      75  what are these but vulgar hankerings

            compared to it? One love alone

            lives among us: the eternal laws

            gave this one to the human heart,

            as its all-commanding lord.

      80     Life has no worth, no reason

            except this, which is everything to man.

            In itself, it exculpates

            fate, which put us mortals here on earth

            to suffer so much for no other reason.

      85  Only because of this sometimes,

            not for the foolish but the valiant heart,

            can life be more beautiful than death.

               To harvest your joys, sweet idea,

            it was worth knowing human suffering,

      90  worth enduring

            this mortal life for all these years.

            And I’d come back again,

            I who am so expert in our pain,

            to take the road again to such a goal.

      95  For never till now did I journey to you

            across the mortal desert,

            among its sands and stinging vipers,

            so worn out that vanquishing

            these pains of ours did not seem a great good.

    100     What a world, what new immensity,

            what a paradise it is

            your overwhelming magic

            often seems to raise me to! Where, wandering

            in another light than the usual,

    105  I forget my earthly nature

            and everything that’s real!

            Such are the immortals’ dreams, I think.

            In the end, alas, in many ways,

            you are a dream through which reality

    110  becomes lovelier, sweet idea,

            dream and patent error. But by nature,

            among the pleasing errors you’re divine;

            because you’re so alive and strong

            that you hold up against the truth;

    115  and often you do seem to be the truth,

            and won’t fade till we’re in the lap of death.

               But surely, O idea of mine,

            you alone essential to my days,

            beloved cause of endless suffering,

    120  you’ll be undone by death along with me:

            for from strong signals in my soul I feel

            you’re given to me as my lord forever.

            Other sweet illusions

            would always weaken

    125  the way that truth appeared to me.

            But the more that I return

            to see her whom I spend my life

            telling you about, the more the great joy grows,

            the more that great delirium grows

    130  by which I breathe. Angelic beauty!

            Every lovely face, wherever I look,

            seems like an image made

            in imitation of your face.

            You, only source of every other grace,

    135  you seem to me to be the one true beauty.

               Since I first saw you,

            what has the greatest object of my interest

            been, but you? How much of the day

            went by without my thinking of you?

    140  How often was your sovereign image

            missing from my dreams?

            Lovely as a dream, angelic semblance,

            in our earthly home or on the highways

            of the entire universe,

    145  what more can I ask, what can I hope for,

            but to see your eyes more radiant,

            what is sweeter than the thought of you?

XXVII

AMORE E MORTE

ν ο ο ϕιλοσιν, πονήσι υέος.

Muor giovane colui ch’al cielo è caro.

MENANDRO

               Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte

            Ingenerò la sorte.

            Cose quaggiù sì belle

            Altre il mondo non ha, non han le stelle.

        5  Nasce dall’uno il bene,

            Nasce il piacer maggiore

            Che per lo mar dell’essere si trova;

            L’altra ogni gran dolore,

            Ogni gran male annulla.

      10  Bellissima fanciulla,

            Dolce a veder, non quale

            La si dipinge la codarda gente,

            Gode il fanciullo Amore

            Accompagnar sovente;

      15  E sorvolano insiem la via mortale,

            Primi conforti d’ogni saggio core.

            Nè cor fu mai più saggio

            Che percosso d’amor, nè mai più forte

            Sprezzò l’infausta vita,

            Nè per altro signore

            Come per questo a perigliar fu pronto:

            Ch’ove tu porgi aita,

            Amor, nasce il coraggio,

            O si ridesta; e sapiente in opre,

      25  Non in pensiero invan, siccome suole,

            Divien l’umana prole.

               Quando novellamente

            Nasce nel cor profondo

            Un amoroso affetto,

      30  Languido e stanco insiem con esso in petto

            Un desiderio di morir si sente:

            Come, non so: ma tale

            D’amor vero e possente è il primo effetto.

            Forse gli occhi spaura

      35  Allor questo deserto: a se la terra

            Forse il mortale inabitabil fatta

            Vede omai senza quella

            Nova, sola, infinita

            Felicità che il suo pensier figura:

      40  Ma per cagion di lei grave procella

            Presentendo in suo cor, brama quiete,

            Brama raccorsi in porto

            Dinanzi al fier disio,

            Che già, rugghiando, intorno intorno oscura.

      45     Poi, quando tutto avvolge

            La formidabil possa,

            E fulmina nel cor l’invitta cura,

            Quante volte implorata

            Con desiderio intenso,

      50  Morte, sei tu dall’affannoso amante!

            Quante la sera, e quante

            Abbandonando all’alba il corpo stanco,

            Se beato chiamò s’indi giammai

            Non rilevasse il fianco,

      55  Nè tornasse a veder l’amara luce!

            E spesso al suon della funebre squilla,

            Al canto che conduce

            La gente morta al sempiterno obblio,

            Con più sospiri ardenti

      60  Dall’imo petto invidiò colui

            Che tra gli spenti ad abitar sen giva.

            Fin la negletta plebe,

            L’uom della villa, ignaro

            D’ogni virtù che da saper deriva,

      65  Fin la donzella timidetta e schiva,

            Che già di morte al nome

            Sentì rizzar le chiome,

            Osa alla tomba, alle funeree bende

            Fermar lo sguardo di costanza pieno,

      70  Osa ferro e veleno

            Meditar lungamente,

            E nell’indotta mente

            La gentilezza del morir comprende.

            Tanto alla morte inclina

      75  D’amor la disciplina. Anco sovente,

            A tal venuto il gran travaglio interno

            Che sostener nol può forza mortale,

            O cede il corpo frale

            Ai terribili moti, e in questa forma

      80  Pel fraterno poter Morte prevale;

            O così sprona Amor là nel profondo,

            Che da se stessi il villanello ignaro,

            La tenera donzella

            Con la man violenta

      85  Pongon le membra giovanili in terra.

            Ride ai lor casi il mondo,

            A cui pace e vecchiezza il ciel consenta.

               Ai fervidi, ai felici,

            Agli animosi ingegni

      90  L’uno o l’altro di voi conceda il fato,

            Dolci signori, amici

            All’umana famiglia,

            Al cui poter nessun poter somiglia

            Nell’immenso universo, e non l’avanza,

      95  Se non quella del fato, altra possanza.

            E tu, cui già dal cominciar degli anni

            Sempre onorata invoco,

            Bella Morte, pietosa

            Tu sola al mondo dei terreni affanni,

    100  Se celebrata mai

            Fosti da me, s’al tuo divino stato

            L’onte del volgo ingrato

            Ricompensar tentai,

            Non tardar più, t’inchina

    105  A disusati preghi,

            Chiudi alla luce omai

            Questi occhi tristi, o dell’età reina.

            Me certo troverai, qual si sia l’ora

            Che tu le penne al mio pregar dispieghi,

    110  Erta la fronte, armato,

            E renitente al fato,

            La man che flagellando si colora

            Nel mio sangue innocente

            Non ricolmar di lode,

    115  Non benedir, com’usa

            Per antica viltà l’umana gente;

            Ogni vana speranza onde consola

            Se coi fanciulli il mondo,

            Ogni conforto stolto

    120  Gittar da me; null’altro in alcun tempo

            Sperar, se non te sola;

            Solo aspettar sereno

            Quel dì ch’io pieghi addormentato il volto

            Nel tuo virgineo seno.

XXVII

LOVE AND DEATH

ν ο ο ϕιλοσιν, πονήσι υέος.

He whom the gods love dies young.

MENANDER

               Fate gave birth at one and the same time

            to two siblings, Love and Death.

            No other thing as fair

            exists down here, or in the stars above.

        5  Good is born of one,

            the greatest pleasure

            to be found upon the sea of being.

            The other puts an end to all great sorrow,

            each worst wrong.

      10  Often Love, the little boy, is pleased

            to be the playmate of the beauteous girl

            who is delightful to behold,

            not the way the craven crowd portrays her.

            And they fly together

      15  above the mortal highway,

            the first comforts of all knowing hearts.

            Nor was heart ever wiser

            than when struck with love;

            never did it disdain unlucky life

      20  more powerfully, nor was prepared to suffer

            danger for any other lord:

            for when you lend your hand, Love,

            courage is born

            or born again, and human beings

      25  turn wise in action,

            not in empty thought, as is their wont.

               When a loving feeling

            is newborn deep within the heart,

            a languid and exhausted

      30  wish to die arrives

            at the same time,

            I don’t know why; but this

            is the first effect of true and potent love.

            Perhaps this desert terrifies the eyes then,

      35  or the mortal

            finds earth is unlivable

            without this new, unique, unending

            happiness his mind conceives.

            But sensing an ungovernable storm

      40  brewing in his heart because of it,

            he yearns for calm,

            he yearns to come to port

            before his wild desire,

            already roaring, turning the world dark.

      45     Then when the terrifying power

            envelops everything,

            and undefeated fear

            strikes lightning in the heart,

            Death, how often are you called upon

      50  with keen desire by the suffering lover!

            How often in the evening,

            how often nodding off at dawn exhausted,

            would he say he was blessed

            if he never had to move his bones again

      55  or return to see the bitter light!

            And often at the sound of funeral bells,

            the singing that accompanies the dead

            to their perpetual oblivion,

            with many ardent sighs,

      60  deep in his heart he envied him

            who was going to stay with the dead.

            Even simple people,

            peasants, ignorant

            of all the virtues that derive from knowledge,

      65  even the timid, bashful girl

            who feels her hair stand on end

            at the very name of death,

            dares to stare unflinchingly

            at the tomb and widow’s weeds,

      70  dares to meditate at length

            on iron and poison,

            and in her uneducated mind

            knows death’s nobility.

            So the law of love

      75  inclines toward death.

            And often the war within them is so great

            that humans lack the power to resist it.

            Either the frail body

            surrenders to its awful turbulence,

      80  and Death prevails through her sibling’s power,

            or else Love wounds so deeply

            that on their own the ignorant

            farmer or the tender girl

            bring their own young bodies

      85  down by violence.

            The world, which heaven guarantees

            peace and old age, derides their fate.

               May destiny grant

            to fervent, glad, courageous minds

      90  one or the other of you,

            gentle lords,

            the human family’s friends,

            whose power no power

            in the enormous universe can match,

      95  and whom no might surpasses, except fate’s.

            And you, whom from my earliest years

            I’ve always honored,

            lovely Death, you only in the world

            pitying of earthly suffering,

    100  if ever you were praised by me,

            if ever I attempted

            to answer the disdain

            of the ungrateful crowd,

            delay no longer,

    105  answer these uncommon prayers,

            shut these sad eyes now on the light,

            O queen of time.

            Surely you’ll find me, at whatever hour

            you spread your wings in answer to my prayers,

    110  head held high,

            armed, and resisting fate.

            Don’t weigh down with praise

            the hand that, whipping me,

            is colored with my blameless blood;

    115  don’t glorify it as man does,

            out of age-old cowardice.

            Toss away from me

            every vain desire with which the world

            childishly consoles itself,

    120  all foolish comfort. Let me not hope for anything

            at any time but you alone;

            may I simply wait serenely for

            the day I’ll lay my sleeping face

            on your virgin breast.

XXVIII

A SE STESSO

               Or poserai per sempre,

            Stanco mio cor. Perì l’inganno estremo,

            Ch’eterno io mi credei. Perì. Ben sento,

            In noi di cari inganni,

        5  Non che la speme, il desiderio è spento.

            Posa per sempre. Assai

            Palpitasti. Non val cosa nessuna

            I moti tuoi, nè di sospiri è degna

            La terra. Amaro e noia

      10  La vita, altro mai nulla; e fango è il mondo.

            T’acqueta omai. Dispera

            L’ultima volta. Al gener nostro il fato

            Non donò che il morire. Omai disprezza

            Te, la natura, il brutto

      15  Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera,

            E l’infinita vanità del tutto.

XXVIII

TO HIMSELF

               Now you’ll rest forever,

            worn-out heart. The ultimate illusion

            that I thought was eternal died. It died.

            I see not just the hope

        5  but the desire for loved illusions

            is done for us. Be still forever.

            You have beaten long enough.

            Nothing deserves your throbbing, nor is earth

            worth sighing over. Life is merely

      10  bitterness and boredom, and the world is filth.

            Now be calm. Despair for the last time.

            Death is the one thing

            fate gave our kind.

            Disdain yourself now, nature, the brute

      15  hidden power that rules to common harm,

            and the boundless vanity of all.

XXIX

ASPASIA

               Torna dinanzi al mio pensier talora

            Il tuo sembiante, Aspasia. O fuggitivo

            Per abitati lochi a me lampeggia

            In altri volti; o per deserti campi,

        5  Al dì sereno, alle tacenti stelle,

            Da soave armonia quasi ridesta,

            Nell’alma a sgomentarsi ancor vicina

            Quella superba vision risorge.

            Quanto adorata, o numi, e quale un giorno

      10  Mia delizia ed erinni! E mai non sento

            Mover profumo di fiorita piaggia,

            Nè di fiori olezzar vie cittadine,

            Ch’io non ti vegga ancor qual eri il giorno

            Che ne’ vezzosi appartamenti accolta,

      15  Tutti odorati de’ novelli fiori

            Di primavera, del color vestita

            Della bruna viola, a me si offerse

            L’angelica tua forma, inchino il fianco

            Sovra nitide pelli, e circonfusa

      20  D’arcana voluttà; quando tu, dotta

            Allettatrice, fervidi sonanti

            Baci scoccavi nelle curve labbra

            De’ tuoi bambini, il niveo collo intanto

            Porgendo, e lor di tue cagioni ignari

      25  Con la man leggiadrissima stringevi

            Al seno ascoso e desiato. Apparve

            Novo ciel, nova terra, e quasi un raggio

            Divino al pensier mio. Così nel fianco

            Non punto inerme a viva forza impresse

      30  Il tuo braccio lo stral, che poscia fitto

            Ululando portai finch’a quel giorno

            Si fu due volte ricondotto il sole.

               Raggio divino al mio pensiero apparve,

            Donna, la tua beltà. Simile effetto

      35  Fan la bellezza e i musicali accordi,

            Ch’alto mistero d’ignorati Elisi

            Paion sovente rivelar. Vagheggia

            Il piagato mortal quindi la figlia

            Della sua mente, l’amorosa idea,

      40  Che gran parte d’Olimpo in se racchiude,

            Tutta al volto ai costumi alla favella

            Pari alla donna che il rapito amante

            Vagheggiare ed amar confuso estima.

            Or questa egli non già, ma quella, ancora

      45  Nei corporali amplessi, inchina ed ama.

            Alfin l’errore e gli scambiati oggetti

            Conoscendo, s’adira; e spesso incolpa

            La donna a torto. A quella eccelsa imago

            Sorge di rado il femminile ingegno;

      50  E ciò che inspira ai generosi amanti

            La sua stessa beltà, donna non pensa,

            Nè comprender potria. Non cape in quelle

            Anguste fronti ugual concetto. E male

            Al vivo sfolgorar di quegli sguardi

      55  Spera l’uomo ingannato, e mal richiede

            Sensi profondi, sconosciuti, e molto

            Più che virili, in chi dell’uomo al tutto

            Da natura è minor. Che se più molli

            E più tenui le membra, essa la mente

      60  Men capace e men forte anco riceve.

               Nè tu finor giammai quel che tu stessa

            Inspirasti alcun tempo al mio pensiero,

            Potesti, Aspasia, immaginar. Non sai

            Che smisurato amor, che affanni intensi,

      65  Che indicibili moti e che deliri

            Movesti in me; nè verrà tempo alcuno

            Che tu l’intenda. In simil guisa ignora

            Esecutor di musici concenti

            Quel ch’ei con mano o con la voce adopra

      70  In chi l’ascolta. Or quell’Aspasia è morta

            Che tanto amai. Giace per sempre, oggetto

            Della mia vita un dì: se non se quanto,

            Pur come cara larva, ad ora ad ora

            Tornar costuma e disparir. Tu vivi,

      75  Bella non solo ancor, ma bella tanto,

            Al parer mio, che tutte l’altre avanzi.

            Pur quell’ardor che da te nacque è spento:

            Perch’io te non amai, ma quella Diva

            Che già vita, or sepolcro, ha nel mio core.

      80  Quella adorai gran tempo; e sì mi piacque

            Sua celeste beltà, ch’io, per insino

            Già dal principio conoscente e chiaro

            Dell’esser tuo, dell’arti e delle frodi,

            Pur ne’ tuoi contemplando i suoi begli occhi,

      85  Cupido ti seguii finch’ella visse,

            Ingannato non già, ma dal piacere

            Di quella dolce somiglianza un lungo

            Servaggio ed aspro a tollerar condotto.

            Or ti vanta, che il puoi. Narra che sola

      90  Sei del tuo sesso a cui piegar sostenni

            L’altero capo, a cui spontaneo porsi

            L’indomito mio cor. Narra che prima,

            E spero ultima certo, il ciglio mio

            Supplichevol vedesti, a te dinanzi

      95  Me timido, tremante (ardo in ridirlo

            Di sdegno e di rossor), me di me privo,

            Ogni tua voglia, ogni parola, ogni atto

            Spiar sommessamente, a’ tuoi superbi

            Fastidi impallidir, brillare in volto

    100  Ad un segno cortese, ad ogni sguardo

            Mutar forma e color. Cadde l’incanto,

            E spezzato con esso, a terra sparso

            Il giogo: onde m’allegro. E sebben pieni

            Di tedio, alfin dopo il servire e dopo

    105  Un lungo vaneggiar, contento abbraccio

            Senno con libertà. Che se d’affetti

            Orba la vita, e di gentili errori,

            È notte senza stelle a mezzo il verno,

            Già del fato mortale a me bastante

    110  E conforto e vendetta è che su l’erba

            Qui neghittoso immobile giacendo,

            Il mar la terra e il ciel miro e sorrido.

XXIX

ASPASIA

               Sometimes your image comes to mind again,

            Aspasia. Either it shines fleetingly

            in lived-in places, in other faces;

            or in empty fields, on a clear day,

        5  under the silent stars,

            as if evoked by gentle harmony,

            that exalted vision reappears

            in a soul still verging on dismay.

            How adored, O gods! and what delight

      10  and torment once! And I never smell

            the fragrant breeze along a blooming shore,

            or city streets perfumed with flowers,

            that I don’t see you as you were

            that day when, in those lovely rooms

      15  all scented with the spring’s first blossoms,

            I encountered your angelic form

            dressed in dark violet,

            and bent to greet you in the gleaming flesh,

            veiled in secret sensuality,

      20  when you, expert enticer,

            showered fervent, noisy kisses

            on the pursed lips of your children,

            inclining your snowy neck just so,

            and held them, unaware of your intentions,

      25  with your very graceful hand

            to your bared, desired breast.

            To me it seemed new heaven, new earth,

            almost a ray of heavenly light. And so,

            into my not-at-all-protected side,

      30  your arm let fly its arrow with great force,

            which I carried lodged in me, lamenting,

            till the sun had twice come to that day.

               Lady, your beauty was a ray of heavenly

            light to my thinking. Beauty and musical

      35  harmony have similar effects,

            for it often seems that they reveal

            the mysteries of hidden Paradises.

            So the wounded mortal dreams

            the daughter of his mind, the amorous idea,

      40  this piece of heaven that he keeps to himself,

            in face, in habits, and expression equal

            to the one the enraptured lover wants

            to dream about and love in his confusion;

            yet it’s not she whom he reveres and loves,

      45  even as he holds her, but the other.

            At last he sees the error of his misplaced

            feelings and becomes enraged, and often

            wrongly blames the woman. Rarely

            does feminine nature rise to this high ideal.

      50  And what inspires her noble lovers,

            her very beauty, woman doesn’t see

            and isn’t capable of understanding;

            their narrow minds can’t take in such ideas.

            In the bright flash of her looks

      55  the bewitched man wrongly hopes for, wrongly seeks,

            deep, mysterious, and much more than manly

            understanding, in one who naturally

            is less than man in everything. For if her limbs

            are softer and more tender, she’s also given

      60  a mind that’s less capacious and less strong.

               Nor could you, Aspasia,

            ever imagine what you once inspired

            in my mind. You don’t know

            what boundless love, what powerful suffering,

      65  what indescribable emotions and delirium

            you aroused in me; nor will there be a time

            when you will understand. In a like way,

            he who creates harmonies in music

            is ignorant of the effect his hand or voice

      70  has on his listener. The Aspasia I loved

            so deeply is dead now. She who was once

            the object of my life now rests forever.

            If not as this, still as a cherished shade,

            she now and then returns, and disappears.

      75  You live, not only lovely now, but still

            so lovely in my eyes that you surpass all others.

            But the ardor that was born of you has died,

            because it wasn’t you I loved, but the Goddess

            who lived once but now is buried in my heart.

      80  I worshipped her a long time, and her celestial

            beauty so enthralled me that although

            I was aware and clear from the beginning

            as to your nature, your artifice and falseness,

            still gazing on her lovely eyes in yours,

      85  I eagerly obeyed you while she lived,

            not really fooled, but led on by the pleasure

            of that sweet resemblance to endure

            a long and bitter servitude.

            Now boast, because you can. Announce that you’re

      90  the one of all your sex who made me bend

            my proud head, the one to whom I freely

            gave my unvanquished heart.

            Say you were the first, and certainly

            the last, I hope, to see me bow to you,

      95  to see me timid, trembling (telling it,

            I’m burning with embarrassment and shame),

            undone, attending humbly to your slightest

            wish, or word, or action, going pale

            when you showed your proud displeasure, brightening

    100  at a friendly nod, changing look and color

            with every look of yours. The spell was broken,

            and the yoke shattered on the ground: I’m glad.

            And, though they may be

            full of boredom, I embrace

    105  wisdom and freedom happily at last,

            having served out my long infatuation.

            For if life, once empty of attachments

            and sweet illusions, is a starless winter night,

            still it’s enough for me of mortal fate

    110  and comfort and revenge that I can lie here

            lazy, lifeless on the grass,

            watching the sea and earth and sky, and smile.

XXX

SOPRA UN BASSO RILIEVO ANTICO SEPOLCRALE

Dove una giovane morta è rappresentata in atto di partire, accommiatandosi dai suoi

               Dove vai? chi ti chiama

            Lunge dai cari tuoi,

            Bellissima donzella?

            Sola, peregrinando, il patrio tetto

        5  Sì per tempo abbandoni? a queste soglie

            Tornerai tu? farai tu lieti un giorno

            Questi ch’oggi ti son piangendo intorno?

               Asciutto il ciglio ed animosa in atto,

            Ma pur mesta sei tu. Grata la via

      10  O dispiacevol sia, tristo il ricetto

            A cui movi o giocondo,

            Da quel tuo grave aspetto

            Mal s’indovina. Ahi ahi, nè già potria

            Fermare io stesso in me, nè forse al mondo

      15  S’intese ancor, se in disfavore al cielo

            Se cara esser nomata,

            Se misera tu debbi o fortunata.

               Morte ti chiama; al cominciar del giorno

            L’ultimo istante. Al nido onde ti parti,

      20  Non tornerai. L’aspetto

            De’ tuoi dolci parenti

            Lasci per sempre. Il loco

            A cui movi, è sotterra:

            Ivi fia d’ogni tempo il tuo soggiorno.

      25  Forse beata sei; ma pur chi mira,

            Seco pensando, al tuo destin, sospira.

               Mai non veder la luce

            Era, credo, il miglior. Ma nata, al tempo

            Che reina bellezza si dispiega

      30  Nelle membra e nel volto,

            Ed incomincia il mondo

            Verso lei di lontano ad atterrarsi;

            In sul fiorir d’ogni speranza, e molto

            Prima che incontro alla festosa fronte

      35  I lúgubri suoi lampi il ver baleni;

            Come vapore in nuvoletta accolto

            Sotto forme fugaci all’orizzonte,

            Dileguarsi così quasi non sorta,

            E cangiar con gli oscuri

      40  Silenzi della tomba i dì futuri,

            Questo se all’intelletto

            Appar felice, invade

            D’alta pietade ai più costanti il petto.

               Madre temuta e pianta

      45  Dal nascer già dell’animal famiglia,

            Natura, illaudabil maraviglia,

            Che per uccider partorisci e nutri,

            Se danno è del mortale

            Immaturo perir, come il consenti

      50  In quei capi innocenti?

            Se ben, perchè funesta,

            Perchè sovra ogni male,

            A chi si parte, a chi rimane in vita,

            Inconsolabil fai tal dipartita?

      55     Misera ovunque miri,

            Misera onde si volga, ove ricorra,

            Questa sensibil prole!

            Piacqueti che delusa

            Fosse ancor dalla vita

      60  La speme giovanil; piena d’affanni

            L’onda degli anni; ai mali unico schermo

            La morte; e questa inevitabil segno,

            Questa, immutata legge

            Ponesti all’uman corso. Ahi perchè dopo

      65  Le travagliose strade, almen la meta

            Non ci prescriver lieta? anzi colei

            Che per certo futura

            Portiam sempre, vivendo, innanzi all’alma,

            Colei che i nostri danni

      70  Ebber solo conforto,

            Velar di neri panni,

            Cinger d’ombra sì trista,

            E spaventoso in vista

            Più d’ogni flutto dimostrarci il porto?

      75     Già se sventura è questo

            Morir che tu destini

            A tutti noi che senza colpa, ignari,

            Nè volontari al vivere abbandoni,

            Certo ha chi more invidiabil sorte

      80  A colui che la morte

            Sente de’ cari suoi. Che se nel vero,

            Com’io per fermo estimo,

            Il vivere è sventura,

            Grazia il morir, chi però mai potrebbe,

      85  Quel che pur si dovrebbe,

            Desiar de’ suoi cari il giorno estremo,

            Per dover egli scemo

            Rimaner di se stesso,

            Veder d’in su la soglia levar via

      90  La diletta persona

            Con chi passato avrà molt’anni insieme,

            E dire a quella addio senz’altra speme

            Di riscontrarla ancora

            Per la mondana via;

      95  Poi solitario abbandonato in terra,

            Guardando attorno, all’ore ai lochi usati

            Rimemorar la scorsa compagnia?

            Come, ahi come, o natura, il cor ti soffre

            Di strappar dalle braccia

    100  All’amico l’amico,

            Al fratello il fratello,

            La prole al genitore,

            All’amante l’amore: e l’uno estinto,

            L’altro in vita serbar? Come potesti

    105  Far necessario in noi

            Tanto dolor, che sopravviva amando

            Al mortale il mortal? Ma da natura

            Altro negli atti suoi

            Che nostro male o nostro ben si cura.

XXX

ON AN ANCIENT FUNERAL RELIEF

In Which a Dead Young Woman Is Represented in the Act of Leaving, Bidding Farewell to Her Own

               Where are you going? Who is calling you

            away from your loved ones,

            beautiful young lady? Are you abandoning

            your father’s house so soon to wander lonely?

        5  Will you ever cross

            this threshold again, will you someday bring joy

            to those who stand beside you weeping now?

               Your eyes are dry, your movements spirited,

            and yet you’re downcast. If your way

      10  is glad or hard, the destination

            that you’re traveling to is dire or happy,

            your grave expression doesn’t indicate.

            Alas, myself I couldn’t say,

            nor does the world yet know, perhaps,

      15  if you should be seen

            as cursed or blessed by heaven,

            miserable or fortunate.

               Death calls you:

            daybreak is your final hour. You won’t come back

      20  to the nest you’re leaving. You’re letting go

            of the sight of your beloved

            parents forever. The place you’re going to

            is underground:

            it will be your lodging for all time.

      25  It may be you’re blessed, and yet whoever

            contemplates your fate sighs all the same.

               Never to see the light

            was best, I think. But, given life,

            and at the time when sovereign beauty

      30  is resplendent in your face and body

            and the world

            starts to pay you homage from afar,

            when every hope is flowering,

            long before truth’s dismal lightning

      35  strikes the happy brow,

            to fade as though you hadn’t lived,

            like mist condensed into a cloud

            in shapes that disappear on the horizon

            and relinquish future days

      40  for the dark silence of the tomb—

            this, even if the mind

            sees it as happy,

            assails the stoutest hearts with deepest pity.

               Nature, mother feared and wept for

      45  since the human family was born,

            marvel that cannot be praised,

            that bears and nurtures only to destroy,

            if dying young brings mortals pain,

            why let it come down

      50  on these blameless heads?

            And if good, then why is it unhappy,

            why make this leaving inconsolable,

            worse than any other woe,

            for those who live, as well as those who go?

      55     Unhappy everywhere they look,

            wretched where they turn or run,

            is this feeling race.

            You chose that life should disappoint

            the hope of youth,

      60  that the wave of years be full of pain,

            with death our only

            shield from suffering;

            and this inevitable end, this changeless law,

            you established for the human journey.

      65  Alas, after these streets of suffering,

            why not at least prescribe a happy end?

            Indeed, why show us

            what we hold up to the soul

            as the certain future while we live,

      70  the one comfort for our pains,

            why show the port

            arrayed in black

            and beset by such unhappy shadows,

            more frightening to behold than any storm?

      75     If it’s already evil luck,

            this dying you assign

            to all whom sinless, unaware,

            unwilling, you give up to life,

            surely the fate of him who dies is enviable

      80  next to him who has to live

            his loved one’s death.

            For if it’s true, as I do firmly hold,

            that life is bad luck and death grace,

            who could ever, even so,

      85  do what he should do:

            hope for the last day of those he loves

            and have to stay on

            shorn of himself,

            to see the adored person

      90  with whom he has lived for many years,

            stolen from his doorstep,

            and say goodbye to her

            with no more hope

            of meeting her again on the world’s ways;

      95  and later, left alone on earth,

            to look around and think of his companion

            at the old times and places?

            How, O Nature, does your heart

            let you sever

    100  friend from friend,

            brother from brother,

            child from parent,

            loved one from lover, and, when one has died,

            expect the other to live on?

    105  How could you let so much pain

            be necessary to us, in that mortal

            has to keep on loving mortal?

            But Nature in her actions is concerned

            with something else besides our pain or joy.

XXXI

SOPRA IL RITRATTO DI UNA BELLA DONNA

Scolpito nel monumento sepolcrale della medesima

               Tal fosti: or qui sotterra

            Polve e scheletro sei. Su l’ossa e il fango

            Immobilmente collocato invano,

            Muto, mirando dell’etadi il volo,

        5  Sta, di memoria solo

            E di dolor custode, il simulacro

            Della scorsa beltà. Quel dolce sguardo,

            Che tremar fe, se, come or sembra, immoto

            In altrui s’affisò; quel labbro, ond’alto

      10  Par, come d’urna piena,

            Traboccare il piacer; quel collo, cinto

            Già di desio; quell’amorosa mano,

            Che spesso, ove fu porta,

            Sentì gelida far la man che strinse;

      15  E il seno, onde la gente

            Visibilmente di pallor si tinse,

            Furo alcun tempo: or fango

            Ed ossa sei: la vista

            Vituperosa e trista un sasso asconde.

      20     Così riduce il fato

            Qual sembianza fra noi parve più viva

            Immagine del ciel. Misterio eterno

            Dell’esser nostro. Oggi d’eccelsi, immensi

            Pensieri e sensi inenarrabil fonte,

      25  Beltà grandeggia, e pare,

            Quale splendor vibrato

            Da natura immortal su queste arene,

            Di sovrumani fati,

            Di fortunati regni e d’aurei mondi

      30  Segno e sicura spene

            Dare al mortale stato:

            Diman, per lieve forza,

            Sozzo a vedere, abominoso, abbietto

            Divien quel che fu dianzi

      35  Quasi angelico aspetto,

            E dalle menti insieme

            Quel che da lui moveva

            Ammirabil concetto, si dilegua.

               Desiderii infiniti

      40  E visioni altere

            Crea nel vago pensiere,

            Per natural virtù, dotto concento;

            Onde per mar delizioso, arcano

            Erra lo spirto umano,

      45  Quasi come a diporto

            Ardito notator per l’Oceano:

            Ma se un discorde accento

            Fere l’orecchio, in nulla

            Torna quel paradiso in un momento.

      50     Natura umana, or come,

            Se frale in tutto e vile,

            Se polve ed ombra sei, tant’alto senti?

            Se in parte anco gentile,

            Come i più degni tuoi moti e pensieri

      55  Son così di leggeri

            Da sì basse cagioni e desti e spenti?

XXXI

ON THE PORTRAIT OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN

Carved on Her Burial Monument

               So you were: but here, now, underground

            you’re dust and skeleton. Raised immovable

            above your mud and bones to no avail,

            the image of your former beauty stands

        5  in silent witness as time flies,

            sole guardian of memory and grief.

            The gentle look that made men tremble

            when you fixed on them, as you do now,

            the lip from which deep pleasure seemed to overflow

      10  as from a brimming urn, the neck

            once circled by desire, the loving hand,

            which when it was given often felt

            the hand it took go cold;

            and the breast,

      15  which turned men

            visibly pale—

            all of these were once upon a time.

            Now you are mud and bones. A stone

            hides the indecent, miserable sight.

      20     So destiny reduces

            the look that seemed the brightest

            image of heaven among us. Eternal

            mystery of our being. Ineffable

            source of noble and immense ideas

      25  and feelings, beauty reigns today

            and seems, like splendor

            lavished on these sands by a divine being,

            a sign of reassuring hope

            for superhuman destinies,

      30  for blessed realms

            and golden worlds for mortals.

            Tomorrow, for no reason,

            what was almost angelic to behold

            becomes repulsive to the sight,

      35  detestable, unworthy,

            while the admirable idea

            that emanated from it

            fades from our minds.

               Music’s learned harmony

      40  naturally engenders

            endless aspirations and exalted

            visions in the dreaming mind;

            thanks to which the human spirit

      45  moves in a delicious, unknown sea,

            almost the way a daring swimmer

            dives into the sea, for recreation.

            But if a discordant

            note assails the ear,

            that heaven turns to nothing in an instant.

      50     Human nature,

            if you’re merely weak and worthless,

            dust and shadow, why aspire so high?

            But if you’re partly noble,

            why are your best actions and intentions

      55  so easily, by such unworthy causes,

            both engendered and destroyed?

XXXII

PALINODIA AL MARCHESE GINO CAPPONI

Il sempre sospirar nulla rileva.

PETRARCA

               Errai, candido Gino; assai gran tempo,

            E di gran lunga errai. Misera e vana

            Stimai la vita, e sovra l’altre insulsa

            La stagion ch’or si volge. Intolleranda

        5  Parve, e fu, la mia lingua alla beata

            Prole mortal, se dir si dee mortale

            L’uomo, o si può. Fra maraviglia e sdegno

            Dall’Eden odorato in cui soggiorna,

            Rise l’alta progenie, e me negletto

      10  Disse, o mal venturoso, e di piaceri

            O incapace o inesperto, il proprio fato

            Creder comune, e del mio mal consorte

            L’umana specie. Alfin per entro il fumo

            De’ sígari onorato, al romorio

      15  De’ crepitanti pasticcini, al grido

            Militar, di gelati e di bevande

            Ordinator, fra le percosse tazze

            E i branditi cucchiai, viva rifulse

            Agli occhi miei la giornaliera luce

      20  Delle gazzette. Riconobbi e vidi

            La pubblica letizia, e le dolcezze

            Del destino mortal. Vidi l’eccelso

            Stato e il valor delle terrene cose,

            E tutto fiori il corso umano, e vidi

      25  Come nulla quaggiù dispiace e dura.

            Nè men conobbi ancor gli studi e l’opre

            Stupende, e il senno, e le virtudi, e l’alto

            Saver del secol mio. Nè vidi meno

            Da Marrocco al Catai, dall’Orse al Nilo,

      30  E da Boston a Goa, correr dell’alma

            Felicità su l’orme a gara ansando

            Regni, imperi e ducati; e già tenerla

            O per le chiome fluttuanti, o certo

            Per l’estremo del boa. Così vedendo,

      35  E meditando sovra i larghi fogli

            Profondamente, del mio grave, antico

            Errore, e di me stesso, ebbi vergogna.

               Aureo secolo omai volgono, o Gino,

            I fusi delle Parche. Ogni giornale,

      40  Gener vario di lingue e di colonne,

            Da tutti i lidi lo promette al mondo

            Concordemente. Universale amore,

            Ferrate vie, moltiplici commerci,

            Vapor, tipi e choléra i più divisi

      45  Popoli e climi stringeranno insieme:

            Nè maraviglia fia se pino o quercia

            Suderà latte e mele, o s’anco al suono

            D’un walser danzerà. Tanto la possa

            Infin qui de’ lambicchi e delle storte,

      50  E le macchine al cielo emulatrici

            Crebbero, e tanto cresceranno al tempo

            Che seguirà; poichè di meglio in meglio

            Senza fin vola e volerà mai sempre

            Di Sem, di Cam e di Giapeto il seme.

      55     Ghiande non ciberà certo la terra

            Però, se fame non la sforza: il duro

            Ferro non deporrà. Ben molte volte

            Argento ed or disprezzerà, contenta

            A polizze di cambio. E già dal caro

      60  Sangue de’ suoi non asterrà la mano

            La generosa stirpe: anzi coverte

            Fien di stragi l’Europa e l’altra riva

            Dell’atlantico mar, fresca nutrice

            Di pura civiltà, sempre che spinga

      65  Contrarie in campo le fraterne schiere

            Di pepe o di cannella o d’altro aroma

            Fatal cagione, o di melate canne,

            O cagion qual si sia ch’ad auro torni.

            Valor vero e virtù, modestia e fede

      70  E di giustizia amor, sempre in qualunque

            Pubblico stato, alieni in tutto e lungi

            Da’ comuni negozi, ovvero in tutto

            Sfortunati saranno, afflitti e vinti:

            Perchè diè lor natura, in ogni tempo

      75  Starsene in fondo. Ardir protervo e frode,

            Con mediocrità, regneran sempre,

            A galleggiar sortiti. Imperio e forze,

            Quanto più vogli o cumulate o sparse,

            Abuserà chiunque avralle, e sotto

      80  Qualunque nome. Questa legge in pria

            Scrisser natura e il fato in adamante;

            E co’ fulmini suoi Volta nè Davy

            Lei non cancellerà, non Anglia tutta

            Con le macchine sue, nè con un Gange

      85  Di politici scritti il secol novo.

            Sempre il buono in tristezza, il vile in festa

            Sempre e il ribaldo: incontro all’alme eccelse

            In arme tutti congiurati i mondi

            Fieno in perpetuo: al vero onor seguaci

      90  Calunnia, odio e livor: cibo de’ forti

            Il debole, cultor de’ ricchi e servo

            Il digiuno mendico, in ogni forma

            Di comun reggimento, o presso o lungi

            Sien l’eclittica o i poli, eternamente

      95  Sarà, se al gener nostro il proprio albergo

            E la face del dì non vengon meno.

               Queste lievi reliquie e questi segni

            Delle passate età, forza è che impressi

            Porti quella che sorge età dell’oro:

    100  Perchè mille discordi e repugnant

            L’umana compagnia principii e parti

            Ha per natura; e por quegli odii in pace

            Non valser gl’intelletti e le possanze

            Degli uomini giammai, dal dì che nacque

    105  L’inclita schiatta, e non varrà, quantunque

            Saggio sia nè possente, al secol nostro

            Patto alcuno o giornal. Ma nelle cose

            Più gravi, intera, e non veduta innanzi,

            Fia la mortal felicità. Più molli

    110  Di giorno in giorno diverran le vesti

            O di lana o di seta. I rozzi panni

            Lasciando a prova agricoltori e fabbri,

            Chiuderanno in coton la scabra pelle,

            E di castoro copriran le schiene.

    115  Meglio fatti al bisogno, o più leggiadri

            Certamente a veder, tappeti e coltri,

            Seggiole, canapè, sgabelli e mense,

            Letti, ed ogni altro arnese, adorneranno

            Di lor menstrua beltà gli appartamenti;

    120  E nove forme di paiuoli, e nove

            Pentole ammirerà l’arsa cucina.

            Da Parigi a Calais, di quivi a Londra,

            Da Londra a Liverpool, rapido tanto

            Sarà, quant’altri immaginar non osa,

    125  Il cammino, anzi il volo: e sotto l’ampie

            Vie del Tamigi fia dischiuso il varco,

            Opra ardita, immortal, ch’esser dischiuso

            Dovea, già son molt’anni. Illuminate

            Meglio ch’or son, benchè sicure al pari,

    130  Nottetempo saran le vie men trite

            Delle città sovrane, e talor forse

            Di suddita città le vie maggiori.

            Tali dolcezze e sì beata sorte

            Alla prole vegnente il ciel destina.

    135     Fortunati color che mentre io scrivo

            Miagolanti in su le braccia accoglie

            La levatrice! a cui veder s’aspetta

            Quei sospirati dì, quando per lunghi

            Studi fia noto, e imprenderà col latte

    140  Dalla cara nutrice ogni fanciullo,

            Quanto peso di sal, quanto di carni,

            E quante moggia di farina inghiotta

            Il patrio borgo in ciascun mese; e quanti

            In ciascun anno partoriti e morti

    145  Scriva il vecchio prior: quando, per opra

            Di possente vapore, a milioni

            Impresse in un secondo, il piano e il poggio,

            E credo anco del mar gl’immensi tratti,

            Come d’aeree gru stuol che repente

    150  Alle late campagne il giorno involi,

            Copriran le gazzette, anima e vita

            Dell’universo, e di savere a questa

            Ed alle età venture unica fonte!

               Quale un fanciullo, con assidua cura,

    155  Di fogliolini e di fuscelli, in forma

            O di tempio o di torre o di palazzo,

            Un edificio innalza; e come prima

            Fornito il mira, ad atterrarlo è volto,

            Perchè gli stessi a lui fuscelli e fogli

    160  Per novo lavorio son di mestieri;

            Così natura ogni opra sua, quantunque

            D’alto artificio a contemplar, non prima

            Vede perfetta, ch’a disfarla imprende,

            Le parti sciolte dispensando altrove.

    165  E indarno a preservar se stesso ed altro

            Dal gioco reo, la cui ragion gli è chiusa

            Eternamente, il mortal seme accorre

            Mille virtudi oprando in mille guise

            Con dotta man: che, d’ogni sforzo in onta,

    170  La natura crudel, fanciullo invitto,

            Il suo capriccio adempie, e senza posa

            Distruggendo e formando si trastulla.

            Indi varia, infinita una famiglia

            Di mali immedicabili e di pene

    175  Preme il fragil mortale, a perir fatto

            Irreparabilmente: indi una forza

            Ostil, distruggitrice, e dentro il fere

            E di fuor da ogni lato, assidua, intenta

            Dal dì che nasce; e l’affatica e stanca,

    180  Essa indefatigata; insin ch’ei giace

            Alfin dall’empia madre oppresso e spento.

            Queste, o spirto gentil, miserie estreme

            Dello stato mortal; vecchiezza e morte,

            Ch’han principio d’allor che il labbro infante

    185  Preme il tenero sen che vita instilla;

            Emendar, mi cred’io, non può la lieta

            Nonadecima età più che potesse

            La decima o la nona, e non potranno

            Più di questa giammai l’età future.

    190  Però, se nominar lice talvolta

            Con proprio nome il ver, non altro in somma

            Fuor che infelice, in qualsivoglia tempo,

            E non pur ne’ civili ordini e modi,

            Ma della vita in tutte l’altre parti,

    195  Per essenza insanabile, e per legge

            Universal, che terra e cielo abbraccia,

            Ogni nato sarà. Ma novo e quasi

            Divin consiglio ritrovàr gli eccelsi

            Spirti del secol mio: che, non potendo

    200  Felice in terra far persona alcuna,

            L’uomo obbliando, a ricercar si diero

            Una comun felicitade; e quella

            Trovata agevolmente, essi di molti

            Tristi e miseri tutti, un popol fanno

    205  Lieto e felice: e tal portento, ancora

            Da pamphlets, da riviste e da gazzette

            Non dichiarato, il civil gregge ammira.

               Oh menti, oh senno, oh sovrumano acume

            Dell’età ch’or si volge! E che sicuro

    210  Filosofar, che sapienza, o Gino,

            In più sublimi ancora e più riposti

            Subbietti insegna ai secoli futuri

            Il mio secolo e tuo! Con che costanza

            Quel che ieri schernì, prosteso adora

    215  Oggi, e domani abbatterà, per girne

            Raccozzando i rottami, e per riporlo

            Tra il fumo degl’incensi il dì vegnente!

            Quanto estimar si dee, che fede inspira

            Del secol che si volge, anzi dell’anno,

    220  Il concorde sentir! con quanta cura

            Convienci a quel dell’anno, al qual difforme

            Fia quel dell’altro appresso, il sentir nostro

            Comparando, fuggir che mai d’un punto

            Non sien diversi! E di che tratto innanzi,

    225  Se al moderno si opponga il tempo antico,

            Filosofando il saper nostro è scorso!

               Un già de’ tuoi, lodato Gino; un franco

            Di poetar maestro, anzi di tutte

            Scienze ed arti e facoltadi umane,

    230  E menti che fur mai, sono e saranno,

            Dottore, emendator, lascia, mi disse,

            I propri affetti tuoi. Di lor non cura

            Questa virile età, volta ai severi

            Economici studi, e intenta il ciglio

    235  Nelle pubbliche cose. Il proprio petto

            Esplorar che ti val? Materia al canto

            Non cercar dentro te. Canta i bisogni

            Del secol nostro, e la matura speme.

            Memorande sentenze! ond’io solenni

    240  Le risa alzai quando sonava il nome

            Della speranza al mio profano orecchio

            Quasi comica voce, o come un suono

            Di lingua che dal latte si scompagni.

            Or torno addietro, ed al passato un corso

    245  Contrario imprendo, per non dubbi esempi

            Chiaro oggimai ch’al secol proprio vuolsi,

            Non contraddir, non repugnar, se lode

            Cerchi e fama appo lui, ma fedelmente

            Adulando ubbidir: così per breve

    250  Ed agiato cammin vassi alle stelle.

            Ond’io, degli astri desioso, al canto

            Del secolo i bisogni omai non penso

            Materia far; che a quelli, ognor crescendo,

            Provveggono i mercati e le officine

    255  Già largamente; ma la speme io certo

            Dirò, la speme, onde visibil pegno

            Già concedon gli Dei; già, della nova

            Felicità principio, ostenta il labbro

            De’ giovani, e la guancia, enorme il pelo.

    260     O salve, o segno salutare, o prima

            Luce della famosa età che sorge.

            Mira dinanzi a te come s’allegra

            La terra e il ciel, come sfavilla il guardo

            Delle donzelle, e per conviti e feste

    265  Qual de’ barbati eroi fama già vola.

            Cresci, cresci alla patria, o maschia certo

            Moderna prole. All’ombra de’ tuoi velli

            Italia crescerà, crescerà tutta

            Dalle foci del Tago all’Ellesponto

    270  Europa, e il mondo poserà sicuro.

            E tu comincia a salutar col riso

            Gl’ispidi genitori, o prole infante,

            Eletta agli aurei dì: nè ti spauri

            L’innocuo nereggiar de’ cari aspetti.

    275  Ridi, o tenera prole: a te serbato

            È di cotanto favellare il frutto;

            Veder gioia regnar, cittadi e ville,

            Vecchiezza e gioventù del par contente,

            E le barbe ondeggiar lunghe due spanne.

XXXII

RECANTATION FOR MARCHESE GINO CAPPONI

Always sighing is no help at all.

PETRARCH

               I was wrong, great Gino, far too long

            and foolishly was wrong. I thought that life

            was miserable and empty, and the age unfolding now

            was duller than the rest. My words both seemed

        5  and were intolerable to the blessed race

            of mortals—if one must, or can, call mankind

            mortal. With amazement and disdain,

            from the fragrant Eden where it lives,

            the noble progeny guffawed, and said

      10  I felt ignored or otherwise unhappy,

            incapable or ignorant of joy,

            believing my own fate was universal

            and mankind shared in my unhappiness.

            At last, amidst the glory of cigar smoke,

      15  to crackling pastries, and a military

            order that conscripted drinks and ice cream,

            with clanging cups and brandished spoons,

            the living daylight of the papers

            shone in my eyes.

      20  I saw and recognized the public joy

            and the delights of mortal destiny.

            I saw the exalted nature and the value

            of earthly things, the whole blooming

            human cavalcade, and understood how nothing

      25  that isn’t pleasing can survive down here.

            Nor did I ignore the stupefying aims and plans,

            the wisdom, virtues, and deep learning

            of my own century; nor fail to see,

            from Morocco to Cathay, the North Pole to the Nile,

      30  Boston to Goa, kingdoms, empires,

            dukedoms racing, gasping at the heels

            of life-enhancing happiness,

            trying to grasp her by her flowing locks,

            or at the least by the end of her boa.

      35  Seeing all this, and meditating deeply on

            the broadsheets, I was ashamed of both

            my dull, inveterate error and myself.

               It’s a golden age the Fates’

            spools are unwinding, Gino. Every paper,

      40  though languages and pagination differ,

            promises it to the world in unison

            in every country. Universal love,

            railroads, expanded commerce, steam,

            typography and cholera the most far-flung

      45  peoples and climates will embrace together:

            and it will be no marvel if pine or oak

            drip milk and honey, or even dance

            to the music of a waltz. The power

            of the alembics and retorts and the machines

      50  that compete with heaven has grown so great,

            and will be even greater in the future,

            for the seed of Shem and Ham and Japheth

            is flying and will fly

            higher and higher forever without end.

      55     Surely, though, the world won’t feed on acorns,

            if hunger doesn’t force it to; won’t put down

            cruel iron, though it will very often

            disdain silver and gold, content with paper

            currency. Nor will our noble sons

      60  abstain from shedding the beloved blood

            of their own. Indeed,

            Europe and the Atlantic’s other shore,

            the new nurse of pure civilization,

            will be bathed in slaughter every time

      65  that it sends bands of brothers on the field

            against each other, let the cause be pepper,

            cinnamon, another spice, or sugarcane,

            or whatever can be turned to gold.

            True bravery and virtue, modesty and faith

      70  and love of justice, under whatever form

            of government, will be unpopular

            and rare in public life, persecuted,

            vanquished, and defeated every time;

            for nature decided these would fail

      75  in every instance. Violence and fraud,

            destined to stay afloat, will always reign

            with mediocrity. However much you want

            empire and power consolidated or diffused,

            whoever has them will abuse them,

      80  in whomever’s name. Nature and fate

            inscribed this law in adamant at the outset,

            and neither Volta nor Davy will repeal it

            with their lightning, nor will all of England

            with her machinery, nor the new century

      85  with a Ganges of political screeds.

            The good always unhappy and the bad

            and scoundrel glad: the world will always be

            united in arms against exalted souls.

            Calumny and hate and rage will dog

      90  the footsteps of true honor, and the weak will be

            fodder for the strong, the starving beggar

            the rich man’s flatterer and slave, in every form

            of social order; whether the ecliptic

            or the poles be near or far, it will be so

      95  forever, while our race’s dwelling place

            and the torch of day don’t disappear.

               It’s vital that this rising golden age

            preserve these frail remains, this evidence

            of former times, because the human family

    100  naturally contains a thousand warring

            and opposing principles and parties,

            and men’s intellects and powers

            have never managed to bring peace

            to these antagonists,

    105  since the day the glorious race was born;

            and no treaty or newspaper in our time,

            no matter how wise or compelling, will change it.

            But in the most important things,

            human happiness will be perfected,

    110  as never seen before. Silk and wool clothing

            will be softer daily. Farmers and workers,

            shucking their rough duds in haste,

            will dress their leathery hides in cotton

            and cover their backs with beaver pelts.

    115  Better-made, or lovelier to look at,

            surely, rugs and blankets,

            chairs and sofas, stools and tables,

            beds and other furniture will grace

            apartments with their beauties-of-the-month,

    120  and the smoke-filled kitchen will admire

            new designs in pots and pans.

            From Paris to Calais, Calais to London,

            London to Liverpool, the train will be as fast

            as flying, faster than anyone dare imagine,

    125  and underneath the wide ways of the Thames

            a tunnel will be opened:

            inspired, immortal work

            meant to be unveiled for many years.

            The less traveled streets of major cities

    130  will be better lit at night than now,

            but just as safe, and perhaps someday,

            the major streets of lesser towns as well.

            So much sweetness, such a blessed fate,

            does heaven promise to the rising generation.

    135     Lucky are they whom, as I write,

            the midwife welcomes mewling in her arms!

            It’s expected that they’ll see

            those sighed-for days when, thanks to long research,

            we’ll know, and every infant will imbibe

    140  with the milk of its beloved nurse,

            how much weight of salt and how much meat,

            how many bushels of wheat his native city

            devours each month, and as well how many

            births and deaths the old prior marks down:

    145  when, by the agency of mighty steam,

            newspapers, printed by the thousands

            in a second, the universe’s soul and life

            and the one font of wisdom

            for this time and times to come!

    150  will cover plain and hill

            and even the vast tracts of the sea, I think,

            as often an array of cranes in flight

            will hide the light from the broad countryside.

               The way a young child, with obsessive care,

    155  builds a structure out of scraps of paper

            and twigs, shaped like a temple, tower, or palace,

            and once he sees it finished

            turns and destroys it

            because he needs these very scraps and twigs

    160  in order to make something new,

            so Nature, with each work of hers,

            no matter how complex to contemplate,

            no sooner sees it done than she undoes it,

            scattering the broken parts around.

    165  And in a futile effort to protect himself

            and others from the evil game whose reason

            is kept from him forever, the mortal creature

            hastens to perform a thousand feats expertly

            in a thousand ways; but, scorning all his work,

    170  cruel Nature, that undaunted child,

            indulges her capriciousness and endlessly

            enjoys herself destroying and rebuilding.

            And so a various, unending family

            of incurable ills and pains oppresses

    175  the frail mortal, ineluctably

            born to die: and so a hostile, unrelenting,

            fierce destructive power, within

            and everywhere around him, drives him

            from the day he’s born. Inexhaustible itself,

    180  it wears him down and out, until at last he lies

            defeated and undone by his pitiless mother.

            These, noble spirit, are the ultimate

            miseries of mortal beings: old age and death,

            which start back when the infant mouth

    185  sucks at the tender breast that instills life.

            The happy nineteenth century won’t manage

            to improve on them, I think,

            any better than the tenth or ninth,

            nor will future times improve on now.

    190  Yet, if sometimes it’s permissible

            to call truth by its proper name,

            then, all in all, each creature born will be

            simply unhappy, in whatever era,

            and not in civil laws and customs only,

    195  but in every other part of life,

            which is essentially incurable,

            by universal law, which takes in earth and heaven.

            But the exalted spirits of my century

            discovered a new and practically divine

    200  idea: having failed to make a single

            person on earth happy, they abandoned man

            and tried to find a universal bliss;

            and having found it easily,

            out of many wretched and unhappy persons

    205  made a joyful, happy race:

            and this miracle, not yet proclaimed by “pamphlets,”

            papers, or reviews, the public herd admires.

               Oh intellects, oh wisdom, superhuman

            foresight of the age unfolding now!

    210  And what sure philosophy, what wisdom, Gino,

            my century and yours teaches the future

            on ever more sublime and abstruse topics.

            How faithfully it falls down and adores today

            what it scorned yesterday and will knock down tomorrow,

    215  only to pick up the pieces and reinstate them

            amidst the fumes of incense the next day!

            How worthy, how inspiring of belief,

            is this new century’s (or new year’s)

            sense of common purpose. How carefully

    220  we should avoid comparing what we feel

            this year with what will certainly

            be otherwise the next,

            although they never differ in the slightest.

            And if we contrast

    225  modern times and ancient, look how much

            we’ve gained in wisdom, from philosophy!

               One of your former colleagues, worthy Gino,

            a true master of poetry, indeed of every science

            and art and human faculty and branch

    230  of knowledge that was, is, and ever shall be,

            doctor and reformer, told me:

            Forget your own affections. This manly age,

            concerned with the hard facts of economics,

            intent on politics, has no interest

    235  in them. What good does exploring

            your heart do you? Don’t go looking

            for a source of song inside yourself.

            Sing our century’s needs and its ripe hope.

            Memorable advice! To which I answered

    240  with solemn laughter, the word “hope”

            sounding like a joke to my profane ears,

            or like a baby’s tongue

            that’s sucking air.

            Now I turn back and take a different path

    245  than in the past,

            having learned from sure experience

            that one must never contradict or criticize

            one’s own time if one longs for praise and fame,

            but faithfully, obediently fawn:

    250  and by this short and easy route attain the stars.

            Which means that I, who do desire fame,

            don’t think that I can make what this age needs

            the subject of my song now, for the merchants

            and the factories look to it already

    255  far and wide, and more so every hour.

            But hope I’ll surely sing of, hope, to which the Gods

            so clearly pledge allegiance: for young faces

            already flaunt the coming happiness,

            sporting sideburns and enormous beards.

    260     All hail, O salutary symbol,

            first light of the famous rising age.

            See how earth and sky brighten before you,

            how the looks of the young ladies sparkle,

            how the bearded heroes’ fame begins

    265  to spread at banquets and at parties. Grow,

            grow for your fatherland, O truly manly

            modern race. In the shadow of your fleece

            Italy will grow, and all of Europe

            from the headwaters of the Tagus

    270  to Hellespont, and the world will rest secure.

            And start smiling for your bearded fathers,

            infant offspring, meant for golden days;

            don’t let the harmless darkening

            of those beloved faces frighten you.

    275  Smile, sweet offspring; the results

            of all this chattering are meant for you:

            to see joy reign in city and in country,

            old age and youth both happy equally,

            and beards flowing, two spans long.

XXXIII

IL TRAMONTO DELLA LUNA

               Quale in notte solinga,

            Sovra campagne inargentate ed acque,

            Là ’ve zefiro aleggia,

            E mille vaghi aspetti

        5  E ingannevoli obbietti

            Fingon l’ombre lontane

            Infra l’onde tranquille

            E rami e siepi e collinette e ville;

            Giunta al confin del cielo,

      10  Dietro Apennino od Alpe, o del Tirreno

            Nell’infinito seno

            Scende la luna; e si scolora il mondo;

            Spariscon l’ombre, ed una

            Oscurità la valle e il monte imbruna;

      15  Orba la notte resta,

            E cantando, con mesta melodia,

            L’estremo albor della fuggente luce,

            Che dianzi gli fu duce,

            Saluta il carrettier dalla sua via;

      20     Tal si dilegua, e tale

            Lascia l’età mortale

            La giovinezza. In fuga

            Van l’ombre e le sembianze

            Dei dilettosi inganni; e vengon meno

      25  Le lontane speranze,

            Ove s’appoggia la mortal natura.

            Abbandonata, oscura

            Resta la vita. In lei porgendo il guardo,

            Cerca il confuso viatore invano

      30  Del cammin lungo che avanzar si sente

            Meta o ragione; e vede

            Che a se l’umana sede,

            Esso a lei veramente è fatto estrano.

               Troppo felice e lieta

      35  Nostra misera sorte

            Parve lassù, se il giovanile stato,

            Dove ogni ben di mille pene è frutto,

            Durasse tutto della vita il corso.

            Troppo mite decreto

      40  Quel che sentenzia ogni animale a morte,

            S’anco mezza la via

            Lor non si desse in pria

            Della terribil morte assai più dura.

            D’intelletti immortali

      45  Degno trovato, estremo

            Di tutti i mali, ritrovàr gli eterni

            La vecchiezza, ove fosse

            Incolume il desio, la speme estinta,

            Secche le fonti del piacer, le pene

      50  Maggiori sempre, e non più dato il bene.

               Voi, collinette e piagge,

            Caduto lo splendor che all’occidente

            Inargentava della notte il velo,

            Orfane ancor gran tempo

      55  Non resterete; che dall’altra parte

            Tosto vedrete il cielo

            Imbiancar novamente, e sorger l’alba:

            Alla qual poscia seguitando il sole,

            E folgorando intorno

      60  Con sue fiamme possenti,

            Di lucidi torrenti

            Inonderà con voi gli eterei campi.

            Ma la vita mortal, poi che la bella

            Giovinezza sparì, non si colora

      65  D’altra luce giammai, nè d’altra aurora.

            Vedova è insino al fine; ed alla notte

            Che l’altre etadi oscura,

            Segno poser gli Dei la sepoltura.

XXXIII

THE SETTING OF THE MOON

               As in the solitary night

            over silvered countryside and water

            where Zephyr gently breathes

            and far-flung shadows

        5  project a thousand lovely

            insubstantial images and phantoms

            onto still waves and branches,

            hedges, hills, and farms;

            reaching the horizon,

      10  behind Apennine or Alp, or on the boundless

            breast of the Tyrrhenian,

            the moon descends, the world goes colorless,

            shadows disappear, and one same darkness

            falls on hill and valley.

      15  Night is blind,

            and singing with a mournful melody,

            the carter on his way salutes

            the last ray of the fleeting light

            that led him on before.

      20     So youth fades out,

            so it leaves mortal life

            behind. The shadows

            and the shapes of glad illusions

            flee, and distant hopes,

      25  that prop our mortal

            nature up, give way.

            Life is forlorn, lightless.

            Looking ahead, the wayward traveler

            searches unavailingly

      30  for goal or reason on the long

            road he senses lies ahead,

            and sees that man’s home truly has become

            alien to him, and he to it.

               Our miserable fate was judged

      35  too glad and carefree up above

            if youth, whose every happiness

            is the product of a thousand pains,

            should last for life;

            the sentence that condemns

      40  all living things to death too lenient

            if first they were not given

            a half-life far more cruel

            than terrifying death itself.

            The eternal gods invented—

      45  great work of immortal minds—

            the worst of all afflictions:

            old age, in which desire is unfulfilled

            and hope extinguished,

            the fonts of pleasure withered,

      50  pain ever greater, and with no more joy.

               You, hills and shores,

            the splendor past that turned

            the veil of night to silver in the west,

            will not stay orphaned long,

      55  for in the opposite

            direction soon you’ll see

            the sky turn white again and dawn arise,

            after which the sun,

            flaming with potent fire

      60  everywhere,

            will bathe you and the heavenly fields

            in floods of brilliance.

            But mortal life, once lovely youth

            has gone, is never dyed

      65  by other light or other dawns again.

            She remains a widow all the way.

            And the Gods determined that the night

            which hides our other times ends in the grave.

XXXIV

LA GINESTRA
O, IL FIORE DEL DESERTO

Κα γπησαν ο νρωποι μλλον τ στος τ ϕς.

E gli uomini vollero piuttosto le tenebre che la luce.

GIOVANNI, III, 19

               Qui su l’arida schiena

            Del formidabil monte

            Sterminator Vesevo,

            La qual null’altro allegra arbor nè fiore,

        5  Tuoi cespi solitari intorno spargi,

            Odorata ginestra,

            Contenta dei deserti. Anco ti vidi

            De’ tuoi steli abbellir l’erme contrade

            Che cingon la cittade

      10  La qual fu donna de’ mortali un tempo,

            E del perduto impero

            Par che col grave e taciturno aspetto

            Faccian fede e ricordo al passeggero.

            Or ti riveggo in questo suol, di tristi

      15  Lochi e dal mondo abbandonati amante,

            E d’afflitte fortune ognor compagna.

            Questi campi cosparsi

            Di ceneri infeconde, e ricoperti

            Dell’impietrata lava,

      20  Che sotto i passi al peregrin risona;

            Dove s’annida e si contorce al sole

            La serpe, e dove al noto

            Cavernoso covil torna il coniglio;

            Fur liete ville e colti,

      25  E biondeggiàr di spiche, e risonaro

            Di muggito d’armenti;

            Fur giardini e palagi,

            Agli ozi de’ potenti

            Gradito ospizio; e fur città famose

      30  Che coi torrenti suoi l’altero monte

            Dall’ignea bocca fulminando oppresse

            Con gli abitanti insieme. Or tutto intorno

            Una ruina involve,

            Dove tu siedi, o fior gentile, e quasi

      35  I danni altrui commiserando, al cielo

            Di dolcissimo odor mandi un profumo,

            Che il deserto consola. A queste piagge

            Venga colui che d’esaltar con lode

            Il nostro stato ha in uso, e vegga quanto

      40  È il gener nostro in cura

            All’amante natura. E la possanza

            Qui con giusta misura

            Anco estimar potrà dell’uman seme,

            Cui la dura nutrice, ov’ei men teme,

      45  Con lieve moto in un momento annulla

            In parte, e può con moti

            Poco men lievi ancor subitamente

            Annichilare in tutto.

            Dipinte in queste rive

      50  Son dell’umana gente

            Le magnifiche sorti e progressive.

               Qui mira e qui ti specchia,

            Secol superbo e sciocco,

            Che il calle insino allora

      55  Dal risorto pensier segnato innanti

            Abbandonasti, e volti addietro i passi,

            Del ritornar ti vanti,

            E procedere il chiami.

            Al tuo pargoleggiar gl’ingegni tutti,

      60  Di cui lor sorte rea padre ti fece,

            Vanno adulando, ancora

            Ch’a ludibrio talora

            T’abbian fra se. Non io

            Con tal vergogna scenderò sotterra;

      65  Ma il disprezzo piuttosto che si serra

            Di te nel petto mio,

            Mostrato avrò quanto si possa aperto:

            Ben ch’io sappia che obblio

            Preme chi troppo all’età propria increbbe.

      70  Di questo mal, che teco

            Mi fia comune, assai finor mi rido.

            Libertà vai sognando, e servo a un tempo

            Vuoi di novo il pensiero,

            Sol per cui risorgemmo

    75  Della barbarie in parte, e per cui solo

            Si cresce in civiltà, che sola in meglio

            Guida i pubblici fati.

            Così ti spiacque il vero

            Dell’aspra sorte e del depresso loco

      80  Che natura ci diè. Per questo il tergo

            Vigliaccamente rivolgesti al lume

            Che il fe palese: e, fuggitivo, appelli

            Vil chi lui segue, e solo

            Magnanimo colui

      85  Che se schernendo o gli altri, astuto o folle,

            Fin sopra gli astri il mortal grado estolle.

               Uom di povero stato e membra inferme

            Che sia dell’alma generoso ed alto,

            Non chiama se nè stima

      90  Ricco d’or nè gagliardo,

            E di splendida vita o di valente

            Persona infra la gente

            Non fa risibil mostra;

            Ma se di forza e di tesor mendico

      95  Lascia parer senza vergogna, e noma

            Parlando, apertamente, e di sue cose

            Fa stima al vero uguale.

            Magnanimo animale

            Non credo io già, ma stolto,

    100  Quel che nato a perir, nutrito in pene,

            Dice, a goder son fatto,

            E di fetido orgoglio

            Empie le carte, eccelsi fati e nove

            Felicità, quali il ciel tutto ignora,

    105  Non pur quest’orbe, promettendo in terra

            A popoli che un’onda

            Di mar commosso, un fiato

            D’aura maligna, un sotterraneo crollo

            Distrugge sì, che avanza

    110  A gran pena di lor la rimembranza.

            Nobil natura è quella

            Che a sollevar s’ardisce

            Gli occhi mortali incontra

            Al comun fato, e che con franca lingua,

    115  Nulla al ver detraendo,

            Confessa il mal che ci fu dato in sorte,

            E il basso stato e frale;

            Quella che grande e forte

            Mostra se nel soffrir, nè gli odii e l’ire

    120  Fraterne, ancor più gravi

            D’ogni altro danno, accresce

            Alle miserie sue, l’uomo incolpando

            Del suo dolor, ma dà la colpa a quella

            Che veramente è rea, che de’ mortali

    125  Madre è di parto e di voler matrigna.

            Costei chiama inimica; e incontro a questa

            Congiunta esser pensando,

            Siccome è il vero, ed ordinata in pria

            L’umana compagnia,

    130  Tutti fra se confederati estima

            Gli uomini, e tutti abbraccia

            Con vero amor, porgendo

            Valida e pronta ed aspettando aita

            Negli alterni perigli e nelle angosce

    135  Della guerra comune. Ed alle offese

            Dell’uomo armar la destra, e laccio porre

            Al vicino ed inciampo,

            Stolto crede così qual fora in campo

            Cinto d’oste contraria, in sul più vivo

    140  Incalzar degli assalti,

            Gl’inimici obbliando, acerbe gare

            Imprender con gli amici,

            E sparger fuga e fulminar col brando

            Infra i propri guerrieri.

    145  Così fatti pensieri

            Quando fien, come fur, palesi al volgo,

            E quell’orror che primo

            Contra l’empia natura

            Strinse i mortali in social catena,

    150  Fia ricondotto in parte

            Da verace saper, l’onesto e il retto

            Conversar cittadino,

            E giustizia e pietade, altra radice

            Avranno allor che non superbe fole,

    155  Ove fondata probità del volgo

            Così star suole in piede

            Quale star può quel ch’ha in error la sede.

               Sovente in queste rive,

            Che, desolate, a bruno

    160  Veste il flutto indurato, e par che ondeggi,

            Seggo la notte; e su la mesta landa

            In purissimo azzurro

            Veggo dall’alto fiammeggiar le stelle,

            Cui di lontan fa specchio

    165  Il mare, e tutto di scintille in giro

            Per lo vóto seren brillare il mondo.

            E poi che gli occhi a quelle luci appunto,

            Ch’a lor sembrano un punto,

            E sono immense, in guisa

    170  Che un punto a petto a lor son terra e mare

            Veracemente; a cui

            L’uomo non pur, ma questo

            Globo ove l’uomo è nulla,

            Sconosciuto è del tutto; e quando miro

    175  Quegli ancor più senz’alcun fin remoti

            Nodi quasi di stelle,

            Ch’a noi paion qual nebbia, a cui non l’uomo

            E non la terra sol, ma tutte in uno,

            Del numero infinite e della mole,

    180  Con l’aureo sole insiem, le nostre stelle

            O sono ignote, o così paion come

            Essi alla terra, un punto

            Di luce nebulosa; al pensier mio

            Che sembri allora, o prole

    185  Dell’uomo? E rimembrando

            Il tuo stato quaggiù, di cui fa segno

            Il suol ch’io premo; e poi dall’altra parte,

            Che te signora e fine

            Credi tu data al Tutto, e quante volte

    190  Favoleggiar ti piacque, in questo oscuro

            Granel di sabbia, il qual di terra ha nome,

            Per tua cagion, dell’universe cose

            Scender gli autori, e conversar sovente

            Co’ tuoi piacevolmente, e che i derisi

    195  Sogni rinnovellando, ai saggi insulta

            Fin la presente età, che in conoscenza

            Ed in civil costume

            Sembra tutte avanzar; qual moto allora,

            Mortal prole infelice, o qual pensiero

    200  Verso te finalmente il cor m’assale?

            Non so se il riso o la pietà prevale.

               Come d’arbor cadendo un picciol pomo,

            Cui là nel tardo autunno

            Maturità senz’altra forza atterra,

    205  D’un popol di formiche i dolci alberghi,

            Cavati in molle gleba

            Con gran lavoro, e l’opre

            E le ricchezze che adunate a prova

            Con lungo affaticar l’assidua gente

    210  Avea provvidamente al tempo estivo,

            Schiaccia, diserta e copre

            In un punto; così d’alto piombando,

            Dall’utero tonante

            Scagliata al ciel profondo,

    215  Di ceneri e di pomici e di sassi

            Notte e ruina, infusa

            Di bollenti ruscelli,

            O pel montano fianco

            Furiosa tra l’erba

    220  Di liquefatti massi

            E di metalli e d’infocata arena

            Scendendo immensa piena,

            Le cittadi che il mar là su l’estremo

            Lido aspergea, confuse

    225  E infranse e ricoperse

            In pochi istanti: onde su quelle or pasce

            La capra, e città nove

            Sorgon dall’altra banda, a cui sgabello

            Son le sepolte, e le prostrate mura

    230  L’arduo monte al suo piè quasi calpesta.

            Non ha natura al seme

            Dell’uom più stima o cura

            Che alla formica: e se più rara in quello

            Che nell’altra è la strage,

    235  Non avvien ciò d’altronde

            Fuor che l’uom sue prosapie ha men feconde.

               Ben mille ed ottocento

            Anni varcàr poi che spariro, oppressi

            Dall’ignea forza, i popolati seggi,

    240  E il villanello intento

            Ai vigneti, che a stento in questi campi

            Nutre la morta zolla e incenerita,

            Ancor leva lo sguardo

            Sospettoso alla vetta

    245  Fatal, che nulla mai fatta più mite

            Ancor siede tremenda, ancor minaccia

            A lui strage ed ai figli ed agli averi

            Lor poverelli. E spesso

            Il meschino in sul tetto

    250  Dell’ostel villereccio, alla vagante

            Aura giacendo tutta notte insonne,

            E balzando più volte, esplora il corso

            Del temuto bollor, che si riversa

            Dall’inesausto grembo

    255  Su l’arenoso dorso, a cui riluce

            Di Capri la marina

            E di Napoli il porto e Mergellina.

            E se appressar lo vede, o se nel cupo

            Del domestico pozzo ode mai l’acqua

    260  Fervendo gorgogliar, desta i figliuoli,

            Desta la moglie in fretta, e via, con quanto

            Di lor cose rapir posson, fuggendo,

            Vede lontan l’usato

            Suo nido, e il picciol campo,

    265  Che gli fu dalla fame unico schermo,

            Preda al flutto rovente,

            Che crepitando giunge, e inesorato

            Durabilmente sovra quei si spiega.

            Torna al celeste raggio

    270  Dopo l’antica obblivion l’estinta

            Pompei, come sepolto

            Scheletro, cui di terra

            Avarizia o pietà rende all’aperto;

            E dal deserto foro

    275  Diritto infra le file

            Dei mozzi colonnati il peregrino

            Lunge contempla il bipartito giogo

            E la cresta fumante,

            Che alla sparsa ruina ancor minaccia.

    280  E nell’orror della secreta notte

            Per li vacui teatri,

            Per li templi deformi e per le rotte

            Case, ove i parti il pipistrello asconde,

            Come sinistra face

    285  Che per vóti palagi atra s’aggiri,

            Corre il baglior della funerea lava,

            Che di lontan per l’ombre

            Rosseggia e i lochi intorno intorno tinge.

            Così, dell’uomo ignara e dell’etadi

    290  Ch’ei chiama antiche, e del seguir che fanno

            Dopo gli avi i nepoti,

            Sta natura ognor verde, anzi procede

            Per sì lungo cammino

            Che sembra star. Caggiono i regni intanto,

    295  Passan genti e linguaggi: ella nol vede:

            E l’uom d’eternità s’arroga il vanto.

               E tu, lenta ginestra,

            Che di selve odorate

            Queste campagne dispogliate adorni,

    300  Anche tu presto alla crudel possanza

            Soccomberai del sotterraneo foco,

            Che ritornando al loco

            Già noto, stenderà l’avaro lembo

            Su tue molli foreste. E piegherai

    305  Sotto il fascio mortal non renitente

            Il tuo capo innocente:

            Ma non piegato insino allora indarno

            Codardamente supplicando innanzi

            Al futuro oppressor; ma non eretto

    310  Con forsennato orgoglio inver le stelle,

            Nè sul deserto, dove

            E la sede e i natali

            Non per voler ma per fortuna avesti;

            Ma più saggia, ma tanto

    315  Meno inferma dell’uom, quanto le frali

            Tue stirpi non credesti

            O dal fato o da te fatte immortali.

XXXIV

BROOM,
OR THE FLOWER OF THE WILDERNESS

Κα γπησαν ο νρωποι μλλον τ στος τ ϕς.

And men loved darkness rather than light.

JOHN 3:19

               Here on the dry flank

            of the terrifying mountain,

            Vesuvius the destroyer,

            which no other tree or flower gladdens,

        5  you spread your solitary thickets,

            scented broom,

            at home in wild places. And I’ve seen your shoots

            embellishing the lonely plain

            around the city

      10  that once was mistress of men,

            and whose grave and silent aspect

            seems to bear witness, telling the traveler

            of her lost empire.

            Now I see you here again,

      15  lover of sad places that the world has left

            and constant friend of fallen greatness.

            These fields

            strewn with sterile ashes, blanketed

            by hardened lava

      20  that echoes to a wanderer’s steps,

            where the snake nests and coils under the sun

            and the hare goes home

            to his familiar cave-like den—

            these were happy farms and fields,

      25  they were blond with wheat

            and echoed with lowing cattle;

            here were gardens, villas, welcome

            respite for the powerful,

            and famous cities, which, with rivers

      30  pouring from its fiery mouth,

            the implacable mountain crushed,

            along with their inhabitants.

            Now one ruin envelops everything

            where you take root, noble flower,

      35  and, as if sharing in the pain of others,

            send a waft of sweetest scent

            into the sky, consoling the wilderness.

            Let him who loves to praise our state

            come to these slopes and see how well our kind

      40  is served by loving nature.

            And he can also fairly judge

            the power of the human race

            whom their cruel nurse,

            when they fear it least,

      45  with the slightest movement in a moment

            partly destroys,

            and can with movements not much greater

            suddenly and totally annihilate.

            Represented on these slopes you see

      50  the magnificent, progressive destiny

            of humankind.

               Look here and see yourself reflected,

            proud and foolish century,

            who gave up the way forward

      55  indicated by resurgent thought,

            and, having changed course,

            boast of turning back

            and call it progress.

            While you babble, all the geniuses

      60  unlucky enough to have had you as a parent

            sing your praises,

            although among themselves they often scorn you.

            Not so shamefully

            shall I go to my death;

      65  rather, the disdain for you

            that is locked inside my breast

            I’ll have displayed as openly as possible,

            though well aware oblivion obscures

            him who was too disliked in his own time.

      70  From now on, I shall laugh at this misfortune,

            which will be yours as well.

            You dream of freedom, but at the same time

            want thought to be enslaved again—

            the one thing because of which we partly

      75  rose out of barbarism, the one thing

            that civilizes us, the one thing

            that brings improvement of the common good.

            The truth about the bitter fate

            and miserable condition nature handed us

      80  made you unhappy. So you turned your backs

            like cowards on the light that made it clear.

            And while you run from it,

            you call the man who follows it a coward,

            and a great spirit only him

      85  who, wise or foolish, fooling himself or others,

            extols human nature above the stars.

               A man who’s poor and weak of limb by nature,

            though he have a generous, noble soul,

            doesn’t believe or boast

      90  that he is rich or strong

            or laughably display

            a life of luxury

            or his own prowess publicly,

            but without shame allows himself

      95  to seem to have no wealth or power,

            and says so openly, and values

            what he has according to the truth.

            I consider a creature foolish

            and not noble who, though born to die

    100  and raised on pain,

            says, I was made for pleasure,

            and fills his pages up

            with rank pride, high-flown destinies,

            and new joys that the heavens,

    105  and not this planet only, have never heard of,

            making promises on earth to men

            whom a typhoon from the stormy sea,

            a blast of ill wind, or an earthquake

            may so destroy that all that’s left,

    110  to their great sorrow, is the memory.

            The noble nature is the one

            who dares to lift his mortal eyes

            to confront our common destiny

            and, with honest words

    115  that subtract nothing from the truth,

            admits the pain that is our destiny,

            and our poor and feeble state;

            who shows he’s great and strong in suffering

            and doesn’t add his brother’s hate or anger,

    120  worse than any other evil, to his ills

            by blaming man for his unhappiness,

            but assigns responsibility

            to the truly guilty: she who is

            mother of mortals when she gives us birth,

    125  stepmother ruling us.

            Her he calls his enemy, and believing

            the whole human company

            arrayed against her,

            as they are in fact,

    130  considers all men allies from the outset

            and embraces all of them

            with true love, offering

            and expecting real and ready aid

            in the alternating dangers and concerns

    135  of our common struggle. But to take up arms

            against a man, or set a trap

            or make trouble for his neighbor

            seems to him as stupid as,

            surrounded by hostile soldiers

    140  during the heaviest fighting on the field,

            to forget your enemies

            and battle fiercely with your friends,

            inciting your own men to run

            by threatening them with your sword.

    145  When such ideas become

            known to the populace as they once were,

            and the fear

            that first joined mortals in a common pact

            against unholy nature

    150  shall be revived to some extent

            out of real wisdom, then an honest,

            just society of citizens

            and right and piety will take root

            from something more than vain mythologies;

    155  and on this foundation

            the people’s probity may stand as firm

            as something based on error.

               Often I sit at night on these deserted

            slopes which the hardened flood

    160  clothes in a black that seems to undulate,

            and over the sad plain

            I see the stars

            burning up above in purest blue,

            which the sea reflects in the far distance

    165  and, twinkling everywhere, the world

            glistens in the empty sky.

            And once my eyes have focused on those lights,

            which seem a tiny point to them,

            though they’re enormous, so that next to these

    170  the earth and sea

            are in truth no greater than a speck

            to which not only man

            but this globe where man is nothing

            is totally unknown; and when I see

    175  these still more infinitely distant

            nuclei, it seems, of stars

            that look like haze to us, to which

            not only man and earth but all our stars

            together, infinite in size and number,

    180  the golden sun among them,

            are unfamiliar, or else they appear

            the way these look to earth: a point

            of nebulous light—

            how do I think of you then, sons of men?

    185  And, considering

            the way you are down here,

            to which the earth I walk upon bears witness,

            and that even so you see yourself

            as lord and end assigned to Everything,

    190  and how you were often flattered to relate

            that the authors of the universe

            came down to this mere grain of sand called earth

            for love of you, and often condescended

            to speak with you and yours,

    195  and how you keep retailing absurd notions

            insulting to the wise, down to our day,

            which seemingly surpasses every other

            in knowledge and civility; what emotion, then,

            mortal unhappy race, what notion of you

    200  finally assails my heart? It’s hard to say

            whether it’s laughter or pity that prevails.

               As a little apple, falling from a tree,

            which there in the late autumn

            no other force but ripeness brings to earth,

    205  breaks, in an instant emptying and burying

            the sweet nests of a multitude of ants

            dug out of the soft soil at great cost,

            and the works and wealth

            that the hardworking army

    210  had stored up by long labor

            providently in the summertime;

            so, plummeting like lead from overhead,

            hurled out of the thundering womb

            deep into the sky,

    215  night and ruin of ashes,

            dirt, and stones,

            infused with boiling rivers

            or steaming in the grass

            of the mountain flank,

    220  an enormous downward flood

            of liquid boulders,

            metal, burning sand,

            fused and broke apart

            and buried within instants

    225  the cities that the sea lapped

            there on the far shore; so that now goats graze

            on top of them and nearby new towns rise

            for which the buried ones are stepping stones

            and the tyrant mountain seems

    230  to trample on the felled walls with its foot.

            Nature has no more esteem

            or care for the seed of man

            than for the ant. And if annihilation

            is rarer for the one than for the other

    235  it’s because of nothing more

            than that man has less fertile progeny.

               More than eighteen hundred years have passed

            since these lived-in places disappeared,

            extinguished by the power of fire,

    240  and yet the farmer bending to his vines

            which the scorched and poisoned earth

            nurtures poorly in these fields

            still lifts his anxious eyes

            to the fatal peak,

    245  in no way gentler,

            which sits there still tremendous,

            still threatening ruin

            for him, his children,

            and their mean possessions.

    250  And often the poor man sleepless on the roof

            of his country hovel,

            lying in the open air all night,

            jumps up time and time again to watch

            the progress of the fearful boiling,

    255  spilling out of the inexhaustible womb

            onto the sandy mountainside,

            on which the shore of Capri gleams reflected,

            and the port of Naples, and Mergellina.

            And if he sees it coming close, or hears

    260  his well water gurgle agitated,

            he frantically collects his wife and children,

            and, fleeing with as many of their things

            as they can carry, watches from afar

            their longtime nest and the small field

    265  that was their one defense from hunger

            fall prey to the burning flood,

            which advances hissing and unstoppable,

            pouring over them unendingly.

            Extinct Pompeii

    270  returns to the celestial light

            from her immemorial oblivion

            like a buried skeleton

            that greed or piety has raised out of the earth

            into the air, and from the empty forum

    275  the wanderer, gazing

            down the rows of broken colonnades,

            contemplates the distant double peak

            and its smoking crest,

            still menacing the scattered ruin.

    280  And in the horror of the hidden night,

            in the empty theaters, the broken temples,

            and ruined houses where the bat

            conceals its young,

            advancing cruelly through vacant buildings

    285  like an evil torch the gleaming,

            deadly lava flows,

            and glows red among the distant shadows,

            dyeing everything around.

            So, ignorant of man and of the age

    290  that he calls ancient, and of the descendants

            following their ancestors,

            nature stays evergreen; indeed she travels

            such a long road she might as well

            be standing still. Meanwhile kingdoms fall,

    295  peoples and languages die out; she doesn’t see.

            Yet man takes it upon himself to praise eternity.

               And you, too, pliant broom,

            adorning this abandoned countryside

            with fragrant thickets,

    300  you will soon succumb

            to the cruel power of subterranean fire,

            which, returning to the place it knew before,

            will spread its greedy tongue

            over your soft thickets. And unresisting,

    305  you’ll bow your blameless head

            beneath the deadly scythe;

            but you will not have bowed before,

            hopeless abject supplicant

            of your future oppressor; you were never raised

    310  by senseless pride up to the stars

            or above the desert, which for you

            was home and birthplace

            not by choice, but chance;

            no, far wiser and less fallible

    315  than man is, you did not presume

            that either fate or you had made

            your fragile kind immortal.

XXXV

IMITAZIONE

               Lungi dal propio ramo,

            Povera foglia frale,

            Dove vai tu? Dal faggio

            Là dov’io nacqui, mi divise il vento.

        5  Esso, tornando, a volo

            Dal bosco alla campagna,

            Dalla valle mi porta alla montagna.

            Seco perpetuamente

            Vo pellegrina, e tutto l’altro ignoro.

      10  Vo dove ogni altra cosa,

            Dove naturalmente

            Va la foglia di rosa,

            E la foglia d’alloro.

XXXV

IMITATION

               Where are you going,

            tender little leaf,

            so far from your bough?

            The wind tore me away

        5  from the beech where I was born.

            Whirling as he flies, he spirits me

            from wood to meadow

            and from hill to valley.

            I wander with him endlessly,

      10  disregarding everything.

            Where all else goes I go,

            where by nature rose

            and laurel leaf go, too.

XXXVI

SCHERZO

               Quando fanciullo io venni

            A pormi con le Muse in disciplina,

            L’una di quelle mi pigliò per mano;

            E poi tutto quel giorno

        5  La mi condusse intorno

            A veder l’officina.

            Mostrommi a parte a parte

            Gli strumenti dell’arte,

            E i servigi diversi

      10  A che ciascun di loro

            S’adopra nel lavoro

            Delle prose e de’ versi.

            Io mirava, e chiedea:

            Musa, la lima ov’è? Disse la Dea:

      15  La lima è consumata; or facciam senza.

            Ed io, ma di rifarla

            Non vi cal, soggiungea, quand’ella è stanca?

            Rispose: hassi a rifar, ma il tempo manca.

XXXVI

SCHERZO

               When as a child I came

            to study with the Muses,

            one of them took me by the hand,

            and all day long

        5  she led me

            through their workshop.

            One by one she showed me

            the tools of their art

            and the different uses

      10  that each of them is put to

            as they do the work

            of prose and rhyme.

            I was amazed, and asked her:

            Muse, where is your file?

      15  The Goddess answered: Gone;

            today we do without.

            And I: But when it’s used, don’t you replace it?

            Said she: We ought to, but there isn’t time.

FRAMMENTI

[FRAGMENTS]

XXXVII

ALCETA

            Odi, Melisso: io vo’ contarti un sogno

            Di questa notte, che mi torna a mente

            In riveder la luna. Io me ne stava

            Alla finestra che risponde al prato,

        5  Guardando in alto: ed ecco all’improvviso

            Distaccasi la luna; e mi parea

            Che quanto nel cader s’approssimava,

            Tanto crescesse al guardo; infin che venne

            A dar di colpo in mezzo al prato; ed era

      10  Grande quanto una secchia, e di scintille

            Vomitava una nebbia, che stridea

            Sì forte come quando un carbon vivo

            Nell’acqua immergi e spegni. Anzi a quel modo

            La luna, come ho detto, in mezzo al prato

      15  Si spegneva annerando a poco a poco,

            E ne fumavan l’erbe intorno intorno.

            Allor mirando in ciel, vidi rimaso

            Come un barlume, o un’orma, anzi una nicchia,

            Ond’ella fosse svelta; in cotal guisa,

      20  Ch’io n’agghiacciava; e ancor non m’assicuro.

MELISSO

            E ben hai che temer, che agevol cosa

            Fora cader la luna in sul tuo campo.

ALCETA

            Chi sa? non veggiam noi spesso di state

            Cader le stelle?

MELISSO

      25                           Egli ci ha tante stelle,

            Che picciol danno è cader l’una o l’altra

            Di loro, e mille rimaner. Ma sola

            Ha questa luna in ciel, che da nessuno

            Cader fu vista mai se non in sogno.

XXXVII

ALCETA

            Listen, Melisso: I want to tell you a dream

            I had last night, which comes to mind,

            seeing the moon again. I was standing

            at the window that looks out on the meadow

        5  staring up, when suddenly the moon

            unhooked herself.

            And it seemed to me that as she fell,

            the nearer she got the bigger she looked, until

            she hit the ground in the middle of the meadow,

      10  big as a bucket, and vomited

            a cloud of sparks that shrieked as loud

            as when you dunk a live coal in the water

            and drown it. So, as I said,

            the moon died in the middle of the meadow,

      15  little by little slowly darkening,

            and the grass was smoking all around.

            Then, looking up into the sky, I saw

            something still there, a glimmer or a shadow,

            or the niche that she’d been torn away from,

      20  which made me cold with fear. And I’m still anxious.

MELISSO

            You were right to be afraid, when the moon

            fell so easily into your field.

ALCETA

            Who knows? Don’t we often see

            stars fall in summer?

MELISSO

      25                            There are so many stars

            that if one or another of them falls

            it’s no great loss, since there are thousands left.

            But there’s just this one moon up in the sky,

            which no one saw fall ever—except in dreams.

XXXVIII

               Io qui vagando al limitare intorno,

            Invan la pioggia invoco e la tempesta,

            Acciò che la ritenga al mio soggiorno.

               Pure il vento muggia nella foresta,

        5  E muggia tra le nubi il tuono errante,

            Pria che l’aurora in ciel fosse ridesta.

               O care nubi, o cielo, o terra, o piante,

            Parte la donna mia: pietà, se trova

            Pietà nel mondo un infelice amante.

      10     O turbine, or ti sveglia, or fate prova

            Di sommergermi, o nembi, insino a tanto

            Che il sole ad altre terre il dì rinnova.

               S’apre il ciel, cade il soffio, in ogni canto

            Posan l’erbe e le frondi, e m’abbarbaglia

      15  Le luci il crudo Sol pregne di pianto.

XXXVIII

               Lurking here around the threshold, I

            pray for rain and storm with no success,

            so that I can keep her here with me.

               But the wind bellows in the woods

        5  and vagrant thunder bellows in the clouds

            before dawn can be revived in the sky.

               O dear clouds, O heaven, O earth, O trees,

            my lady’s leaving! Pity me, if an unhappy

            lover can find pity in this world.

      10     O whirlwind, rouse yourself now, try

            to drown me now, O clouds, until the time

            the sun brings daylight back in other lands.

               The sky opens, the wind dies; everywhere,

            the grass and leaves lie still; and the cruel sun

      15  dazzles my eyes, which are heavy with tears.

XXXIX

               Spento il diurno raggio in occidente,

            E queto il fumo delle ville, e queta

            De’ cani era la voce e della gente;

               Quand’ella, volta all’amorosa meta,

        5  Si ritrovò nel mezzo ad una landa

            Quanto foss’altra mai vezzosa e lieta.

               Spandeva il suo chiaror per ogni banda

            La sorella del sole, e fea d’argento

            Gli arbori ch’a quel loco eran ghirlanda.

      10     I ramuscelli ivan cantando al vento,

            E in un con l’usignol che sempre piagne

            Fra i tronchi un rivo fea dolce lamento.

               Limpido il mar da lungi, e le campagne

            E le foreste, e tutte ad una ad una

      15  Le cime si scoprian delle montagne.

               In questa ombra giacea la valle bruna,

            E i collicelli intorno rivestia

            Del suo candor la rugiadosa luna.

               Sola tenea la taciturna via

      20  La donna, e il vento che gli odori spande,

            Molle passar sul volto si sentia.

               Se lieta fosse, è van che tu dimande:

            Piacer prendea di quella vista, e il bene

            Che il cor le prometteva era più grande.

      25     Come fuggiste, o belle ore serene!

            Dilettevol quaggiù null’altro dura,

            Nè si ferma giammai, se non la spene.

               Ecco turbar la notte, e farsi oscura

            La sembianza del ciel, ch’era sì bella,

      30  E il piacere di colei farsi paura.

               Un nugol torbo, padre di procella,

            Sorgea di dietro ai monti, e crescea tanto,

            Che più non si scopria luna nè stella.

               Spiegarsi ella il vedea per ogni canto,

      35  E salir su per l’aria a poco a poco,

            E far sovra il suo capo a quella ammanto.

               E veniva il poco lume ognor più fioco;

            E intanto al bosco si destava il vento,

            Al bosco là del dilettoso loco.

      40     E si fea più gagliardo ogni momento,

            Tal che a forza era desto e svolazzava

            Tra le fronde ogni augel per lo spavento.

               E la nube, crescendo, in giù calava

            Ver la marina sì, che l’un suo lembo

      45  Toccava i monti, e l’altro il mar toccava.

               Già tutto a cieca oscuritade in grembo,

            S’incominciava udir fremer la pioggia,

            E il suon cresceva all’appressar del nembo.

               Dentro le nubi in paurosa foggia

      50  Guizzavan lampi, e la fean batter gli occhi;

            E n’era il terren tristo, e l’aria roggia.

               Discior sentia la misera i ginocchi;

            E già muggiva il tuon simile al metro

            Di torrente che d’alto in giù trabocchi.

      55     Talvolta ella ristava, e l’aer tetro

            Guardava sbigottita, e poi correa,

            Sì che i panni e le chiome ivano addietro.

               E il duro vento col petto rompea,

            Che gocce fredde giù per l’aria nera

      60  In sul volto soffiando le spingea.

               E il tuon veniale incontro come fera,

            Rugghiando orribilmente e senza posa;

            E cresceva la pioggia e la bufera.

               E d’ogn’intorno era terribil cosa

      65  Il volar polve e frondi e rami e sassi,

            E il suon che immaginar l’alma non osa.

               Ella dal lampo affaticati e lassi

            Coprendo gli occhi, e stretti i panni al seno,

            Gia pur tra il nembo accelerando i passi.

      70     Ma nella vista ancor l’era il baleno

            Ardendo sì, ch’alfin dallo spavento

            Fermò l’andare, e il cor le venne meno.

               E si rivolse indietro. E in quel momento

            Si spense il lampo, e tornò buio l’etra,

      75  Ed acchetossi il tuono, e stette il vento.

               Taceva il tutto; ed ella era di pietra.

XXXIX

               The light of day had died out in the west,

            and the houses’ smoke had disappeared,

            as had the sounds of dogs and people, too,

               when she, heading to love’s rendezvous,

        5  found herself in the middle of a heath

            more gay and charming than she’d ever known.

               The sun’s sister spread her brightness

            with every ray, and silvered

            the trees that were a garland for that place.

      10     The little boughs were singing in the wind

            and together with the bird that always weeps

            among the trees a river was lamenting.

               The sea was bright in the distance,

            the countryside and forests, and one by one

      15  the tops of the mountains could be seen.

               The dark valley lay in silent shadow

            and the dewy moon was cloaking

            the little hills around it with its brightness.

               The lady went her silent way alone

      20  and felt the wind that wafts its odors

            gently pass across her face.

               There’s no point in asking if she was happy:

            the sight gave her pleasure, yet the good

            her heart promised her was even greater.

      25     How quickly you flew, lovely, serene hours!

            Nothing else that is delightful lasts

            down here, nothing ever lasts, but hope.

               See the night cloud over, and the face

            of the sky that was so beautiful turn dark,

      30  and her pleasure turn to fright.

               A turbid cloud, the father of a storm,

            rose from behind the hills, and grew so huge

            that moon and stars no longer could be seen.

               She saw it spreading everywhere,

      35  gradually rising through the air

            and making a mantle above her head.

               The faint light grew dimmer all the time;

            meanwhile the wind rose in the grove,

            where they were supposed to rendezvous.

      40     And moment by moment it grew stronger,

            so every bird was wakened by its force

            and darted in the foliage from fear.

               And the cloud, as it increased, descended

            to the shore, till one of its edges

      45  touched the hills and the other met the sea.

               Now, in the womb of blind obscurity,

            the shudder of the rain began to be heard

            and the sound grew as the cloud came nearer.

               Lightning flared inside the clouds

      50  in a fearful shape that made her blink,

            and the land was sad, and the air red.

               The poor girl felt her knees give way

            and now the thunder bellowed like the roar

            of a river pouring from the heights.

      55     At times she stood stock-still and watched

            the dark air in dismay and then she ran,

            her clothes and hair streaking behind her.

               And the wild wind struck her breast

            and cold rain was spattering her face

      60  in the darkness while she gasped for breath.

               And the thunder struck like something wild,

            howling horribly, unendingly,

            and the rain and storm intensified.

               And everything around was terrible

      65  flying dust and leaves, branches and stones,

            and a sound the soul dare not imagine.

               She, covering her miserable, tired eyes

            from the lightning, clutched her clothes to her breast

            and hurried faster through the cloud.

      70     But the burning lightning stayed in sight,

            so that in the end she wasn’t

            moving in her terror, and lost courage.

               And she turned back. And at that very moment

            the lightning ceased, the air went dark,

      75  the thunder subsided, and the wind.

               Everything was still; and she was stone.

XL

DAL GRECO DI SIMONIDE

               Ogni mondano evento

            È di Giove in poter, di Giove, o figlio,

            Che giusta suo talento

            Ogni cosa dispone.

        5  Ma di lunga stagione

            Nostro cieco pensier s’affanna e cura,

            Benchè l’umana etate,

            Come destina il ciel nostra ventura,

            Di giorno in giorno dura.

      10  La bella speme tutti ci nutrica

            Di sembianze beate,

            Onde ciascuno indarno s’affatica:

            Altri l’aurora amica,

            Altri l’etade aspetta;

      15  E nullo in terra vive

            Cui nell’anno avvenir facili e pii

            Con Pluto gli altri iddii

            La mente non prometta.

            Ecco pria che la speme in porto arrive,

      20  Qual da vecchiezza è giunto

            E qual da morbi al bruno Lete addutto;

            Questo il rigido Marte, e quello il flutto

            Del pelago rapisce; altri consunto

            Da negre cure, o tristo nodo al collo

      25  Circondando, sotterra si rifugge.

            Così di mille mali

            I miseri mortali

            Volgo fiero e diverso agita e strugge.

            Ma per sentenza mia,

      30  Uom saggio e sciolto dal comune errore

            Patir non sosterria,

            Nè porrebbe al dolore

            Ed al mal proprio suo cotanto amore.

XL

FROM THE GREEK OF SIMONIDES

               Every earthly happening

            is in the power of Jove, of Jove, my son,

            who according to his will

            decides how everything is done.

        5  But our blind brain is tortured

            planning a long future,

            although the human state,

            as heaven decides our fate,

            proceeds from day to day.

      10  Lovely hope feeds all of us

            on sweet appearances,

            and we all suffer from them pointlessly:

            some await the friendly dawn,

            some the time to come,

      15  and no one lives on earth

            who hasn’t told himself

            that Pluto and the other gods

            will be kind and lenient next year.

            Yet before hope comes to port,

      20  some of us have reached old age

            and some are brought by sickness to dark Lethe.

            One is taken by hard Mars,

            another by the river of the ocean;

            someone else, devoured by black cares,

      25  or putting a sad noose around his neck,

            flees underground.

            So a many-headed

            wild swarm of a thousand ills

            chases and ruins miserable mortals.

      30  But I say the man who’s sane

            and free of common error wouldn’t stand

            for suffering, or lavish so much love

            on his own misery and pain.

XLI

DELLO STESSO

               Umana cosa picciol tempo dura,

            E certissimo detto

            Disse il veglio di Chio,

            Conforme ebber natura

        5  Le foglie e l’uman seme.

            Ma questa voce in petto

            Raccolgon pochi. All’inquieta speme,

            Figlia di giovin core,

            Tutti prestiam ricetto.

      10  Mentre è vermiglio il fiore

            Di nostra etade acerba,

            L’alma vota e superba

            Cento dolci pensieri educa invano,

            Nè morte aspetta nè vecchiezza; e nulla

      15  Cura di morbi ha l’uom gagliardo e sano.

            Ma stolto è chi non vede

            La giovanezza come ha ratte l’ale,

            E siccome alla culla

            Poco il rogo è lontano.

      20  Tu presso a porre il piede

            In sul varco fatale

            Della plutonia sede,

            Ai presenti diletti

            La breve età commetti.

XLI

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

               Human things last only a short time,

            and what the sage of Chios said

            is very sure:

            that leaves and human beings

        5  are similar by nature.

            Yet few assent to this idea.

            All give room

            to restless hope,

            the young heart’s creature.

      10  While the flower

            of our green age blooms,

            our empty, prideful soul

            feeds a hundred sweet ideas in vain,

            expecting neither death nor age,

      15  and strapping, healthy youth

            won’t hear of sickness.

            But he’s a fool who doesn’t see

            how swift the wings of youth are, and how near

            the cradle lies to the grave.

      20  You, about to take

            the fatal step

            that leads to Pluto’s kingdom,

            commit to present pleasures

            your brief life.

Other Texts

LE RIMEMBRANZE

Idillio

               Era in mezzo del ciel la curva luna,

            E di Micon la povera capanna

            Sol piccola da un lato ombra spandea.

            Chino sul destro braccio, ed appoggiando

        5  Alle ginocchia il cubito, dell’uscio

            Sul facile gradin sedea Micone.

            Egli era triste, e muto. Il tenerello

            Dameta il figliuolin, che ad ogni istante

            Temea la mamma udir chiamarlo al sonno,

      10  Scherzavagli d’intorno, e saltellando

            La mano gli prendeva, e or d’una cosa

            Or d’altra il ricercava: un panierino

            Mostravagli talor da lui tessuto,

            Talor raccolto un fresco fior, talora

      15  Nella socchiusa man lucido insetto

            Sorpreso in aria da sagace colpo:

            E il rimirava in faccia, e avidamente

            Plauso chiedea col guardo, e col sorriso.

            Quel, serio, e taciturno a stento ai detti,

      20  O a fuggitivo riso i labbri apriva.

            Alfin proruppe:

MICONE

                                      O amabile Dameta,

            Dì, figlio mio, del tuo maggior fratello

            Non ti ricordi tu? più non rammenti

            Il tuo Filino? Ei t’ha lasciato, e un anno

      25  È che nol vedi più. Le prime rose

            Spuntavano, com’or, su quella fratta,

            Quando, i suoi giuochi abbandonati, il vidi

            Seder pallido, e muto. Io gli chiedea:

            Figlio, perchè qui sei? perchè non giuochi?

      30  Perchè non vai con tuo fratello al prato?

            Su scendi a sollazzarti. Hai forse male?

            No, padre, ei mi dicea, no, nulla io sento,

            Ma stanco io sono, e qui riposo; or ora

            Tornerò con Dameta a trastullarmi.

      35  Così sempre ei dicea, ma sempre il male

            Più gli apparia sul viso. Un dì di Festa

            Alfine ei si levò l’estrema volta,

            Poi più non sorse. Oh come, allor che a casa

            La sera mi vedea tornar dal campo,

      40  Lieto in chiamarmi mi tendea le mani,

            E la mia mi baciava, e mi chiedea

            Se stanco fossi, e sempre a se vicino

            M’avria voluto. Un giorno alfin (dimani

            Quel dì funesto riconduce il sole)

      45  Mi levai, corsi a lui, chino sul letto

            Gli diedi un bacio, e come stasse il chiesi.

            Ei più non rispondea: l’occhio mi volse

            Cui luccicante lacrima copria:

            Ma nulla dir potè, più non dischiuse

      50  Il moribondo labbro. Un opportuno

            Rimedio al male, il vecchio Alcon, quel Saggio,

            Cui sì spesso vedesti, e cui sì spesso

            Della villa consultano i pastori,

            Indicato ci avea. Per procacciarlo

      55  Impaziente alla città mi volsi.

            Saliva il sole in cielo, e la marina

            Di lontano splendea: ma la campagna

            Era tacita ancor. Passai non lungi

            A quell’alto palagio, che alla luna

      60  Or vedi biancheggiar dietro alle piante,

            Colà vicino alla maestra via.

            Della villa i Signori eran sepolti

            Nel dolce sonno del mattin. Pur vidi

            Aperta una finestra, intorno a cui

      65  Sporgea ferrea ringhiera, e dentro l’ampia

            Camera Signoril, sul pavimento

            E il lucido apparato, che l’opposta

            Parete ricopria, dal sol dipinta

            L’immagine mirai della finestra.

      70  A cui dinanzi con negletta veste

            Un dei servi passar vidi, che intento

            Sulla scopa pendea. Quanto lugubri

            Per me fur quei momenti! Alla cittade

            Giunsi, tolsi il rimedio, e qua tornai.

      75  Fra speme, e fra timor, tremante, incerto

            Entrai sospeso … Morto era Filino.

            Pallido il rimirai: finito io vidi

            Il respirar sulle gelate labbra:

            Serrate le palpebre, e rilucenti

      80  Pel ghiacciato sudor l’umide chiome.

            Ahi mio Filino! Da quel tempo ancora

            Quel mesto orror, quei funebri momenti,

            Quel tristo dì dimenticar non posso.

DAMETA

            Ben men sovvengo anch’io: che nel levarmi

      85  Quella mattina, oltre l’usato io vidi

            Trista la mamma. Al mio Filino io tosto

            Correr voleva: ella il vietò, mi disse

            Che ancor dormiva, e uscir mi fece al prato.

            Ma nel tornar con festa, e saltellando

      90  Pianger la vidi. Io m’acchetai, pian piano

            Le venni appresso, e presale la gonna,

            Mesto le dimandai perchè piangesse.

            Ella china abbracciommi, ed appoggiando

            Alla mia la sua fronte, ah figlio, disse,

      95  Caro Dameta mio, Filino è morto.

            Allor piansi ancor io. La mamma invano

            Trattenermi volea: poi ch’ella il guardo

            Rivolse altrove, al letticciuolo io corsi

            Del mio caro Filin. Fiso dapprima

    100  Il rimirai, poi sullo smorto viso

            Mille baci gli diedi, e colla mano

            Toccai la fredda guancia, e gli occhi chiusi

            Di riaprir gli cercai. Deh quanto io piansi

            In veder come più non si movea!

    105  Filin! fratello! io gli dicea, oh Dio!

            Tu non mi vedi più … Che far giammai

            Potrò senza di te? Quanto t’amava!

            Quanto m’amavi! alla selvetta, al prato

            Sempre eravamo insieme: oh quante volte

    110  Corremmo a gara, e a gara tra le foglie

            Cogliemmo i più bei fior! quante sull’erba

            La sera assisi al raggio della luna,

            Cantammo insiem! Tu m’insegnavi il suono

            Sopra le canne a modular, che spesso

    115  Di tua man m’apprestavi; o a far panieri

            Per empirli di fiori; o a lanciar sassi

            A un albero lontan. Spesso nel bosco

            Tendemmo insidie agli augelletti, e insieme

            Ci partimmo la preda. Entro un canneto

    120  Spesso nascosto io l’amor tuo cercai

            Deludere un momento: ansioso allora

            Tu di me givi in traccia. Il riso mio,

            O lo scrosciar delle vicine canne

            Mi tradiva talor: tu mi scoprivi,

    125  E lieto a me correvi, e in abbracciarmi

            Del mio crudo piacer mi riprendevi.

            Oh quanto ci amavamo! Ah tutto tutto

            È finito per noi. Caro fratello

            Tu mi lasciasti … Al giuoco, in casa io sempre

    130  Solo restar dovrò? No, che la vita

            Menar più non potrei … Caro Filino,

            Ah tu moristi, ah morir voglio anch’io.

           Egli piangea; tra le ginocchia il prese

            Il buon Micone, e gli asciugava il pianto,

            E consolando il gia.

MICONE

    135                                      Diman condurti

            Alla cittade io vo’, diman la tomba

            Ti mostrerò di tuo fratello, e voglio

            Che venga insiem con noi la mamma ancora.

            Ah figlio! ah tu sei morto! il padre tuo

    140  Che sì t’amò, dimenticar sapresti?

MEMORIES

Idyll

               The crescent moon was high up in the sky

            and Micon’s poor hut offered

            just a little shadow on one side.

            Leaning on his right arm

        5  with his elbow on his knee,

            Micon sat in the wide threshold of his door.

            He was sad and silent. Tender young Dametas,

            his little boy, afraid at any moment

            to hear his mother calling him to bed,

      10  was playing near him; as he jumped,

            he took his hand and begged for his attention

            for one thing or another: now he showed him

            a little basket that he’d woven,

            now a fresh flower that he’d picked,

      15  now a gleaming insect in his hand,

            caught in midair with a shrewd maneuver.

            He looked into his face and greedily

            sought his approval with his eyes and smile.

            The other, serious, and taciturn, was having trouble

      20  speaking or even smiling a fleeting smile.

            Finally he broke out:

MICON

                                              O adorable Dametas,

            tell me, son, don’t you remember

            your older brother? Don’t you recall

            your Filinos? He left you, and it’s been a year

      25  since you’ve seen him. The first roses

            were budding, as they are now, on that cliffside

            when I saw him leave his games

            and sit pale and mute. I asked him:

            Son, why are you here? Why aren’t you playing?

      30  Why don’t you go to the meadow with your brother?

            Sit here and rest. Are you not feeling well?

            No, Father, he told me, I don’t feel a thing,

            but I’m tired, I’m resting here.

            Soon I’ll go back to playing with Dametas.

      35  Which was what he always said, but illness

            was more and more apparent on his face.

            At last one Sunday he got out of bed

            one final time, and then no more. Oh, when he saw me

            coming from the field back to the house

      40  he’d hold his hands out, happily

            calling me, and kiss my hand and ask me

            if I was tired and always wanted me

            beside him. At last one day (tomorrow

            will be the deadly anniversary)

      45  I rose and ran to him, stretched on his bed,

            gave him a kiss, and asked him how he was.

            He didn’t answer any more: he turned to me,

            eyes full of glistening tears,

            but he couldn’t speak; he never opened

      50  his dying lips again. Old Alcon,

            the wise man you saw often, whom

            the farm shepherds always turn to,

            suggested an effective remedy

            for his illness, so I rushed

      55  impatiently to town for it.

            The sun rose in the sky, the sea was shining

            in the distance: but the countryside

            was quiet still. I passed not far

            from the high palace you now can see

      60  turning white by moonlight

            behind the hedge, beside the main street there.

            The Masters of the place were buried

            in sweet morning sleep. And yet I saw

            one window with an iron balcony

      65  and inside the ample Master Chamber,

            both on the floor

            and on the room’s rich furnishings,

            covering the wall opposite, I saw

            the windows’ image painted by the sun.

      70  In front of which I saw one of the servants

            pass, out of uniform, leaning on his broom.

            How unhappy

            these moments were for me!

            I reached town, got the medicine, and returned.

      75  I came in trembling, hanging

            between hope and fear … Filinos was dead.

            I saw that he was pale, I saw the breath

            had ceased on his icy lips,

            his lids were closed, his wet locks

      80  shone with icy sweat.

            Oh my Filinos! From that moment on

            I can’t forget that melancholy horror,

            those mournful moments, that sad day.

DAMETAS

            I myself remember less: but when I rose

      85  that morning, I saw my mother was much sadder

            than usual. I wanted to run to my Filinos

            right away. She stopped me, saying

            he was still asleep, and made me go out into the meadow.

            But as I came back joyful, jumping,

      90  I saw her weeping. I went silent, slowly

            I came up to her and pulled her skirt,

            sadly asking her why she was crying.

            She bent down to hold me, and as she touched

            her forehead to mine, said, Oh son,

      95  My dear Dametas, Filinos is dead.

            Then I cried, too. Mamma wanted

            to hold me back but couldn’t. While she

            was looking elsewhere, I ran to the little

            bed of my dear Filin. At first I stared at him

    100  intently, then I kissed his pallid face

            a thousand times, and touched his frigid cheek

            with my hand, and tried to open

            his shut eyes. Oh, how I cried,

            seeing that he no longer moved!

    105  Filin! My brother! I said to him, oh God!

            You don’t see me anymore … What will I ever

            manage to do without you? How I loved you!

            How you loved me! We were always together

            in the woods and field: oh how many times

    110  we raced, and vied to pick the prettiest flowers

            in the leaves. How often we sat on the grass

            in the evenings and sang

            by the light of the moon! You taught me

            how to make notes with the canes

    115  you often lent me, or weave baskets

            to fill with flowers, or throw rocks

            at a tree in the distance. Often in the woods

            we set snares for the birds, and shared our catch

            together. Often hidden in a canebrake

    120  I tried to trick your love for just a moment:

            then how anxiously

            you’d dog my footsteps. My laughter,

            or the rustling of the canes nearby

            would betray me and you’d find me out,

    125  and gladly run to me, and hug me,

            reprimanding me for my cruel pleasure.

            How much we loved each other! Oh everything,

            everything’s over for us.

            Dear brother, you left me … Must I always be alone,

    130  playing, at home? No, I couldn’t

            go on living … Dear Filinos,

            you died, and I want to die myself.

            He wept. Good Micon held him

            between his knees and wiped his tears,

            and kept on consoling him.

MICON

    135                                                Tomorrow

            I want to take you into town, I’ll show you

            your brother’s grave,

            and I want your mother to come with us too.

            Ah son! you’re dead! How could your father

    140  who loved you so, forget you?

IL CANTO DELLA FANCIULLA

               Canto di verginella, assiduo canto,

            Che da chiuso ricetto errando vieni

            Per le quiete vie; come sì tristo

            Suoni agli orecchi miei? perchè mi stringi

        5  Sì forte il cor, che a lagrimar m’induci?

            E pur lieto sei tu; voce festiva

            De la speranza: ogni tua nota il tempo

            Aspettato risuona. Or, così lieto,

            Al pensier mio sembri un lamento, e l’alma

      10  Mi pungi di pietà. Cagion d’affanno

            Torna il pensier de la speranza istessa

            A chi per prova la conobbe.

THE GIRL’S SONG

               Young girl’s song, insistent song

            wafting from a hidden room and wandering

            in the quiet streets—why do you sound

            so sad to me? Why do you tear my heart

        5  so fiercely it brings me to tears?

            And yet you’re happy; joyous voice of hope:

            each note of yours rehearses

            the expected moment. Yet even happy,

            you seem a lament to me,

      10  and pierce my soul with pity. The idea

            of hope itself returns, a cause of pain

            to him who’s known it.

CORO DI MORTI NELLO STUDIO DI FEDERICO RUYSCH

               Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve

            Ogni creata cosa,

            In te, morte, si posa

            Nostra ignuda natura;

        5  Lieta no, ma sicura

            Dall’antico dolor. Profonda notte

            Nella confusa mente

            Il pensier grave oscura;

            Alla speme, al desio, l’arido spirto

      10  Lena mancar si sente:

            Così d’affanno e di temenza è sciolto,

            E l’età vote e lente

            Senza tedio consuma.

            Vivemmo: e qual di paurosa larva,

      15  E di sudato sogno,

            A lattante fanciullo erra nell’alma

            Confusa ricordanza:

            Tal memoria n’avanza

            Del viver nostro: ma da tema è lunge

      20  Il rimembrar. Che fummo?

            Che fu quel punto acerbo

            Che di vita ebbe nome?

            Cosa arcana e stupenda

            Oggi è la vita al pensier nostro, e tale

      25  Qual de’ vivi al pensiero

            L’ignota morte appar. Come da morte

            Vivendo rifuggia, così rifugge

            Dalla fiamma vitale

            Nostra ignuda natura;

      30  Lieta no ma sicura;

            Però ch’esser beato

            Nega ai mortali e nega a’ morti il fato.

CHORUS OF THE DEAD IN THE STUDY OF FREDERICK RUYSCH

               Alone eternal in the world,

            all creation bent your way,

            Death, our naked being

            rests in you:

        5  not happy, no, but safe

            from age-old suffering.

            Deep night in our troubled minds

            obscures the terrible idea;

            the arid spirit lacks

      10  breath for hope and desire:

            freed thus from strife and fear,

            peaceably it spends

            the empty, inexorable years.

            We lived, and like

      15  a terrifying ghost

            a nursing infant’s fitful dream,

            a vague memory of living

            flickers in the soul.

            But memory’s a far cry from fear.

      20  What were we?

            What was that bitter

            moment known as life?

            To us today it seems

            a secret, fearful thing,

      25  the way that death seems alien

            to those who are alive.

            As it fled death in life,

            now our naked being

            shrinks from the vital flame,

      30  not happy, no, but safe;

            since fate bans happiness

            for mortals and the dead.

AD ARIMANE

Re delle cose, autor del mondo, arcana

Malvagità, sommo potere e somma

Intelligenza, eterno

Dator de’ mali e reggitor del moto,

io non so se questo ti faccia felice, ma mira e godi ec. contemplando eternam. ec.

produzione e distruzione ec. per uccider partorisce ec. sistema del mondo, tutto patimen. Natura è come un bambino che disfa subito il fatto. Vecchiezza. Noia o passioni piene di dolore e disperazioni: amore.

I selvaggi e le tribù primitive, sotto diverse forme, non riconoscono che te. Ma i popoli civili ec. te con diversi nomi il volgo appella Fato, natura e Dio. Ma tu sei Arimane, tu quello che ec.

E il mondo civile t’invoca.

Taccio le tempeste, le pesti ec. tuoi doni, che altro non sai donare. Tu dai gli ardori e i ghiacci.

E il mondo delira cercando nuovi ordini e leggi e spera perfezione. Ma l’opra tua rimane immutabile, perchè p. natura dell’uomo sempre regneranno L’ardimento e l’inganno, e la sincerità e la modestia resteranno indietro, e la fortuna sarà nemica al valore, e il

merito non sarà buono a farsi largo, e il giusto e il debole sarà oppresso ec. ec.

Vivi, Arimane e trionfi, e sempre trionferai.

Invidia dagli antichi attribuita agli dèi verso gli uomini.

Animali destinati in cibo. Serpente Boa. Nume pietoso ecc.

Perchè, dio del male, hai tu posto nella vita qualche apparenza di piacere? l’amore?… per travagliarci col desiderio, col confronto degli altri, e del tempo nostro passato ec.?

Io non so se tu ami le lodi o le bestemmie ec. Tua lode sarà il pianto, testimonio del nostro patire. Pianto da me per certo Tu non avrai: ben mille volte dal mio labbro il tuo nome maledetto sarà ec.

Mai io non mi rassegnerò ec.

Se mai grazia fu chiesta ad Arimane ec. concedimi ch’io non passi il 7o lustro. Io sono stato, vivendo, il tuo maggior predicatore ec. l’apostolo della tua religione. Ricompensami. Non ti chiedo nessuno di quelli che il mondo chiama beni: ti chiedo quello che è creduto il massimo de’ mali, la morte. (non ti chiedo ricchezze ec. non amore, sola causa degna di vivere ec.). Non posso, non posso più della vita.

TO AHRIMAN

King of the real, creator of the world,

hidden malevolence, supreme power and supreme

intelligence, eternal

giver of pain and arbiter of movement,

I don’t know if this will make you happy but look and enjoy, etc., contemplando aeternam [contemplating eternity], etc.

production and destruction etc. gives birth to kill etc., system of the world, all patimen [suffering]. Nature is like a baby who suddenly destroys what has been created. Old age. Boredom or passions full of pain and despair: love.

The savages and primitive tribes, in different forms, recognize only you. But civilized peoples etc. the crowd call you Fate, nature, and God by different names. But you are Ahriman, you who etc.

And the civilized world calls to you.

I leave out the storms, plagues, etc. your gifts, for you don’t know how to give anything else. You give ardors and ice.

And the world raves seeking new orders and laws and hopes for perfection. But your work remains immutable, because given man’s nature Courage and illusion will always reign, and sincerity and modesty will lag behind, and luck will be the enemy of valor, and merit will not manage to make its way, and the just and the weak will be oppressed, etc. etc.

You live, Ahriman, and triumph, and you will always triumph.

Envy of men attributed to the gods by the ancients.

Animals destined to be food. Boa Constrictor. Pitying god etc.

Why, god of evil, have you set some semblance of pleasure in life? love?… to torment us with desire, with comparing our fate with others, and our past etc.?

I don’t know if you love praise or blasphemy etc. Your praise will be weeping, testimony of our suffering. Weeping from me certainly. You will not have: more than a thousand times will your name be cursed by my lips, etc.

But I will not be resigned etc.

If ever mercy was asked of Ahriman etc. grant that I will not pass the 7th lustrum. I have been, while I lived, your greatest preacher etc. the apostle of your religion. Give me recompense. I ask you for none of what the world calls goods: I ask you for what is considered the worst of evils, death. (I don’t ask you for wealth etc. not love, the only thing worth living for etc.) I cannot, cannot bear to go on living.

CHRONOLOGY

THE STRUCTURE OF THE CANTI

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

CHRONOLOGY

1798

Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi is born on June 29 in Recanati, a small town not far from Ancona in the Marche, a region then belonging to the backward Papal States. He is the first of five surviving children—the others are Carlo (1799–1878) and Paolina (1800–1869), to whom Giacomo will be particularly close; Luigi (1804–28); and Pierfrancesco (1813–51)—of Count Monaldo Leopardi (1776–1847) and Marchesa Adelaide Antici (1778–1857). The reactionary Monaldo is cultivated, affectionate, a man of letters, and an avid book collector; his wife, by contrast, is cold, severe, dedicated to restoring the family’s finances, which had been compromised by her spendthrift husband. Leopardi, in a portrait sketch thought to be of her in his Zibaldone (353–55, 25 November 1820), writes of a woman “reduced by religion” to hating life, beauty, and pleasure to the point where “not only does she not share in the grief of parents who lost their infant children, but she envied them intimately and sincerely, because they had flown to heaven without danger.”

1807–12

Giacomo, Carlo, and Paolina are taught by priests until 1812, when, as Giacomo’s father would write, “Giacomo’s scholarly studies came to an end because the teacher had nothing more to teach him.” Indeed, from 1808, it can be said that he educates himself. Beyond Italian and Latin, he eventually teaches himself Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and English, and writes poems, translations, and philological works that will be admired by the litterateurs of the time.

1809

Writes various poetic texts, the first of which is the sonnet “La morte di Ettore” (The Death of Hector). Also writes his first prose works and, between the ages of ten and eleven, translates the Odes of Horace: twenty-nine from the first book and fifteen from the second.

1810

Writes other poems, in Italian and Latin, notably “Il diluvio universale” (The Universal Flood).

1811

Writes the tragedy La virtù Indiana (Indian Courage) and his first Dissertazioni filosofiche (Philosophical Dissertations). Translates Horace’s Ars poetica into ottava rima.

1812

Begins the “seven years of insane and desperate study,” in his father’s library of sixteen thousand volumes, that will ruin his health; develops scoliosis. Epigrammi. Pompeo in Egitto (Pompey in Egypt), tragedy.

1813

Storia dell’astronomia dalla sua origine fino all’ anno MDCCCX (History of Astronomy from Its Beginnings to 1811).

1814

Philological studies of the Greek Esichios [of Milo], Plotinus, and early Christian rhetoricians. Translates Scherzi epigrammatici (Epigrammatic Scherzi) and Fragmenta Patrum Graecorum (Fragments from the Greek Fathers) (unfinished) from the Greek.

1815

In two months writes the Saggio sopra gli errori poplari degli antichi (Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients). After the Austrians defeat Murat he writes the Orazione agli Italiani in occasione della liberazione del Piceno (Oration to the Italians on the occasion of the liberation of Piceno), which reflects his father’s anti-French and antirevolutionary biases. Translates the Idilli (Idylls) of Moschus and the pseudo-Homeric Batracomiomachia, titled “La guerra dei topi e delle rane” (The War Between the Mice and the Frogs), which he will later revise twice, in 1821–22 and 1826.

1816

Writes a discourse on the life and works of the Roman rhetorician M. Cornelius Fronto and translates his works, which had been discovered and published by the librarian and philologist Angelo Mai. Writes the Notizie storiche e geografiche sulla città e chiesa arcivescovile di Damiata (Historical and Geographical Notes on the City and Archiepiscopal Church of Damiata), printed in Loreto in June, his first published work; “Parere sul salterio ebraico” (A View of the Hebrew Psalter); “Della fama di Orazio presso gli antichi” (On Horace’s Fame among the Ancients). Writes “Le rimembranze” (Memories), and the “Inno a Nettuno” (Hymn to Neptune), which purports to translate a Greek original; when it is published in Lo spettatore in Milan the following year it will fool even the most erudite critics. Writes (in Greek, with translations into Latin) two Odae adespotae (Anonymous Odes). Convinced that his death is imminent, writes the canticle “Appressamento della morte” (Approach of Death), of which a fragment will appear in the Canti (no. XXXIX). Translates the first book of the Odyssey and the second of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Iscrizioni greche triopee (Greek Inscriptions from Triopio),and the pseudo-Virgilian poem Moretum or La torta (The Cake). Outlines a tragedy about Marie-Antoinette. Sends La biblioteca italiana a letter, which goes unpublished, in response to Mme de Staël’s article “L’esprit des traductions.”

1817

Translates the fragments of the Roman Antiquities of Dionysus of Halicarnassus discovered by Mai. Begins an epistolary friendship with the man of letters Pietro Giordani, who becomes his first great friend and admirer.

Writes the first notes of the Zibaldone, the collection of his literary and philosophical reflections and observations that will eventually be published between 1898 and 1900 by a commission led by Giosué Carducci under the title Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella lettera (Thoughts on Various Philosophies and Belles Lettres). Translates Hesiod’s Titanomachia. Writes the “Sonetti in persona di Ser Pecora fiorentino” (Sonnets in the Voice of the Florentine Ser Pecora) and the sonnet “Letta la vita dell’Alfieri scritta da esso” (On Reading Alfieri’s Autobiography).

In December, Monaldo’s twenty-six-year-old cousin Geltrude Cassi-Lazzari visits Recanati. Leopardi’s overwhelming infatuation with her inspires his “Elegia I” (which becomes “Il primo amore”) and the prose Diario del primo amore (Journal of First Love).

1818

Writes “Elegia II” and the Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (An Italian’s Discourse Concerning Romantic Poetry). In September, Giordani visits Recanati for five days and the two travel to Macerata together, Leopardi’s first foray away from his family. Toward the end of the year writes the canzoni “All’Italia” and “Sopra il monumento di Dante,” which are published in Rome by Bourlié.

1819

Begins to suffer from a fatigue of the eyes, which prevents him “not only from any reading or study whatsoever, but from the slightest attempt at thinking” (letter to Leonardo Trissino, 27 September 1819).

Writes the canzoni “Per una donna inferma di malattia lunga e mortale” (For a Woman Suffering from a Long and Fatal Illness) and “Nella morte di una donna fatta trucidare col suo portato dal corruttore per mano di un chirurgo” (On the Death of a Woman Murdered with Her Fetus by Her Corruptor at the Hand of a Surgeon), which he will later disavow.

In July applies in secret for a passport for Milan, hoping to escape from Recanati, but his plan is discovered and foiled. Writes the Ricordi d’infanzia e di adolescenza (Memories of Childhood and Adolescence) and, it seems, begins to plan a tragedy, Telesilla.

In September, writes “L’infinito”; writes “Alla luna” and the fragment “Odi, Melisso…”

1820

Writes the canzone “Ad Angelo Mai” in ecstatic response to Mai’s discovery in the Vatican of the manuscript of Cicero’s De re publica. The poem is published by Marsigli in Bologna.

First glimmerings of the Operette morali. On September 4, he writes to Giordani: “Almost to take revenge on the world, and on courage, I’ve imagined and sketched out certain satirical prose pieces.”

In the fall, writes “La sera del dì di festa” and, most likely, “Il sogno.”

1821

Applies for but fails to obtain a post as writer in Latin under Mai at the Vatican Library.

Convinced of the absolute “uselessness of human things,” he envisions writing several Inni cristiani (Christian Hymns), of which only the “Inno ai patriarchi” (1822) is completed. In all likelihood writes “La vita solitaria,” “Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina,” “A un vincitore nel pallone,” and “Bruto minore.”

1822

“Alla primavera,” “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” “Comparazione delle sentenze di Bruto minore e di Teofrasto vicini a morte” (Comparison of the Sayings of Brutus Minor and Theophrastus Before Dying).

Translates from the Latin the French patrologist François Combefis’ Martirio de’ santi padri nel Monte Sinai (Martyrdom of the Holy Fathers on Mount Sinai).

Is invited to travel to Rome with one of his maternal uncles, but is gravely disappointed by the culture of the capital. Orcel (331): “He walks a bit in the city, weeps at the grave of Tasso, becomes aware of his unsuitability for any kind of worldly life, and fails in his attempts to find a post in Italy or abroad.”

1823

Returns to Recanati on May 3. In September, writes the Platonic canzone “Alla sua donna,” translates the “Satira di Simonide sopra le donne” (Simonides’ Satire on Women), and returns to his philological studies, writing over thirteen hundred pages in the Zibaldone.

1824

Writes the first twenty of the Operette morali (moral sketches; satirical and philosophical dialogues in the style of Lucian) as well as the “Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani” (Discourse on the Present State of the Morals of the Italians), which remains unpublished until 1906.

Is invited by G. B. Vieusseux to contribute to his distinguished Florentine review, L’Antologia, but declines, saying it’s impossible for him to keep au courant of contemporary literary fashion in Recanati.

At the end of August, the Canzoni, of which there are ten, along with their “Annotazioni” are published by Nobili in Bologna. Between December 1824 and early 1825 translates the Operette morali of Isocrates.

1825

In July, is invited by A. F. Stella to edit the complete writings of Cicero. Leaves for Milan, stopping at Bologna, where he is met by Giordani. After declining a minor appointment at the University of Rome, returns to Bologna at the end of September, where he will remain for more than a year, working on a translation of the Manual of Epictetus and, in particular, a critical edition of Petrarch’s Rime for Stella.

1826

Refuses an ecclesiastical benefice left vacant on the death of one of his uncles. Several of the Operette morali are published in L’Antologia.

Interrupting a long poetic silence, which otherwise runs from September 1823 to April 1828, composes the epistle “Al Conte Carlo Pepoli,” which he is invited to deliver at the Bolognese Accademia dei Felsinei. But it is poorly received: “His voice is low and timid, and his philosophy decidedly too despairing” for popular consumption (Orcel, 331).

In the springtime, meets and is briefly infatuated with Countess Teresa Carniani Malvezzi, a friend of the poet Vincenzo Monti.

Stella publishes his Petrarch edition in Milan; the Versi are issued by the Stamperie delle Muse in Bologna.

Returns to Recanati on November 11. Translates the “Orazione di G. Gemisto Pletone in morte della imperatrice Elena Paleologina” (Oration of G. Gemisto Pleto on the death of the Empress Elena Paleologina) with an introductory “Discorso.”

1827

Leopardi’s Crestomazia italiana: La Prosa (Italian Anthology: Prose), compiled for Stella, is published in Milan, while Leopardi is correcting the proofs for the Operette morali (also published by Stella).

In Bologna from April 26 to June 20, when he travels to Florence. Meets Vieusseux, Gino Capponi, and other leading intellectuals, including Niccolò Tommaseo, for whom he forms an intense dislike, Manzoni, and Stendhal. Also encounters a young Neapolitan admirer, Antonio Ranieri, who will become his companion in his last years. Writes further operette morali.

On November 1 transfers to Pisa.

1828

Stella publishes Leopardi’s Crestomazia italiana poetica (Anthology of Italian Poetry), or “Selection of passages in Italian verse outstanding for feeling or expression, chosen and arranged according to the age of the authors, by Count Giacomo Leopardi.” Reads with great enjoyment Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed).

Beginning in Pisa of a major return to poetry. Writes “Scherzo,” “Il risorgimento,” and “A Silvia.”

Declines a chair in Dante studies at the University of Bonn.

Meets the Jesuit Vincenzo Gioberti in Florence and with him returns to Recanati at the end of November. Death of his brother Luigi.

1829

Writes “Le ricordanze,” “La quiete dopo la tempesta,” “Il sabato del villaggio”; begins the “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia.”

Plans a “Parallelo della civiltà degli antichi (cioè Greci e Romani) e di quella dei moderni” (Comparison of the Civilization of the ancients [i.e, Greeks and Romans] with that of the Moderns), as well as an “Enciclopedia delle cognizioni inutili” (Encyclopedia of Useless Knowledge).

1830

The Operette morali fail to win the quinquennial prize of 1000 scudi awarded by the Accademia della Crusca; it goes instead to Carlo Botta’s Storia d’Italia (History of Italy).

Finishes the “Canto notturno” On April 30, leaves for Florence, where Pietro Colletta has arranged for a consortium of friends to offer him a yearlong stipend. Meets and falls in love with the beautiful but unmoved Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, inspiration for the five poems in the so-called Aspasia cycle: “Consalvo,” “Il pensiero dominante,” “Amore e Morte,” “A se stesso,” and “Aspasia.”

Meets the Swiss philologist Louis de Sinner, to whom he gives all his own philological works, hoping that de Sinner will publish them abroad. In November, joins forces with Antonio Ranieri, who will remain with Leopardi until his death.

1831

Begins the Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (Omissions from the [pseudo-Homeric] War Between the Mice and the Frogs, twice translated by Leopardi in his youth); the poem, in eight eventual cantos of 375 octaves, is a relentless satire on political and religious idealism, an allegory of the Neapolitan revolution of 1820—“the shrimp are the Germans [i.e., the Austrians], the rats are the Italians of 1820; and the frogs are the priests” (wrote Marc Monnier in 1860)—which he will work on until his death and which will be published by Ranieri in Paris in 1842.

After the revolution of 1831, the provisional government of Recanati names him a deputy to the National Assembly in Bologna, but this is aborted with the return of the Austrians.

In April the first edition of the Canti is published in Florence by Piatti, dedicated to “his Tuscan friends,” to whom he had written (December 15, 1830): “I have lost everything. I am only a trunk that feels and suffers.”

Writes (possibly) “Il pensiero dominante,” then leaves with Ranieri for Rome, where he may draft “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale.”

1832

Returns with Ranieri to Florence. Writes the preamble to the Florentine journal Lo spettatore fiorentino, planned by some friends. Writes, perhaps, “Amore e Morte” and “Consalvo.”

Writes the last two operette and, on December 4, the last entry in the Zibaldone. Begins compiling the Pensieri (Thoughts), 111 short pieces largely drawn from the Zibaldone, on “the characters of men and their conduct in Society.” The book will be published posthumously in Ranieri’s 1845 edition of Leopardi’s works.

1833

Writes “A se stesso” and sketches the hymn to Ahriman.

On September 2, leaves Florence for Naples with Ranieri, stopping in Rome; arrives October 2.

1834

Writes “Aspasia.” Friendship with the German poet August von Platen. Publication in Florence of the second edition of the Operette morali.

1835

Signs a contract with the Neapolitan publisher Saverio Starita for a collected edition of his writings, planned in no fewer than six volumes, of which the first would contain the Poesie, the second and third the Operette morali, and the rest his uncollected works.

The second edition of the Canti is published in September, including the Aspasia poems and “Il passero solitario” (written between 1831 and 1835), as well as “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale,” “Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna,” and the “Palinodia,” most of these likely written in this year.

Probably also writes “I nuovi credenti” (The New Believers), verse satire on the Neapolitan Catholic spiritualists, analogous to his critique of Florentine liberals in the “Palinodia.”

1836

The first and second volumes of Starita’s edition are sequestered by the Bourbon government. Due to an outbreak of cholera in Naples, Leopardi, Ranieri, and Ranieri’s sister Paolina retire to the Villa Ferrigni at the foot of Vesuvius, between Torre del Greco and Torre Annunziata.

Writes “Il tramonto della luna” and “La ginestra,” which will be published in Ranieri’s posthumous edition (Florence: Le Monnier, 1845).

1837

In the spring, returns to Naples. Dies of cholera on June 14 and is buried in the church of San Vitale at Fuorigrotta. Giordani’s inscription on his tomb reads:

TO COUNT GIACOMO LEOPARDI OF RECANATI / PHILOLOGIST ADMIRED OUTSIDE ITALY / GREATEST WRITER OF PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY / COMPARABLE ONLY WITH THE GREEKS / WHO FINISHED HIS LIFE AT AGE 39 / IN CONTINUAL MOST MISERABLE ILLNESS / ANTONIO RANIERI / WITH HIM FOR SEVEN YEARS TO THE LAST HOUR / MADE THIS FOR HIS ADORED FRIEND. MDCCCXXXVII

1845

Postumous edition of Leopardi’s Opere, edited by Ranieri, published by Le Monnier in Florence.

1898–1900

Publication of the Zibaldone under the title Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura (Thoughts on Various Philosophies and on Belles Lettres), edited by a national commission headed by Giosué Carducci, in seven volumes by Le Monnier, Florence.

1939

The poet’s remains are interred in a monument next to the so-called tomb of Virgil near Piedigrotta (Mergellina).

THE STRUCTURE OF THE CANTI

The forty-one canti are generally seen as organized in the following groupings:

1 the ten canzoni (I–IX and XVIII), written between 1818 and 1823, on public and historical themes;

2 the intimately personal elegies and idylls (X–XVI), written at much the same time (1818–21), with the exception of XI, “Il passero solitario,” begun in this period but completed in the early 1830s and inserted at the beginning of the idylls; this alternation between public and private, historical and pastoral, is in fact the essential organizing characteristic of all of Leopardi’s work;

3 the epistle to Carlo Pepoli (XIX, 1826), written during the period when Leopardi had turned from poetry to the social criticism of the Operette morali;

4 the return to lyric with the canti of memory of the great Pisa-Recanati period, XX–XXV (1828–30);

5 the so-called Aspasia cycle, inspired by Leopardi’s unhappy love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti (XXVI–XXIX) (1830–35), which also includes “Consalvo” (XVII), though the poem was eventually placed earlier in the book;

6 the paired meditative, neoclassical sepulchral songs (XXX and XXXI) of the early 1830s;

7 the bitterly ironic verse epistle, the “Palinodia” (XXXII) (1835);

8 the last great testamentary poems, “Il tramonto della luna” and “La ginestra” (XXXIII and XXXIV), written at Naples in 1836, not long before the poet’s death;

9 a group of seven short texts (XXXV–XLI): translations, epigrams, and fragments drawn from the poet’s early unpublished work.

The variety of style, theme, and tone among the book’s components makes its formal organization difficult to discern. As Nicola Gardini writes in “History and Pastoral in the Structure of Leopardi’s Canti” (79), the book is “the work of one man, but includes the most diverse poetic forms, styles and voices: Petrarchan canzoni, free canzoni, epistles, elegies, Horatian satire, love poems, dramatic monologues, imitations and translations. The book grew over the years from a slender collection of relatively traditional canzoni to its final form, progressively incorporating and adapating to an ever-changing design the poet’s ongoing meditations and stylistic experiments.” Though the poems appear in a basically chronological order, “temporal discontinuities as well as breaks and shifts of various kinds govern the whole. The publishing history of the book shows that the Canti have a highly dynamic structure and that contradiction and selfemendation or even recantation are distinctive features of Leopardi’s mind.”

Gardini (91) sees the book as divided into four sections: “(1) Historical decline (‘All’Italia’–‘Ultimo canto di Saffo’). (2) The pastoral/infinito (‘Il primo amore–‘Al conte Carlo Pepoli’). (3) Critique of the pastoral/infinito (‘Il risorgimento’–‘A se stesso’). (4) Historical catastrophe (‘Aspasia’–‘La ginestra’) … While seeming solely to represent a fatal progression towards total historical ruin, this subdivision expresses an essential characteristic of Leopardi’s mind: a passionate preoccupation with beginnings.” He adds (92): “In the Canti … the positive follows, and tends to replace, the negative. Alternation within progression appears to be the leading principle of construction of the book.”

Much perplexity has been expressed about why Leopardi himself, in the 1835 Naples edition, chose to end his greatest book “in a minor key.” Dotti (146) quotes Mario Fubini’s proposal that the poet wanted to give the reader “a little taste of his less serious work”; others have suggested that the poet wanted to make the book a little longer; but neither option seems plausible for such a premeditated artist.

The last two compositions, being, as Leopardi believed, translations of Simonides, the dominant figure of “All’Italia,” the first of the canti, in a sense bring “full circle the stylistic and philosophical variety of the book as a whole under the unifying sign of antiquity,” Gardini asserts (82), making Simonides and Leopardi “inextricably one” as the young Leopardi had hoped, “in spite of all historical decadence and difference” (92).

Franco d’Intino, in an illuminating analysis of fragment XXXIX (“Spento il diurno raggio in occidente,” (700), contends that “the secret heart of the epilogue to the Canti” is “the rediscovery of the self in artistic labor—and in the book. A rediscovery which compensates for the loss—the vertiginous mutation—of the modern subject, hostage to a time which swallows up everything” (see notes, p. 478). Expanding on a suggestion of María de las Nieves Muñiz Muñiz, he asserts that “the frame of the epilogue exhibits and represents the theme of human time, opposed (in the ‘Scherzo’) to the time of artistic labor and the book,” adding that “its central nucleus puts this opposition center stage, presenting old texts that go back to a now very distant past, reinterpreted (and, in part changed) in the new context of the book of the Canti.” For d’Intino (716), it’s not impossible that, “more ironic than his commentators,” Leopardi, in a coda that is notable for its variety, irony, and, finally its spirited embrace of the classical acceptance of the limits of human time, “intended to laugh at himself, and his own obstinate dedication to an eternity in which he no longer believed.”

NOTES

This is not a scholarly edition. Leopardi’s work has been so thoroughly and authoritatively interpreted that to attempt something original in the way of commentary would have been a fool’s errand for an amateur. I have confined myself in my notes to trying to offer a fuller context for the poetry than has hitherto been available for English-language readers, selectively pointing out sources and echoes along the way—though the poet draws incessantly on his inspirations, ancient and modern. It goes without saying that the commentary to these texts could have been endless.

NOTE: “M1” and “M2” refer, respectively, to Mondadori’s Meridiani editions of Leopardi’s poetry (edited by Mario Andrea Rigoni) and prose (edited by Rolando Damiani). See Bibliography.

Introduction: Poet of Problems

1. The first complete English translation, edited by Michael Caesar and Franco d’Intino of the Leopardi Center at Birmingham University, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013.

2. Ugo Dotti, in his exemplary critical edition of the Canti (6th ed.; Feltrinelli, 2008), 160.

3. “[T]he present, however it is, cannot be poetic; and the poetic, in one way or another, always turns out to consist in the distant, the undefined, the vague.” Zibaldone 4426 (1 January 1829).

4. Gary Brown, in a note to his translation of “History in the Service and Disservice of Life,” the second of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Unmodern Observations, otherwise translated as Untimely Meditations) (1873–76) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), writes (93n–94n): “Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, felt intense admiration [for Leopardi’s poetry and prose]. Schopenhauer had seen in Leopardi the supreme contemporary poet of human unhappiness; and it was to Nietzsche … that Hans von Bulow … dedicated his translation of Leopardi into German … Of Leopardi Nietzsche remarked [in “We Classicists,” the last of the Unmodern Observations] that he was “the modern ideal of a classicist” and one of “the last great followers of the Italian poet-scholars” [“Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” the fourth of the Unmodern Observations] … who, along with Merimée, Emerson, and Landor, could rightly be called ‘a master of prose’ [The Gay Science, 92].”
    In his introduction (xiv) to the Yale edition of the Unmodern Observations, William Arrowsmith writes of Nietzsche’s conviction that to “fulfill themselves art and philosophy must be fused in a powerfully unified vision. Thus, Nietzsche could speak of the poetry of Heraclitus and Empedocles as philosophy en acte and … praise Pindar and Leopardi as ‘poets who think.’”

5. By Domenico De Robertis, Nicola Gardini, Franco d’Intino, and others. See Gardini’s “History and Pastoral in the Structure of Leopardi’s Canti” and d’Intino’s “‘Spento il diurno raggio.’” See also “The Structure of the Canti,” pp. 375–77.

6. For an illuminating discussion of the significance of Leopardi’s title and the formal development of his poetry, see Michel Orcel’s essay “Leopardi et le procès des formes” in Orcel (9–20), in which he asserts (10) that the poet’s primary inspirations for his title were Mme de Stäel’s “Dernier chant de Corinne,” in chapter XX of her celebrated eponymous novel, and Cesarotti’s versions of Ossian, the Canti di Selma. Orcel also associates the new title for the book with the “return to life” that was also a “return to song” in the new lyricism of the Pisa-Recanati period, as recorded in “Il risorgimento,” adding that Bellinian “bel canto” offered the poet a model of “semantic plasticity” in his new “melodic expansion.”

7. Zibaldone 4302 (15 February 1828): “One of the major results that I propose for myself and hope for my verses, is that they should warm my old age with the heat of my youth; it is to enjoy them in that time, and feel some residue of my past feelings, set within them there, to preserve them and give them duration, as if on deposit; it is to be moved myself in rereading them as often happens to me, and more so than in reading the poems of others: beyond remembering, reflecting on what I was, and comparing myself with myself; and finally the pleasure that is felt in enjoying and appreciating one’s own work, and contemplating it oneself, taking pleasure in it, the beauties and the virtues of one’s own child, with no other satisfaction than having made something beautiful in the world; whether or not it is recognized as such by others.”

8. See Franco d’Intino’s incisive introduction to his edition of Leopardi’s translations of Poeti greci e latini, xvi.

9. The ten canzoni are canti I–IX and XVIII, “Alla sua donna” (1823). See notes to “All’Italia” for a discussion of the form and its meaning for Leopardi.

10. Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, 76.

11. “Lyric can be called the height the culmination the summit of poetry, which is the summit of human discourse.” Zibaldone 245 (18 September 1820).

12. In his “Translator’s Introduction: ‘Attempts and Preludes’” (xviii), to his Leopardi: Selected Poems.

13. Nicholas J. Perella, “Translating Leopardi?” 358.

14. Quoted in Perella, 364.

15. John Heath-Stubbs, in the introduction (13) to his Poems from Giacomo Leopardi.

16. D. S. Carne-Ross, Instaurations, 262–63. As d’Intino (Poeti greci e latini, xvi) puts it, Leopardi in the Zibaldone “always described and greatly appreciated Greek as free and flexible, in opposition … with Latin, a logical and rational language par excellence.”

17. See Orcel, p. 14.

18. I.e., from heart to chorus. Orcel (16) quotes Zibaldone 2804–2809 (21–23 June 1823): “I consider [the use of the chorus in ancient drama] as part of that vague, that indefinite that is the principal cause of the charme of ancient poetry and belles lettres … Maxims of justice, virtue, heroism, and compassion, of love of country, were spoken in ancient dramas in the mouth of the chorus, that is of an indefinite, and often unnamed, multitude … They were expressed in lyric verses, which were sung, and accompanied by musical instruments. What other impression could all these circumstances … produce if not an impression of the vague and indeterminate, and therefore entirely great, entirely beautiful, entirely poetic? These maxims weren’t put into the mouth of an individual, to be recited in an ordinary and natural tone … The entire nation, posterity, appeared on stage. She did not speak like each of the mortals who represented the action: she expressed herself in lyric verses, full of poetry. The sound of her voice was not that of human individuals: it was a music, a harmony … This was almost the same as uniting the real world and the ideal and moral world … on stage.”

19. Leopardi wrote to Charles Lebreton in June 1836 about Starita’s edition of his collected writings: “In spite of the magnificent title of opere which my bookseller has felt he must give to his collection, I have never made works, I have only made some attempts thinking always of making a start, but my career has gone no further”—an echo, perhaps, of his much-quoted mot by Mme De Staël that “dans la vie il n’y a que commencements.” Quoted in Damiani, All’apparir del vero, 467.

20. Zibaldone 152 (4 July 1820). See also his “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica” (M2, 347–426).

21. Francesco De Sanctis, in his History of Italian Literature, trans. Joan Redfern, vol. 2 (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1968), 943–44.

22. Massimo Bontempelli, quoted in Rigoni (M1, 976).

23. See Zibaldone 2219–21 (3 December 1821).

24. Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, rev. ed. with an introduction by Cyril Connolly (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 22.

25. Nicola Gardini, “History and Pastoral in the Structure of Leopardi’s Canti,” pp. 84 and 92.

Canti

I. ALL’ITALIA / TO ITALY

This first canzone was written at Recanati in September 1818; it was published that year in Rome, along with “Sopra il monumento di Dante” and a dedicatory letter to the poet Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828), by Bourlié. Republished in the Bologna edition of the Canzoni (1824) and in the 1831 and 1835 editions of the Canti. Leopardi’s “Argomento di una canzone sullo stato presente dell’Italia” (Rigoni [M1, 620]) outlines the themes developed in his first two canzoni.

Leopardi, in his notes on the Canti (1831) (M1, 147–48), derived from his letter to Monti: “The success of Thermopylae was truly celebrated by the one who is introduced to poetize in this canzone, i.e, Simonides; held by antiquity to be one of the best Greek lyric poets, who lived, what’s more, at the time of the fall of Xerxes, and was a Greek citizen. Apart from the epitaph repeated by Cicero and others, his achievement is demonstrated by what Diodorus writes in book eleven, where he also quotes some words of this Poet on this theme, two or three of which are repeated in the fifth line of the last strophe … I don’t believe another subject as worthy of a lyric poem has ever been found, nor one more fortunate, nor more truly achieved, than this one chosen by Simonides. Since if the enterprise of Thermopylae has such power for us who are distant from those who carried it out, and, in spite of all this, we cannot contain our tears reading about it simply as it transpired, and twenty-three centuries after it occurred; we have to conjecture as to the power of the memory of it in a Greek, and a poet, and among the principal ones, who, it can be said, had witnessed the event with his own eyes, traveling in the same cities victorious over an army much larger than any others recorded in the history of Europe, partaking in the celebrations, the marvels, the fervor of a whole very excellent nation, made even more magnanimous in nature through its awareness of the glory it had gained, and by the emulation of so many virtues demonstrated previously by its own. For these reasons, considering it due to much misadventure that the writings of Simonides on that occurrence had been lost, not that I presumed to repair that damage, but in order to belie the wish to, I tried to represent to myself in my mind the dispositions of the poet’s spirit at that time, and in this way, apart from the disparity in our gifts, tried to go back and create his song; of which I offer this opinion, that either it was marvelous, or else the fame of Simonides was pointless and his writings were lost with little harm.”

The term “canzone” signifies a poetic composition “of high rank and theme, lyric, principally, and later doctrinal and political, but always Dantesquely ‘tragic’ (lyric also in the sense of being linked, at least in origin, to music)” (Bertone, 38ff). It had Sicilian and Tuscan roots modeled on the Provençal cansò, and its primacy was established by Dante, who in his De vulgari eloquentia named it the highest of the poetic forms. Later, it was practiced with greater variation and freedom by Petrarch, and in modern times has been adopted by Carducci and d’Annunzio, and by Pasolini in his Friulian dialect poems.

The first of Leopardi’s published poems already formally subverts its Petrarchan model, for the even stanzas follow one rhyme scheme and the odd stanzas another. In his hands, the canzone would gradually become libera, free, shedding its strict rhyming and rhythmic structures until, in “A Silvia” (1828), what remains of the ancient form’s strictures is “mere alternation of settenari [seven-syllable lines] and hendecasyllables” and the rhyming of the last line of each stanza with an internal line of variable position.

The history of Leopardi’s experimentation with the canzone reveals much about the development of the modern poetic voice. Bertone (43): “At the beginning, in ‘All’Italia’ and ‘Sopra il monumento di Dante,’ different rhyme schemes alternate, one for the odd stanzas and one for the even (but with an equal number of lines … and the succession of rhymes also corresponds in large part, though hendecasyllables replace settenari and vice versa). In ‘Bruto minore’ the number of unrhymed lines (nine out of fifteen) increases up to the ‘Ultimo canto di Saffo,’ in which the stanzas (eighteen lines) present fully sixteen unrelated hendecasyllables and a combinatio or conclusion to the stanza (settenario and hendecasyllable) with rima baciata [aa].” As Orcel (14) puts it: “The Leopardian canto—that is, the canzone freed from every pre-established model—is born of the conjunction between the canzone form and the suppleness of the loose hendecasyllable.”

In a typically ironic preamble to the republication of his “Annotazioni” to the canzoni in the Milanese review Il nuovo ricoglitore in September 1825 (M1, 163–64), a signal text that largely summarizes Leopardi’s thinking in poetry, he describes “ten Canzoni, and more than ten ‘stravaganze’ (eccentricities)” (for “‘eccentricity’ we are meant to read ‘originality’” [Dotti, 44]). Of them, “not even one [is] amorous”; they are not particularly Petrarchan, nor do they follow the traditional forms of the Italian canzone from Chiabrera to Monti; in fact, “they are like no Italian lyric poem … [N]o one could guess the subjects of the Canzoni by their titles,” but—and here, typically, as Dotti (45) puts it, “the ironic-polemical motif slowly gives way to an open declaration of the tragic truth” of man’s condition—“they are all full of laments and melancholy, as if the world and men were a sad thing, and as if human life were unhappy.” After declaring that his work needs to be read carefully to be understood (“as if the Italians read carefully”) and emphasizing that “poetry is in fact thought” (Dotti, 45), Leopardi “enumerates what he considers the most notable ‘discoveries’ of his ‘philosophy’: that science and knowledge, in destroying our illusions and their ‘errors,’ have diminished the world; that at one time nature, without revealing herself, knew how to speak to hearts and inspire them; that the more we make progress in reason and consciousness, the more the imagination becomes sterile and the more the emptiness of things is revealed; that all is vain in the world except pain; that even this pain is better than boredom; and that in sum ‘all is mystery in the Universe, except for our unhappiness.’” Thus Leopardi defines his “eccentricity”: in Dotti’s words “the mark of a vibrant ideological as well as stylistic originality.”

Rigoni (M1, 916): “The reflection on the radical diversity of ancient and modern man and world was, from Winckelmann to Friedrich Schlegel, one of the fundamental elements of the revolution in Western consciousness that determined … the landscape of experience and thought in which we continue to live today. But no one in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, or after, has dedicated an attention and an analysis to this theme as profound as Leopardi’s: the pages of the Zibaldone, from beginning to end, are a supreme document of this, so much more surprising if one considers Leopardi’s distance from the great moment of German culture …

“Criticism of the first of the Canti initially underlined its public and patriotic and recently also its ‘existential’ aspects [Dotti (11) calls it “a singular admixture of libertarian and legitimist themes”], but it is important to recognize a much more vast and essential subject, i.e., the comparison and contrast between the decadence and obscurity of contemporary Italy, where its former greatness survives only in the fantasies of ruins, and the immortal glory of the ‘adventurous and dear and blessed … ancient times’ embodied by classical Greece … Though it is called ‘All’Italia,’ the lyric is also and above all a hymn to Greece, the testimony—at the beginning of Leopardi’s poetic work—of the idealization of antiquity repeated and varied upon as well in the other canzoni.” Indeed, Gardini (82) calls it “a manifesto of literary anachronism and, as such, a distillation of all that poetry represents and entails for Leopardi.”

Simonides’ apologia, which makes up more or less the second half of the poem, and to a modern reader is striking in its vividness in contrast to the formulaic rhetoric of what precedes it—“the language of traditional civil and patriotic poetry” derived from Dante, Petrarch, and Virgil that is the vehicle of Leopardi’s first canzoni (Dotti, 151)—is his first representation of the poet’s self-consciousness, his definition of the poet’s calling and his anxiety for fame. As such, it stands as a precursor of Leopardi’s own autobiographical testimonies, and hence of our modern “confessional” lyric.

Dotti (12) quotes Luigi Blasucci on the young poet’s sense “of his own unhappy condition, vague mania for greatness, awareness of an aristocratic sensibility though not without a painful awareness of exclusion”; indeed, for Blasucci the protagonist of these first two canzoni is Leopardi’s own “heroic, eloquent ego.” Here, then, Dotti adds, “we see not only a ‘patriotic’ young man … who, in the romantic-Risorgimento atmosphere at the dawn of the first national liberation movements, pays (and cannot not pay) his tribute to the great civil tradition of Parini, Alfieri, and Foscolo; we see a poet … beginning to raise his protest—individually and personally felt—against the indolence with which he is surrounded”; the first two canzoni also expound on the themes that bring “us to the heart of Leopardi’s thought”: “the inevitable unhappiness of modern man thrown into a world turned upside down yet aware of an irremediably lost ‘happiness.’”

Nuda la fronte… : Orcel (288): “The personification of Italy is an originally Petrarchan topos (see the canzoni ‘Italia mia’ and ‘Spirto gentil’ [Rime CXXVIII and LIII]), which Monti had recently adopted in his ‘Musogonia’ and ‘Il beneficio.’”

senza velo: The veil was the prerogative of Roman freewomen.

Che fosti donna… : Cf. Dante, Purgatorio VI, 78; Foscolo, “Bonaparte liberatore,” 50–52; Ariosto, Orlando furioso XVII, lxxvi.

L’armi, qua l’armi: Cf. Virgil, Aeneid II, 668: “Arma, viri, ferte arma.”

procomberò: I’ll fall forward, facing the enemy.

Dove sono i tuoi figli?: Taken from the letter of 19–20 February 1799 in Foscolo’s novel, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1798–1801): “Ove dunque sono i tuoi figli?”

In estranie contrade: A division of Italian soldiers fought in Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. See Leopardi’s treatment of the theme in “Sopra il monumento di Dante.”

O tessaliche strette: The pass of Thermopylae, where in 480 B.C. a band of three hundred Spartans under Leonidas resisted Xerxes’ Persian army to the death.

al passeggere: Refers to the epigraph at Thermopylae, arributed to Simonides (Palatine Anthology VII, 241): “Stranger, when you come to / Lakedaimon, tell them we lie / Here, obedient to their will.” In Poems from the Greek Anthology, trans. Kenneth Rexroth, expanded ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 106.

Serse per l’Ellesponto si fuggia: After the great sea battle of Salamis, which followed the engagement at Thermopylae.

Antela: Town near the pass of Thermopylae.

Si sottrasse da morte… : Rigoni (M1, 918) notes that F. Sesler first remarked that this formulation derives from Simonides of Keos’s epigram on the Spartans’ defense of Plataea in 479 B.C. in the Palatine Anthology (VII, 251): “These men clothed their land with incorruptible Glory when they assumed death’s misty cloak. / They are not dead in death; the memory / Lives with us and their courage brings them back.” In The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams: A Selection in Modern Verse Translations, ed. and trans. Peter Jay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 40.

Simonide: Simonides of Keos (556–468/9 B.C.), Greek lyric poet, rival of Aeschylus and Pindar, often considered the first national poet of Greece, a fragment of whose poem about Thermopylae (480 B.C.), as quoted by Diodorus of Sicily, had been translated by Leopardi’s mentor Pietro Giordani. In the C. H. Oldfather translation (Diodorus of Sicily, vol. IV, Books IX–XII. 40, Loeb Classical Library. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946], 153), the fragment reads: “Of those who perished at Thermopylae / All glorious is the fortune, fair the doom; / Their grave’s an altar, ceaseless memory’s theirs / Instead of lamentation, and their fate / Is chant of praise. Such winding sheet as this / Nor mould nor all-consuming time shall waste. / This sepulcher of valiant men has taken / The fair renown of Hellas for its inmate. / And witness is Leonidas, once king / Of Sparta, who hath left behind a crown / Of valour mighty and undying fame.”

Nell’armi e ne’ perigli: Hendiadys.

passo: The (Petrarchan) step of death. Originally, “passo” was “fato.”

splendido convito: Dotti (212) calls this a “probable allusion to the famous remark … made by Leonidas before the battle in front of his soldiers: ‘Forward with courage, O Spartans; tonight perhaps we shall dine in the Underworld.’”

Tartaro: Tartarus is Hades, but as G. De Robertis says (8), Leopardi should have said Elysium, where heroes are supposed to reside after death.

immortale: I.e., endless.

L’ira de’ greci petti e la virtute: Cf. Foscolo, Dei sepolcri, 201: “La virtù greca e l’ira.”

La vostra tomba è un’ara: The formulation again derives from Simonides.

Così la vereconda… : Leopardi’s formulaic expression here of the poet’s desire for immortality is a classic trope that he will later reject. (See in particular the critique of the “vana” and “cieca” Goddess Gloria at the end of “Al Conte Carlo Pepoli,” and the “Palinodia.”)

appo: from the Latin apud.

II. SOPRA IL MONUMENTO DI DANTE / ON THE MONUMENT TO DANTE BEING ERECTED IN FLORENCE

This second canzone was written at Recanati in September and October 1818, soon after “All’Italia” (the “Argomento di una canzone sopra lo stato presente dell’Italia” outlines ideas employed in both poems) and a little more than a month after the announcement of a plan to erect a monument to Dante, to be sculpted by Stefano Ricci, in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, the Italian Westminster Abbey or Panthéon. The poem was published in Rome with “All’Italia” in 1819.

Rigoni (M1, 919): The composition’s “denunciation of past French rule and, in contrast, its silence on the current Austrian hegemony in Italy, must have been displeasing to liberal circles, but Leopardi, who could certainly not openly proclaim himself as against the Restoration, was aiming in fact to attack every form of foreign oppression, using the example of Napoleon.”

“At once both fatiguing and emphatic” (Rigoni [M1, 920]), and rife with Petrarchan allusions to the reduced condition of modern Italy, the canzone is most effective poetically in its evocation of the miserable death of Italian soldiers on the Russian steppe during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812, in strict antithesis with the heroic death of the Spartans at Thermopylae described in “All’Italia.” Rigoni notes that Leopardi’s deploring of the shame of Italians fighting for a foreign power echoes his remarks in the Zibaldone (896–99 [30 March–4 April 1821]) on the unnatural nature of modern wars, no longer conducted by nations and states, but by governments.

It is worth observing, too, that each poem’s conclusion is dominated by the figure of a poet: here Dante, there Simonides of Keos. Leopardi’s impersonation or inhabiting of the Greek poet in “All’Italia” makes for vivid and convincing writing in the first canzone; here, the poem gains in power when he abandons apostrophe for a powerful imagining of the deaths of Italian soldiers.

Pace: The Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815), at which the structure of post-Napoleonic Europe was determined, and hopes for Italian unification were disappointed.

contrade (plural): Petrarchan.

Che senza sdegno omai: The harsh alliteration here is characteristic of Alfieri’s tragic style.

colui per lo cui verso: Dante died in exile in Ravenna in 1321 and was buried there.

Il meonio cantor: Homer, thought by some to be a native of Maeonia, or Lydia, in Asia Minor.

Lunge sia: Cf. Virgil, Aeneid VI, 258: “Procul, o procul este, profani.”

etrusco: Etruscan, for Tuscan.

costei che tanto alto locasti: Beatrice.

bronzi e marmi: Cf. Horace, Odes III, 30: “Exegi monumentum aere perennius.”

unqua: from Latin umquam, to avoid repetition of mai.

di novo salisti al paradiso: Dante had already been to heaven once, in his vision.

la più recente… : Napoleon. This line originally read: “Ma non la Francia scellerata e nera” (But not France, criminal and black).

de’ folti / Carri… : Napoleon ordered numerous Italian artworks transported to Paris, many of which entered the collections of the Louvre.

morto / Io non son per la tua cruda fortuna: Cf. “All’Italia,” 135–36, where Simonides expresses regret that he has not fallen in battle for Greece, and that his contribution must be different.

Padre: Leopardi now addresses Dante directly.

Quando più bella a noi l’età sorride: When we are young.

Così vennero al passo: The moment of death. See “All’Italia,” 93.

infinita … sciagura: Dotti (224) notes that the bitterness of the heroes’ fate is aggravated by the fact that it is the same as the cowards’ and quotes G. L. Bickersteth: “Being confused with cowards, simply because their suffering was unknown, was the tragedy of these men, as it was Leopardi’s.”

e questo vi conforti: Orcel (290–91): “This tragic epigram is the fruit of a psychological observation on the ‘pleasure brought on by despair,’ the masochistic and megalomaniacal components of which Leopardi will later describe acutely” (see Zibaldone 2217–21 [3 December 1821]).

chi vi spinse / A pugnar contra lei: Napoleon.

affaticata e lenta: Cf. Petrarch’s description of Italy in the canzone “Spirto gentil” (Canzoniere LII): “vecchia, oziosa e lenta, / Dormirà sempre…”

andrò sclamando: Cf. Dante, Purgatorio XXIV, 52–54: “I’ mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / Ch’e ditta dentro vo significando.” Also Petrarch, “Italia mia”: “I’vo gridando.”

Meglio l’è rimaner: Cf. Purgatorio VI, 112–13: “Vieni a veder la tua Roma che piagne, / Vedova e sola…” [Come see your Rome, which weeps, / a widow and alone…]

III. AD ANGELO MAI / TO ANGELO MAI

Written at Recanati “in ten or twelve days” in January 1820; published in Bologna in July of the same year, with a dedicatory letter to Count Leonardo Trissino.

Abate Angelo Mai (1782–1854) of Bergamo, Jesuit philologist and writer on Oriental languages, was librarian of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and, from late 1819, of the Vatican. Leopardi first wrote to him in 1816 when, as a young scholar, he learned that Mai, one of the leading literary men of his time, had discovered a new manuscript by Marcus Cornelius Fronto, “an author almost wholly, and perhaps deservedly, unknown,” as Origo (40) puts it, on whom Leopardi had written a Latin commentary in 1814, at a startlingly young age. Leopardi translated the new work with great alacrity and sent it to Mai, hoping to publish it, but Mai responded coolly—as he did to this poem, the occasion of which was the abbot’s discovery of the manuscript of Cicero’s De re publica in the Vatican Library. Gallo and Garboli assert nevertheless (21) that from 1816 on virtually all of Leopardi’s properly philological work was based on Mai’s discoveries or publications.

Rigoni (M1, 923): “The canzone to Mai … bears witness for the first time, at least in poetry, to that incompatibility between wisdom and life, between knowledge and existence, between history and happiness, that can be considered the original and definitive nucleus of all the thought and work of Leopardi”—what Francesco De Sanctis (as quoted by Dotti, 16) called “the horrible fanaticism” of Leopardi’s “philosophy of history.”

The poem is the first of what might be called the catalog canzoni (along with “Alla primavera” and the “Inno ai patriarchi”), in which a series of figures out of the past is evoked and celebrated, in the manner of the Homeric Hymns, as admonishment of and encouragement to the present age. For Ungaretti, who reportedly taught a course at the University of Rome that consisted of a close reading of the poem, it “is Leopardi’s greatest undertaking. It even surpasses, in spite of some naïve passages, ‘La ginestra.’ In its emotional power, it recalls Beethoven, in its tragedy, Aeschylus … It treats two themes: the theme of the Secol morto, the dead century, or Leopardi’s own time; and the theme of the Clamor dei defunti, the clamor of the dead. The dead—from every age from Dante on, but with the distant shadow of those risen from the times of De Republica [sic] … rise up again, and we are witness—contrasting our days, which are desert, with those of the ancients, which are furious—to the ebbing of the vital energy of a civilization, rousing itself here and there, with every new age; but ever more faintly [cf. the “Coro di morti,” p. 352] … It is a chilling spectacle. The effect is obtained by the interweaving of words or images which respond to and evoke each other from stanza to stanza, via echoes and a thousand other means of verbal orchestration, which ends up, while complex in the extreme, clear in its slightest tones.” “Secondo discorso su Leopardi” (1950), in Vita d’un uomo: saggi e interventi, ed. Mario Diacono and Luciano Rebay (Mondadori, 1974), 478ff.

ardito: “Indefatigable,” but also “audacious, courageous” (Leone Piccioni, quoted in Orelli, 84), eager to measure himself against the past.

Risorgimenti: Of lost classical texts.

O con l’umano / Valor forse contrasta il fato invano: Dotti (228) notes that the typical Leopardian opposition of the hero and fate redounds to Petrarch (Rime LIII, 85–87: “Rade volte adiven ch’a l’alte imprese / fortuna ingiuriosa non contrasti, / ch’agli animosi fatti mal s’accorda” [It rarely happens that harmful fortune, which accords poorly with spirited deeds, doesn’t interfere with great undertakings].)

que’ giorni allor: “You bring us back to the times of the Petrarchs and the Poggi [allusion to the humanist Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), who recovered many classical texts], when every day was illuminated by a new classical discovery, and the marveling and joy of the litterati knew no rest.” Leopardi to Mai, 10 January 1820.

a cui natura/ Parlò senza svelarsi… : I.e., without revealing the sad truth of man’s destiny, though suggesting it in myth and fable. De Sanctis (quoted in Gallo and Garboli, 27: “It means that nature wasn’t revealed in her truth and nakedness, and appeared dressed in all her illusions, which were her deceiving veil. The phrase is too rapid in its profundity; it is a thought that flashes and that will later be the basis for another canzone [‘Alla primavera’].”

i riposi / Magnanimi… : Cf. “La ginestra,” 28: “Agli ozi de’ potenti.”

Non domito nemico / Della fortuna: Allusion to Dante, Inferno II, 61: “amico … non della ventura…”

Fu più l’averno che la terra amico: Because there he could finally see the sins of his contemporaries punished.

sfortunato / Amante: Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), founder of the tradition of the Italian love lyric.

Del tedio… : “The unhappiness or desperation that comes from great passions or illusions or whatever misfortune in life, is not comparable to the suffocation that results from the certainty and the vivid sense of the nullity of all things, and the impossibility of being happy in this world, and the immensity of the void that is felt in the soul. Misfortunes, whether imaginary or real, can also bring on the desire for death, or even death itself, but that unhappiness has more of life, indeed, if above all it results from imagination and passion, it is full of life; but this other unhappiness I’m describing is all death; and that same death produced immediately by misfortunes is a more alive thing, whereas this other is more sepulchral, without action without movement without heat, and almost without pain, but rather with an unmeasured heaviness and a sadness similar to the one that derives from the fear of ghosts in childhood, or the idea of hell. This condition of the spirit is the effect of very great real misfortunes, and of a great soul once full of imagination and then totally stripped of it, and also of a life so evidently null and montonous, that it makes palpable the nullity and vanity of things, because without this the great variety of illusions that merciful nature sets before us every day, impedes this fatal and sensible evidence. And therefore, although this condition of the spirit is extremely reasonable, indeed the only reasonable one, being with all this extremely contrary, indeed the most directly contrary to nature, it is unknown except by a few who have felt it, like Tasso.” Zibaldone 140–41 (27 June 1820).

il fastidio: Cf. the “negra cura” in “Al Conte Carlo Pepoli,” 85, and the related notion of “ozio” throughout. Dotti (153): “No traditional poet could have written lines like these. [What is original here] … is poetry that translates thought, that tends to the allusive and brings together in a particular image, as powerful as it is naked, the repeated research of reflection. Classical argumentation is transformed into assertion, and assertion becomes figure.”

Ligure ardita prole: Columbus, who was born in Genoa in 1447. Leopardi’s “uniquely and typically” (Dotti, 18) radical view of the explorer’s achievements centers on “its devasating consequences—the vastness of the world destroyed, the capacity for fantasy annihilated, the liquidation of the imagination, the triumph of science and reason at the expense of primitive natural sensibility”—and is ”based on the opposition of nature and science, dream and reality, fantasizing ancient humanity and lucidly (and squalidly) prosaic modern world.” See also the “Dialogo di Cristoforo Colombo e Pietro Gutierrez” (1824) in the Operette morali, quoted by William Carlos Williams in In the American Grain (1925).

alle colonne: The Straits of Gibraltar, known to the ancients as the Columns of Hercules.

conosciuto il mondo / Non cresce… : Leopardi’s essential notion of the beauty of the vago, or indefinite, is relevant here. “Science destroys the principal pleasures of our spirit, because it determines things and shows us their boundaries, though in many things it has materially enlarged our ideas a very great deal. I say materially and not spiritually, since, for example, the distance from the sun to the earth was much greater to the human mind when we thought it was a few miles without knowing how many, rather than now, when it is known to be very precisely thousands. Thus science is the enemy of the greatness of ideas, though it has immeasurably enlarged our natural opinions. It has enlarged them as clear ideas, but a very small confused idea is always greater than a very big, entirely clear one. The uncertainty as to whether a thing entirely is or is not is also the source of a largeness which becomes destroyed by the certainty that the thing really is. How much greater the idea of the Antipodes was, when Petrarch said that perhaps they exist, than as soon as it was known that they did. What I’m saying about science, I’m saying about experience, etc., etc. The biggest, indeed the only greatness with which man can confusedly satisfy himself, is the indeterminate, as also results from my theory of pleasure … Therefore ignorance, which alone can hide the limits of things, is the principal source of indefinite ideas, etc. Therefore it’s the greatest source of happiness, and thus childhood is the happiest time in a man’s life, the most content with itself, least subject to boredom. Experience necessarily shows the limits of many things even to the natural, unsociable man.” Zibaldone 1464–65 (7 August 1821).

del maggior pianeta: The sun, considered a planet by the ancients.

Nascevi ai dolci sogni: Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), author of the great romance Orlando furioso. Leopardi in his “Elogio degli uccelli” in the Operette morali (M2, 159) writes of Ariosto’s imagination “not … profound, fervid and tempestuous, such as Dante and Tasso had: which is a very baleful gift, and the source of very deep and enduring cares and worries; but that rich, various, light, unstable and childlike one; which is the very broad source of pleasing and happy thoughts, sweet illusions, various delights and comforts; and the greatest and most fruitful gift with which nature is courteous to living spirits.”

O torri, o celle: Allusion to the first line of the Orlando furioso: “Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori.”

O Torquato: Torquato Tasso (1544–95), author of the epic Gerusalemme liberata (1574), in the last twenty years of his life endured mental instability, exile, and imprisonment. Dotti (19): “In Tasso … Leopardi sees another self and … more than a man of the past, a contemporary.”

ultimo inganno… : According to tradition, Tasso’s unhappy love for Eleonora d’Este.

Ombra reale e salda: Leopardi, letter to Giordani of 6 March 1820: “Because this is the miserable condition of man, and the barbaric teaching of reason, that human pleasures and pains being mere illusions, the travail which derives from the certainty of the nullity of things is always and only just and true.” And in the letter to Jacopsen of 13 June 1823: “The nullity of things was the only thing that existed for me. It was always present for me as a frightful phantom; I saw only a desert around me.”

Al tardo onore: Tasso was to be crowned with the laurel wreath on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, as Petrarch had been, but died before this honor could be bestowed.

Se, fuor che di se stesso… : G. De Robertis (40), Leopardi’s letter of 28 August 1820: “All the classes are tainted with the destructive egotism of all that is beautiful and all that is great.”

Allobrogo feroce: The passionate and severe dramatist Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), a harsh critic of Italian colonization, whom Parini in fact called “fero [fierce] allobrogo” (“Il dono,” 1) and who served as an essential model for the young Leopardi. In ancient times, the Allobrogians lived in the territory stretching from the Alps to the Rhone, which was later called Delfinato and Savoy. By extension, the Piedmontese, living near Savoy and ruled by the House of Savoy, were also called Allobrogians.

in su la scena: Alfieri’s tragedies, among them Filippo, Antigone, Oreste, Mirra, and Saul, which are primarily concerned with the overthrowing of tyranny, made him one of the heroes of the Risorgimento.

scopritor: Refers again to Mai.

arma: Cf. lines 24–25: “ripor mano alla virtude / Rugginosa.”

IV. NELLE NOZZE DELLA SORELLA PAOLINA / ON THE MARRIAGE OF HIS SISTER PAOLINA

Written at Recanati between October and November 1821, in anticipation of the marriage, which in fact failed to take place, of his beloved sister, Paolina (1800–1869), a cultivated enthusiast of music and translator of a biography of Mozart, and an admirer of Stendhal. Published in Bologna, along with the first three canzoni, already published and corrected, in 1824.

Leopardi, in Disegni letterari [Literary Outlines], 1821 (M2, 1205): “Canzone to the Roman Virginia where one imagines seeing her shadow in a dream, and speaking to her tenderly both about her situation and about the present ills of Italy.” Cf. also “Dell’educare la gioventù italiana” (On the Education of Italian Youth) of 1818 or 1820 (M1, 623–24), where Leopardi indicates that the poem is based “on the taste [style] of Ode 2, Book III of Horace.”

Orcel (293): “In spite of its metrical regularity, the canzone—of which De Sanctis wrote that it was more a ‘funeral dirge’ than an epithalamium—distances itself further from the Petrarchan model in assimilating in particular certain typically Horatian stylistic elements (inversions, ellipses).”

Rigoni (M1, 926): “The patriotic-educative themes, while present, serve nevertheless the expression of a much more general and intrinsic idea, particularly vivid in all the canzoni: the contrast between the happy, vital and heroic fullness of the dawn of the world and the sadness of being born “too late, / and in the evening of human life.” Here Leopardi “leads the causes of general modern mediocrity back to the fatal historical exhaustion which marks the Earth in its final age.”

O miseri o codardi / Figliuoli avrai: “Leopardi had already read of the association of greatness and unhappiness that will echo in the opening of the ‘Dialogo della Natura e di un’anima’ [in the Operette morali], ‘be great and unhappy,’ as in fact an imposition of nature rather than ‘corrupted custom,’ in D’Alembert’s Ēloges, relating it in the Zibaldone to the theory of pleasure and to the tormented ‘desire for happiness.’” D. De Robertis, quoted in Gavazzeni, 151.

Immenso / Tra fortuna e valor: Dotti (242): “The corrupt custom of the present times has imposed an enormous deviation (dissidio) between merit (valor) and fortuna, where the term means “fortunate social circumstances,” which are favored by cowardice, submissiveness and conformism. Underlying this statement are at least two basic Leopardian convictions: the opposition of ancients and moderns, and the senescent condition of the contemporary world, represented historically by the Restoration.” Cf. the opposition between the hero and fate in “Ad Angelo Mai” (14).

il ferro e il foco: Cf. Anacreontic 24: “She who is beautiful vanquishes iron and fire.”

a voi s’inchina: In a marginal note, Leopardi cites Guarini’s Il pastor fido III, 1399–1400: “a cui pur s’inchina / ogni cosa mortale.”

Ragion di nostra etate: Dotti (243) quotes Mario Fubini: “The thought is closely linked to what precedes it: if the power of women is so great, they are responsible, if not for the present corruption, at least for the lack of attempts to combat it.”

atti egregi: Cf. Foscolo, I sepolcri, 151: “egregie cose.”

chi ben l’estima: Cf. Petrarch’s canzone “Quell’antico mio dolce empio signore,” 139: “Che son scala al Fattor, chi ben l’estima.” G. De Robertis (48): Leopardi “wants to attenuate the crudeness of the preceding stanza. The vileness of the times is not so much and not only the fault of women, but of the ignorance of men, who don’t know how to hear the claims of love, to read and see themselves in beauty.”

e fiede le montagne il rombo: Cf. Virgil, Georgics I, 318 and 323–24. Cf. also the evocation of the storm in the “Ultimo canto di Saffo” and in fragment XXXIX (“Spento il diurno raggio in occidente”).

fanciulle: Effeminate men.

nel conservato scudo: In Zibaldone (45), Leopardi tells the story of the Spartan mother who gives her son his shield, telling him to return “with it or on it” and at 2425 (6 May 1822) mentions that it was a point of honor among the Spartans to return from battle with their shields, whose size would prevent them from fleeing.

Virginia: The Roman Virginia, killed by her centurion father to save her from the advances of the decemvir Appius Claudius. Leopardi, inspired no doubt by one of Alfieri’s most celebrated tragedies, Virginia, makes her a heroine who sacrifices herself voluntarily for the good of her country. Again, as in the first two canzoni, the poem gains in power once Leopardi characteristically moves from generalizing to a specific character and case.

Eri pur vaga … / dolci sogni: Dotti (156–57) cites this as a primary instance of Leopardi’s “tendency,” derived from Petrarch, “to fasten on the unknown in order to immerse his heart in the vague [vago] and indeterminate.” Gardini (81) points out the “striking stylistic affinities” between the description of Virginia and the later masterpiece “A Silvia,” the words “molcea,” beltade,” “vaga,” and “dolci” occuring in both texts. For Dotti (246), Virginia at this moment “becomes the ideal sister of Silvia. The language’s tone suddenly changes and takes on the accents of the major Leopardi, the poet who depicts his feminine creations from within … revealing their most human and painful emotions.”

ti ruppe / Il bianchissimo petto: Orcel (293): “Beyond the probable Virgilian reminiscence (candida pectora rumpit, Aeneid IX, 432), one ought to question the recurrence in Leopardi’s imagination of the symbolic association between whiteness and blood, which is itself linked to the theme of the moon. Cf. ‘Bruto minore’ (76–77): ‘E tu dal mar cui nostro sangue irriga, / Candida luna…’ and ‘Alla primavera’ (35–38): ‘La faretrata Diva / Scendea ne’ caldi flutti, e dall’immonda / Polve tergea della sanguigna caccia / Il niveo lato…’”

Erebo: Hades.

la romulea prole: According to myth, the Romans were the descendants of Romulus.

di polve / Lorda il tiranno i crini: Appius Claudius was dragged by the Romans through the streets after being murdered. As Dotti (247) notes, Leopardi is drawing on the tragic spirit of Alfieri.

Femmineo fato: As Orcel (294) points out, the suppression of the article gives the phrase an untranslatable force. Rome had first been aroused by the death of Lucretia, which had led to the fall of the Tarquins and the old Roman monarchy. This is the first evocation in the Canti of a woman’s suffering and death, but the theme was already well established in Leopardi’s work. Two early unpublished canzoni, “Per una donna inferma di malattia lunga e mortale” (For a Woman Suffering from a Long and Mortal Illness) (March–April 1819) and the contemporary “Nella morte di una donna fatta trucidare col suo portato dal corruttore per mano ed arte di un chirurgo,” which Leopardi’s father prohibited him from publishing along with the canzone to Angelo Mai, bear witness to Leopardi’s intense interest in feminine suffering, which he posits as perhaps the most representative instance of human pain.

V. A UN VINCITORE NEL PALLONE / TO A CHAMPION AT PALLONE

Written at Recanati in November 1821, in honor of Carlo Didimi, an athlete from nearby Treia, who later became a hero of the Risorgimento. (The game was palla al muro, or pallone col bracciale, an antecedent of the Basque pelote, played in Italy since the sixteenth century. It involved hitting a ball against a high wall with a wooden cylinder worn over the right forearm.) Published in the Bologna 1824 edition of the Canzoni.

Orcel (294) compares this to the odes of Horace and Pindar—in spite of Leopardi’s note asserting that this is not “an imitation of Pindar”—pointing out the difference in style from Chiabrera (1552–1638), whose Pindaric odes/canzoni included three on this very game: “In this piece, often quite obscure due to elision, one will note the praise of ‘desire,’ of physical energy, of heroism, as ‘powerful,’ vital ‘illusions’ as well as the provocative, but no less profound, equivalence that Leopardi establishes between life and game, illusion and reality.” Bon (78): “Only in danger, or at least in risk, does life become fully valued.”

Beyond its invidious comparison of heroic times and the decadent present, the poem evokes one of Leopardi’s primary paradoxes: that since life in actuality is suffering and nullity, illusion, pleasure, and the game—which he could not bring himself to trust—are in fact the things that ultimately make it worth living. Cf. Zibaldone, 272 (11 October 1820): “All the pleasures are illusions or are made of illusion, and our life is formed and constructed from these illusions. Now if I can’t have them, what pleasure remains to me? and why do I live? I speak likewise of the ancient institutions, etc., tending to foment enthusiasm, illusions, courage, activity, movement, life. They were illusions, but take them away, as they were taken. What pleasure remains? And what does life become? Similarly, I say: virtue, generosity, sensibility, true mutuality in love, faithfulness, constancy, justice, magnanimity, etc. humanly speaking are imaginary entities. And yet the sensible man, if he found them frequently in the world, would be less unhappy.” And 339 (18 November 1820): “This was the idea that the ancients constructed of happiness and unhappiness. That is, they considered the man who was lacking such advantages in life, albeit illusory, to be really unhappy, and vice versa. And they never consoled themselves with the idea that these were illusions, recognizing that life consisted of them, or considering them as such or as reality. And they didn’t hold happiness and unhappiness to be imaginary and chimerical things, but solid and solidly opposed to each other.”

in Maratona: At the battle of Marathon, September 12, 490 B.C., the Athenians and Plataeans defeated the Persian army.

il campo eleo: Elis, the plain in the northwest Peloponnesus, where on the banks of the River Alpheus, especially at Olympia, the Olympic Games were celebrated every four years.

Le meste rote: Melancholy, because the wheels bring to light so much unhappiness.

ed è men vano: G. De Robertis (56) quotes a letter of Leopardi of 9 April 1821: “All the good things of this world are illusions. But do you therefore take away these illusions? What is wisdom? What else teaches us beside our unhappiness? In substance the happy man isn’t happy, but the unhappy man is truly unhappy, for all that even unhappier wisdom tries to console him. There was a time when I trusted in virtue, and despised fortune: now after a very long battle I’m defeated, and down on the ground, because I’ve found in the end that if many wise men have known the sadness and vanity of things, I, like many others, have also known the sadness and vanity of wisdom.” Dotti (250) notes that the movement of the line recalls the opening of Foscolo’s Sepolcri.

Tempo forse verrà: Cf. Virgil, Georgics, 493ff, and Petrarch, Rime CXXVI: “Tempo verrà ancor forse.” The fantasy, according to Rigoni (M1, 929), derives from the letter of 19–20 February 1799 in Foscolo’s Ortis. Cf. the description of the ruins around Vesuvius in “La ginestra.”

i sette colli: The seven hills of Rome.

la cauta volpe: Leopardi’s habitual epithet for the fox, or vixen.

più grata riede: Having neared the infernal river, i.e., having risked death, it returns “più cara e più pregiata che innanzi” [dearer and more valued than before] (“Dialogo di Cristoforo Colombo e di Pietro Gutierrez” in the Operette morali). Dotti (253) notes Mario Fubini’s observation that Leopardi transforms his athlete into a mythic hero like Hercules or Theseus, who triumphs over hell and death. But cf. also the suicidal fantasy and its aftermath, recounted in Zibaldone 82 (1819) (translated in the note to “Le ricordanze” 106–109), p. 446.

VI. BRUTO MINORE / BRUTUS

Written at Recanati in December 1821; published in Bologna in 1824, preceded by the “Comparazione delle sentenze di Bruto Minore e di Teofrasto vicini a morte” (“Comparison of the sayings of Brutus Minor and Theophrastus on the verge of death”) (M2, 266–77) (1822), in which Leopardi writes: “We can say that the times of Brutus constituted the last age of the imagination, prevailed over, finally, by science and the knowledge of truth, which was disseminated among the people sufficiently to lead to the old age of the world. For if this had not been, neither would he have had occasion to flee from life, as he did, nor would the Roman Republic have died along with him. But not only this, but all of antiquity, I mean the ancient character and customs of nations, were close to disappearing, along with the opinions that had generated and fed them.”

Marcus Junius Brutus (79?–42 B.C.) is known as Brutus Minor because of his older relative Decimus Junius Brutus (84–43 B.C.), likewise a trusted associate of and later conspirator against Julius Caesar, who also resisted Antony’s attempt to gain absolute power. Marcus Brutus, the hero of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, fought with Cassius against Antony in Macedonia before being defeated at Philippi.

Orcel (295): “The poem starts from the legendary blasphemy against virtue that Marcus Junius Brutus was supposed to have shouted at the moment of his suicide, after the defeat of the republican troops against the army of Octavian and Antony at the battle of Philippi in 42 B.C.” [Florus, Epitome IV, 7: “But how much more efficacious is fortune than virtue and how true is what (Brutus) expressed as he died, that virtue consists not so much in the thing but in the word …]

“From this subject Leopardi draws a somber and vehement poem [a prime example of the violent “titanism” or disdain of the gods, found in the canzoni, with a vehement protagonist who owes much to the “titanic” heroes of Alfieri] in which, against the well-established background of the fracture between ancient and modern worlds, he develops … a blasphemous Prometheanism and an apologia for suicide (which, in spite of the future reservations of the ‘Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio’ [of 1827, in the Operette morali], will remain representative of the poet’s attitude in the face of destiny)” and which Dotti (28) sets among the greatest of his achievements, the “tragic,” “lucid and despairing monologue of a Shakespearean hero” (see Dotti, 25–33, for a brilliant discussion of the centrality of “Bruto minore” in defining Leopard’s “philosophy”).

As Leopardi wrote to de Sinner on 24 May 1832, in response to a German reviewer who saw “a religious tendency” in his work and related his pessimism to his physical ailments: “My feelings about destiny have been and still are those I expressed in ‘Bruto minore.’ It was due to the same courage that, having been led by my research to a despairing philosophy, I didn’t hesitate to embrace it wholly; while on the other hand it was only because of the cowardice of men, who need to be convinced of the value of existence, that they wanted to consider my philosophical opinions the result of my personal suffering, and continue to attribute to my material circumstances what is only owed to my understanding. Before I die, I’m going to protest against this invention of weakness and vulgarity, and beg my readers to commit to destroy my observations and reasonings rather than blame my maladies.”

nella tracia polve: G. De Robertis (60) quotes Leopardi (M2, 149): “We use here the license taken by diverse ancient authors to attribute to Thrace the city and the battle of Philippi, which were actually in Macedonia.” Dotti (254) notes Leopardi’s mention in his Annotazioni (M2, 182) that the beginning of the canzone is modeled on that of Book III of the Aeneid.

ruina immensa: Dotti (254): For Leopardi the defeat of Brutus brings the heroic age of the ancient world to a close.

Esperia: The Greek name for Italy, given its western location.

al tiberino lido: I.e., at Rome.

l’Orsa algida: The cold northern constellation of Ursus Major, known to us as the Big Dipper.

fraterno sangue: At Philippi, brothers fought against brothers, Octavian and Anthony against Brutus and Cassius, in civil war.

Stolta virtù… : Leopardi, in the manner of his expatiation on Simonides in “All’Italia,” draws freely on Brutus’s words as reported by Dio Cassius (Roman History, XLVII, 49) and Florus.

Flegetonte: River in Hades.

Guerra mortale, eterna… : Rigoni (M1, 931): “In the preamble to his translation of the Manual of Epictetus Leopardi writes [M2, 1046] that ‘it is characteristic of great and strong spirits … to struggle, at least within themselves, against necessity, and wage fierce and mortal war against destiny, like the seven at Thebes of Aeschylus, and like the other great spirits of ancient times.’”

E maligno alle nere ombre sorride: Cf. Zibaldone 503–504 (15 January 1821): “But the ancients, always greater, more magnanimous, and stronger than we, in the excess of their bad fortune, and in their consideration of its necessity, and of the invincible power that made them unhappy and held them close and bound them to their misery without their being able to improve on it or liberate themselves, conceived hate and fury against fate, and cursed the Gods, declaring themslves enemies of heaven in a certain sense, though impotent and incapable of victory or vendetta, but not therefore dominated nor tamed, no less, but rather all the more desirous of revenge, the greater their misery and need.”

il non suo dardo: I.e., the suicidal blow delivered not by nature but by man himself.

al non previsto passo: Cf. “All’Italia,” 93; also the description of the lives of sheep in the “Canto notturno.”

nulla contesa / Legge… : G. De Robertis (66): “Allusion to the Platonic idea of the afterlife. See the ‘Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio’: ‘Why must primitive nature, which no longer prescribes laws for our life, prescribe laws for our death? Why must not reason govern death, since it governs life?’”
    Dotti (29) underlines how the polemic on suicide—“central to Leopardi’s meditation”—becomes “a polemic on theology and religion (Christianity above all).”

Figli di Prometeo: Rigoni (M1, 932): The Titan “Prometheus is the father of consciousness and civilization, and hence of human unhappiness.”

a voi Giove contende: Cf. the “Coro di morti” from the “Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie” in the Operette morali (translated on p. 352).

la funesta / … campagna: The battlefield of Philippi.

All’ausonio valor: Ausonia was an ancient name for Italy.

Lavinia prole: The descendants of Lavinia, wife of Aeneas, the legendary Trojan founder of Rome.

memorandi allori: Laurel wreaths representing the victories for which they were awarded.

Nè scolorò le stelle: According to ancient fable, when great misfortunes afflicted humanity, the stars went dark (G. De Robertis, 69).

Cocito: Hell.

dell’atra morte ultimo raggio: Dotti (262): “Leopardi wants to say that Brutus doesn’t turn, even in the extreme moment of his life, to his descendants who, aware of what the defeat at Philippi meant, and moved perhaps to indignation, could represent the last ray of hope for life in the black death that the hero is now about to embrace.”

In peggio / Precipitano i tempi: Cf. Virgil, Georgics I, 199: “Sic omnia fatis in peius ruere.”

VII. ALLA PRIMAVERA / TO SPRING

Written at Recanati in eleven days in January 1822; published in Bologna in 1824.

Leopardi, Zibaldone 63–64: “What a lovely time it was when everything was alive according to the human imagination and humanly alive, i.e., inhabited and shaped by beings equal to ourselves! When in the emptiest of woods it was judged certain that the lovely Hamadryads lived, and fauns and wood nymphs and Pan, etc. And arriving and seeing that all was solitude there you still believed all was inhabited and likewise of the springs lived in by Naiads, etc. And hugging a tree to your breast you almost felt it quiver in your hands, believing it to be a man or woman like Ciparissus, etc.! And likewise with flowers, etc., as indeed with children.”

In the Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (M2, 359–60), Leopardi offers his version of Schiller’s “naïve,” which the modern “sentimental” can only aspire to mourn: “What the ancients were we all were, and what the world was for some centuries, we were for some years, I mean children, and sharers in that ignorance and those fears and those joys and those beliefs and that endless activity of the imagination; when the thunder and wind and sun and stars and animals and plants and the walls of our houses—everything seemed to us to be either our friend or our enemy, none indifferent, none insensate, when every object we saw seemed somehow to be nodding to us, as if to show it wanted to address us; when we were never alone anywhere and asked things of images and walls and trees and flowers and clouds, and embraced stones and wood, and practically mistreated as if we’d been offended and almost embraced as helpful things that were incapable of offense or aid; when the marvel that is so welcome to us that very often we want to be able to believe in it in order to be able to marvel, possessed us constantly, when the colors of things when the light when the stars when fire when the flight of insects when the song of birds when the clearness of the springs was all new or unfamiliar to us, nor did we pass over any accident as ordinary, or know the reason for anything, and we imagined things according to our ability and embellished them according to our ability; when tears were a daily thing, and the passions were unconquered and intensely alive, not forcibly repressed, and broke out ardently. But what was our imagination then, how often and easily inflamed, how free and unrestrained, how it wandered impetuous and inexhaustible, how it magnified small things and loved simple things, and illuminated dark things, what living simulacra and breathing creatures, what lovely dreams what ineffable daydreams what magic what portents what lovely lands what chivalric finds, such material for poetry, such riches such vigor so much power so much commotion so much delight.”

Orcel (296): “In spite of the highly classical density of its verbal material— its philological incandescence—and its formal relationship with ‘Bruto minore,’ this canzone … distances itself yet a little more from the model of the Horatian ode to prefigure the future freedom of the Leopardian canto (here, the stanza already has no more than eight rhymed lines out of 19) … the poem grafts onto the theme of the overwhelming return of spring the lament for the disappearance of the ancient myths [frequent since the end of the eighteenth century; cf. above all Schiller’s The Gods of Greece], myths that Leopardi treats, not as metaphysical ‘wisdom,’ but, on the contrary, as a material and vital product of the primitive world (infantile or historic).” For Leopardi, myth is “a human creation to be understood as the reflection and personification of our own internal emotions, now happy, now unhappy; where the mythological landscape … is seen as an expression of the infancy of the world and corresponding, in the world of today, to the imagination of the child who still has the privilege … of giving life and feeling not only to animal existence but to the inanimate world as well” (Dotti, 34). Dotti (36) quotes Karl Vossler’s suggestion that the linguistic archaisms of the canto were part of a literary game with the aim of seeing “Nature once again not as she is, but as she appeared to the Greeks.”

Rigoni (M1, 933): “If Schiller and the philosophy of history of German romanticism, from Schlegel to Hölderlin, while perceiving the break between ancient and modern, believe in the possibility of reconstituting the blessed primitive harmony on another plane … Leopardi on the contrary nourishes no hope, sees no future. And in the canzone ‘Alla primavera,’ written in the firmest and most enchanted classicism, he has set loose the shadows and shivers of modern dereliction, creating a masterpiece of Grace and Melancholy at the same time.”

Perchè i celesti danni: Cf. Horace, Odes IV, 7, 13: “Damen tamen celeres reparant coelestia lunae.” See also, for contrasting tone, the opening lines of “La vita solitaria.”

l’atra / Face del ver: Literally, the dark, i.e., sad, torch of truth, or scientific knowledge.

Innanzi tempo: Antognoni (quoted by Gallo and Garboli, 66): “Before its time, because nature, in taking illusions away from man, also had to deprive him of feeling; she did this partially, but not proportionally: she took the illusions all at once, feeling by degrees. One senses that a time will come when the heart of man will be totally cold; now, to the degree that it is not so, he suffers.”

Nel fior degli anni: Leopardi frequently harps on the theme of his unspent youth; in “Il passero solitario,” 23–25, e.g.: “Quasi romito, e strano / Al mio loco natio, / Passo del viver mio la primavera.”) He wrote to Giulio Perticari (30 March 1821): “Fate has condemned my life to miss youth: because from childhood I made a leap to old age, indeed to decrepitude of the body as well as of the spirit. I’ve never ever experienced a single joy since I was born; hope for some years; for a long time since, not even that. And my external and internal life is such that, only imagining it, men would go chill with fear.”

La faretrata Diva: Diana, goddess of the hunt, with her attributes of bow and arrows.

la titania lampa: The sun, offspring of the Titan Hyperion. Cf. Virgil, Aeneid VI, 725: “titaniaque astra.”

Ciprigna luce: The moon, Venus, goddess of Cyprus.

Dafne o la mesta Filli: Daphne, pursued by Apollo, was transformed into a laurel tree by her father, Peneus. Phyllis, daughter of Lycurgus, king of Thrace, believing herself abandoned by Demophoön, killed herself and was turned into an almond tree.

di Climene / … la sconsolata prole: The Heliades, daughters of elios and Clymene, sisters of Phaeton. After mourning at length the death of their brother, who was unable to control the chariot of the sun and fell from the sky, they were transformed into willows.

Eridano: River in Greek mythology associated with the Po.

Eco: Echo, hopelessly in love with Narcissus, wasted away until only her voice remained.

Musico augel: The nightingale.

E d’ira e di pietà… : Orcel (297–98): Because of the “criminal disgrace” committed against Philomela, “who was violated by her brother-in-law Tereus, king of Thrace. He cut out her tongue to prevent her from speaking, but Philomela embroidered her story on a piece of cloth and so told her sister Procne, who killed her own son Itys and gave him to Tereus to eat. Pursued by Tereus, she was transformed into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, Tereus into a hoopoe, and Itys into a robin. The composition of this line supposedly cost Leopardi much labor.”

e te di colpa ignudo … men caro: Less adored because modern reason has destroyed the myth of the nightingale, and with it the possibility of our participating in her piteous fate.

In freddo orror dissolve: Conflation of two phrases from Virgil’s Aeneid: “mihi frigidus horror / membra quatit” (III, 29–30) and “solvuntur frigore membra” (I, 29).

e poi ch’estrano… : Dotti (270): “and from the moment that even the earth on which we are born … is alienated from us and, indifferent to the fate of its children … nourishes, raises … their unhappy souls. Leopardi wrote in a marginal note [about lines that were later changed]: ‘Thus these verses would say poetically, that today given the absence of illusions, the earth itself, and the very home of the living, has become the dwelling place of death and totally dead.’”

Vaga: See notes to lines 87–88 of “Ad Angelo Mai” (394) and passim on this essential Leopardian concept.

la favilla antica: Gallo and Garboli (70): the spark “of youth, as of the youth of the world.”

se tu pur vivi …: Gallo and Garboli (70): “if you still live, and if there is something in heaven, on earth or on the sea that can in some way represent the metaphor of our life.”

VIII. INNO AI PATRIARCHI / HYMN TO THE PATRIARCHS

Written at Recanati in seventeen days in July 1822; published in Bologna in 1824, the only one completed of ten planned hymns (the others were to be to God, the Redeemer, Maria, the Angels, Moses, the Prophets, the Apostles, the Martyrs, and the Hermits), along with a Discorso intorno agl’Inni e alla Poes. Crist. (Discourse on the Hymns and on Christian Poetry). Leopardi, in the “Annotazioni” to the canzoni (M2, 197): “I call this Hymn a Canzone, because it is a lyric poem, though it has neither stanza nor rhyme, and has achieved the true significance of the term canzone, which means the same as the Greek term ode, i.e., canticle [cantico].”

Leopardi, Zibaldone 2939 (11 July 1823): “From the long considerations made by me around the meaning of the tree of knowledge in Genesis, etc., from the fable of Psyche […] and from other very ancient fables or beliefs, etc. […] one can gather not only what is generally said, that the corruption and decadence of humankind from a better state was confirmed by a very distant, universal, constant and continuous tradition, but […] that this corruption and decadence of humanity from a happy state, was born out of knowing, out of experiencing too much, and that the origin of its unhappiness was knowledge both of itself and of the world, and the overuse of reason.”

Orcel (298): “Inspired by the Homeric and Alexandrian hymns, particularly rich in Latinisms, the poem forms with the canzone ‘Alla primavera’ a sort of diptych on the golden age.” Dotti (35): “The hymn to the Biblical primitive after the one raised to the classical primitive [was] based on the conviction that Christian tradition, like that of all religions, had ‘a great deal of that which, in resembling illusion, is optimal for poetry.’” Gallo and Garboli (71): Leopardi “admired the great book of the Jewish people, the Bible, the same way he admired the two poems of Homer: ‘for nothing else than because being the most ancient books, they are the closest to nature, the sole source of beauty, greatness, life, variety’” (Zibaldone 1028 [11 May 1821]).

Bon (82–83) cites the influence of Chateaubriand and emphasizes the hymn’s distance from Manzoni’s devotional Inni sacri (1812–15 and 1822). “The notes that survive bear witness … to an unease (‘O uomo Dio, Pietà di questa miseranda vita Che tu provasti’; Inno al Redentore [O man God, Have mercy on this miserable life Which you experienced; Hymn to the Redeemer [M1, 639]) which over time will move toward the vision of evil as prime mover of existence [cf. the hymn “To Ahriman”].” Orcel: “[The hymn is] globally less convincing than the preceding one ([and] its manuscripts attest in fact to its difficult elaboration)” and in fact the project of the hymns was abandoned.

The hymn joins the other odes-canzoni (Fubini, quoted in Dotti [37]) in “its taste for difficult and fugitive expression, arrived at via an elaboration that is especially laborious here, and an even more prominent and agitated syntax than in ‘Alla primavera’ … characterized especially by many forceful Latinate inversions.”

For Dotti (38), “The theme … of the insane and insatiable human desire to know and its deleterious effects on society … having become the true bearing structure of the poem … ended by suffocating the more poetic, Miltonic part of its inspiration [i.e., on man’s fall], which dedicated the hymn to the vast infinities of the primal world … one certainly reads the prose of the sketch [M1, 676–80] with more admiration than its translation into poetry … Its bitter and agonistic burden, its ideological obsession with the contrast between nature and reason, not only dominate but overwhelm the images making explicit what … was possibly better left inexplicit, in the background.”

Rigoni (M1, 936): “The blessedness of the original state, imagined in the preceding poem in the form of Greek myth, is here sung in the Biblical version of the origins of humankind, through the evocation of the ‘Patriarchs,’ from Adam to Jacob, inhabitants of a world still immersed in a stupefied and solitary peace, ignorant of the mad and insatiable will to knowledge and of the unpropitious effects of society (whose foundation is laid at the feet of Cain, the first murderer). But the metaphor of the golden age is enriched in the last stanza, by another figure, no less dear to Leopardi’s thought than ancient man, the child, and the animal: the savage, evoked in the species then believed to be most ‘primitive,’ and ‘natural,’ that is the savage of the ‘California forests,’ the same one which Leopardi’s ‘ultraphilosophy’ posits as an ideal of happiness and, in a note in the Zibaldone of 21 May 1823, even of wisdom, precisely in that he ‘doesn’t know thought’ … Here is the secret meaning of the canzoni: heroes of Thermopylae, great Italians of the past, Spartan and Roman virgins, winners in the game of pallone, Greek fables, patriarchs are not, in a poet like Leopardi, relics of a simple classicism or primitivism; they are projections and disguises of a flight from the condemnation of History, acts of exorcism of the nightmare of Time and the curse of Becoming.”

alma / Luce: The sun; cf. Aeneid VIII, 455.

vostro antico / Error: Original sin.

Erebo: The kingdom of Death.

Tu primo il giorno: Adam. Leopardi imitates the mode of the Greek Homeric hymns and of Callimachus to “enumerate in a segment of brief portraits the most memorable facts about celebrated heroes” (G. A. Levi, cited by Dotti, 37).

l’aurea luna: Leopardi (in a marginal note quoted by Dotti, 273): “The color of the moon is between gold and silver. And aureo means splendid.”

fraterno scempio: Adam and Eve’s first son, Cain, a farmer, committed the first murder, killing his shepherd brother Abel, when God rejected Cain’s sacrifice but accepted Abel’s.

aduna e stringe / Ne’ consorti recetti: Dotti (275) calls these lines “strongly elliptical.”

E tu dall’etra… : Noah.

illude: Cf. Virgil, Georgics I, 181, and II, 375.

padre de’ pii: Abraham.

celesti peregrini: Cf. Genesis 18:1–2, where Yahweh appeared to Abraham as three men.

figlio / Della saggia Rebecca: Jacob, son of Isaac and Rebecca.

Della vezzosa Labanide: Rachel.

servaggio all’odiata soma: Jacob had to serve Laban for fourteen years to obtain Rachel’s hand in marriage. Cf. Genesis 29:1–30.

L’aonio canto: I.e., poetry. Mount Helicon, home of the Muses, is located in Aonia (Boeotia).

Questa misera piaggia: The earth.

aurea corse / Nostra caduca età: According to Orcel (299), Leopardi draws for this passage on Virgil’s fourth eclogue, the final chorus of the first act of Tasso’s Aminta, and the fourth act of Guarini’s Il pastor fido.

beata prole: Leopardi believed that California was the last place on earth where “the golden age is not a fable” (M1, 164), and that its existence was threatened by colonialism. In his 1831 “Note ai Canti” to the canzoni (M1, 150) he wrote: “It’s thought that the Californians, among the known nations, are the most distant from civilization, and the most hostile to it.” Orcel (299) calls these last lines an “astounding denunciation of colonialism” but for Rigoni (M1, 938) “it would be incongruous to see” in this last stanza “a simple denunciation of white colonialism, rather than a despairing cry on the tragedy of civilization.”

ignuda / Felicità per l’imo sole incalza: Dotti (280) quotes M. Fubini: “One can observe that the word felicità always occurs in the same position in Leopardi’s verses: it’s placed at the beginning of the line, separated by a strong enjambment from the adjective that accompanies it, as if the poet wants us to sense the unreachable distance of the good desired by everyone (cf. ‘La vita solitaria,’ 20; ‘Al Conte Carlo Pepoli,’ 24, 59, 87; ‘Le ricordanze,’ 24; ‘Palinodia,’ 31 and 258; ‘La ginestra,’ 104).”

IX. ULTIMO CANTO DI SAFFO / SAPPHO’S LAST SONG

Written at Recanati between May 13 and 19, 1822; published in the Bologna edition of the Canzoni in 1824. As Leopardi wrote (M1, 163), the poem “intends to represent the unhappiness of a delicate, tender, sensitive, noble, and warm soul contained in an ugly and young body.”

Orcel (299): “This canzone, still representative of a verbal hyperclassicism … is presented as a metrical ‘extravagance’: the [eighteen-line] stanza includes only one settenario and only the last two lines are rhymed.” Dotti (281) quotes Antognoni: “The first sixteen lines have the now placid, now solemn, now tragic movement of the free hendecasyllabic line … Sappho’s disturbed mind finds the wave of harmony at the end of the stanza, and almost indulging in this, a relative calm in her despairing pain.” Orcel: “This movement toward the Leopardian ‘canto,’ which will soon free itself of all formal constraint, corresponds to the poem’s subject matter: through the voice of Sappho (Leopardi exploits both the Ovidian image of the ‘small and dark’ Sappho of the Heroides and the poetess’s legendary unhappy love for Phaon) it is the poet’s own subjectivity—the alienation of a ‘noble’ and ‘tender’ soul in a ‘young and ugly’ body—that for the first time finds pure expression here. A commentary on sources (see C. Muscetta, Per la poesia italiana, Rome, 1988) would mention among others … Mme. De Staël’s ‘Dernier chant de Corinne,’ A. Verri’s Avventure di Saffo, Cesarotti’s Ossian, and Italian translations of Gray.”

Rigoni (M1, 939–40): “The composition renounces all concrete classical orientation, instead letting erupt on the scene—for the first time in the series of the Canti—the pure voice of the Leopardian lyric ‘I’ … The inspiration for the canzone, which takes the theme of suicide—with its bitter and blasphemous notes—from ‘Bruto minore,’ is thus endowed with a transposed but nevertheless very evident personal theme and raises again the question, long debated by the critics, of the relationship between thought and biography in Leopardi. Even during the poet’s life it was insinuated that his pessimism was determined by his deformity and illness, with the intent of limiting or invalidating it as an entirely private and particular case … Leopardi himself had responded to such an attitude with lucid and resentful certainty [in the letter to Louis de Sinner quoted on p. 402 (see also his bitter lines on the subject in the “Palinodia,” 7–13)]. Anticipating on this point as well a notion that will be typical of Nietzsche … [the poet] exalted the exceptional decisive role of the various passions and the different states of organic and psychological alteration in the discoveries of thought (cf. Zibaldone 1975 [23 October 1822]) … The [irritated], incandescent autobiographical material is not only legitimized on the poetic plane by virtue of its high imaginative and stylistic development but manages, on the intellectual plane, to attain universal and objective truths about the human condition: the cruel blindness of destiny; the impossibility that inner worth can be affirmed on its own on earth; the brevity of youthful ‘joyful illusions’; the indecipherable enigma of the universe where ‘All is mystery except our pain.’”

G. De Robertis (97), however, asserts that “when he felt human unhappiness as something less causal, he made his deformity the subject of humor, and used it once to describe the origin of Socratic irony, which was also his irony (cf. the “Detti memorabili di Filippo Ottonieri” [in the Operette morali], chapter 1).” Bon (83) notes that starting with the Florentine edition of 1825, the “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” though it comes chronologically before the “Inno,” is placed after it so that “the two classical canti open and close the mythical parenthesis, be it classical or biblical.”

la rupe: The rock of Leucade above the Ionian Sea, from which, according to legend, Sappho is supposed to have thrown herself into the sea because of her unrequited love for Phaon.

Nunzio del giorno: The “star” of Venus, which is called Lucifer when it announces the day.

l’erinni: The Furies; by extension, the torments of passionate love.

Spettacol molle: The personal tone of this introductory evocation anticipates the similar opening of the autobiographical “Le ricordanze.”
    Leopardi wrote in the margin of his manuscript: (quoted in Dotti [282]): “Don’t we say spettacol dolce, dolce vista, dolce sguardo? Why then can you apply a word from spoken language to the eyes, and not from touch? I admit that the metaphor is a stretch, but how many more stretches does Horace have. But if the poet, especially the lyric poet, isn’t ardent in his metaphors, and is afraid of the unusual, he will also lack what’s new.”

il flutto / Polveroso de’ Noti: Notus, or Auster: the south wind, here used generically.

carro di Giove: “It was a commonplace for poets to think of thunder as Jove’s chariot.” Leopardi, “Saggio sopra gli errori poplari degli antichi,” XIII (M2, 807).

grave ospite addetta: The phrase is borrowed from Lucan, Pharsalia VIII, 157 “submissa … gravis hospita.”

colorati augelli: Cf. “pictae volucres,” Virgil, Aeneid IV, 525, and Georgics III, 243, as Leopardi himself notes (Rigoni [M1, 941]) in marginal notes on the poem manuscript.

scemo: Leopardi, “Here it does not mean diminished, but absolutely lacking.”

indomita: Leopardi, in a marginal note quoted by Dotti (284): “Lachesis can very well be called indomitable, given that the ancients assigned the governance of the world to the Fates.”

ferrigno: Leopardi: “i.e., iron-colored, dark,” in a marginal note quoted by Gallo and Garboli (86).

Arcano è tutto: Dotti (154) gives this as an example of Leopardi’s unique ability to “reshape the entire traditional linguistic patrimony … innovating it by inserting entirely personal terms … Leopardi’s epigraphic Dantism has here assumed an entirely new form … through the insertion of a word [arcano] which certainly belongs to the tradition but which, as used, pertains, one could say almost exclusively, to the [poet’s] ideal vocabulary.”

De’ celesti si posa: Leopardi, in a marginal note (Rigoni [M1, 941]), writes: “Homer and other poets in numerous places.”

il Padre: Zeus.

disadorno ammanto: Leopardi to Giordani (2 March 1818): “Whoever it may be is forced to desire that virtue not be without some external embellishment, and finding it entirely naked, turns sad and, by force of nature that no wisdom can defeat, practically lacks the courage to love the virtuous one in whom only the soul is beautiful.”

Morremo: Cf. the exclamation of Dido in Aeneid IV, 659–60: “Moriemur inulta, sed moriamur,” which Leopardi cites in a marginal note. He glosses this Virgilian quotation in Zibaldone 2217 (3 December 1821): “Virgil wanted here to express (a refined and profound sentiment, and worthy of a man who knew hearts, and was expert in passions and misfortunes, as he was) the pleasure that the soul feels in considering and representing not only vividly, but minutely, intimately, and fully its misfortune, its pains; in exaggerating them, even to itself, if it can (and if it can, it certainly will), in recognizing, or representing, but certainly persuading itself and taking care with every effort to persuade itself firmly, that they are excessive, endless, limitless, without possible real remedy or impediment or compensation or consolation, without any circumstance that would alleviate them; in seeing, in sum, and feeling vividly that its misfortune is appropriately immense and perfect.”
    Dotti (43), commenting on the movement here from “io” to “noi,” points out that the first person plural was used for the singular “as Leopardi well knew, having noted it in Zibaldone 2891 [5 July 1823] … according to the habit of the best Greek and Latin poets,” adding that it nevertheless “has a choral force.”

Il velo indegno: Continues the metaphor of the body as mantle in the previous line. The (Petrarchan) veil is the body in which Sappho’s soul is dressed.

fede: Gallo and Garboli (87): “obsessive.”

nato mortal: Leopardi (in a marginal note quoted by Gallo and Garboli [87]): “The Gods according to the ancients were born but not mortal, and many of these had lived for some time on earth; and many were terrestrial, and always lived there, like the nymphs of the woods, rivers, seas, Pans, the sylvan gods, etc.”

del doglio avaro: Leopardi is alluding, as he notes (Rigoni [M1, 941]), to “the jar full of happiness which Homer places in the house of Jove.” Cf. Iliad XXIV, 527–30.

Sottentra il morbo… : Leopardi is translating Virgil, Georgics III, 66–69: “Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi / prima fugit, subeunt morbida tristisque senectus / et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis.” The ambiguous nature of “primo” (l. 66 here) is pointed out by Leopardi in a marginal note (Rigoni [M1, 942]): “Does primo depend on età or relate to s’invola? Ask Virgil.”

Ecco di tante / Sperate palme… : Leopardi, in an unpublished note (19 May 1822) [M1, 681–82], wrote: “Latin poetry, Virgil and Horace, who are the most perfect … abound in such uncertain expressions … And the uncertain, and distant, and ardent, and unusual, and indefinite, and fugitive in this phrase gives it that vago [vagueness] which will always be greatly valued by whoever understands the true nature of poetry.”

tenaria: Hecate or Proserpina, goddess of the underworld, is so named after Cape Tenaro, now Capo Matapàn, endpoint of the southern Peloponnese, which was near the entrance to Hades according to the Greeks.

X. IL PRIMO AMORE / FIRST LOVE

Written between December 14 and 16, 1817, at Recanati; published under the title “Elegia I,” in the Bologna Versi, 1826; and then with its final title in the Florentine Canti of 1831. (“Elegia II,” “Io qui vagando al limitare attorno,” appears in revised form in the Canti without a title, as fragment XXXVIII). The poem was occasioned by a visit made to the Leopardi household by a cousin of Monaldo’s, the twenty-seven-year-old contessa Geltrude Cassi-Lazzari of Pesaro, who had a powerful effect on the young Leopardi, arousing an emotion of “uncontaminated and pure fire.”

Orcel (301): “Written before the first canzoni, and heavy with literary citations, this elegy is all the more disappointing when compared with the Diario del primo amore (written slightly later … [14–23 December 1817]) [M2, 1171–86], which relates the same psychological experience in prose with an entirely Stendhalian introspective clarity” (cf. the discrepancy in vividness between the sketch for the “Inno ai patriarchi” and the canzone itself). D’Intino, in the introduction to his edition of Leopardi’s Scritti e frammenti autobiografici (xxi–xxv), finely analyzes his affinity with Stendhal, while Dotti (48) quotes Walter Binni on the “disruptive and liberating importance” of Leopardi’s reading of Alfieri’s Vita earlier in the year.

Orcel (301): “In spite of its having been written first, Leopardi placed this poem after the nine canzoni as an introduction to the intimism of the second section of the collection,” i.e., the idylls. Dotti (47): After the “ideological-poetical group of canzoni” with its “heroically accented poetry of ‘ideas,’” Leopardi here introduces “the more mournful and intimately descriptive voice of his own interior journey, of human suffering, of the singular ‘adventure’ of the poet’s spirit that has likewise been preoccupying him at the same time.”

Rigoni (M1, 942) sees the “cantabilità” of the poem as deriving from the decline of Petrarchism [like much of his work, the poem is riddled with Petrarchan echoes and citations, among others] into the terza rima of the typical eighteenth-century amorous elegy. “It is interesting to note three themes: the poet’s turning back on his own heart (‘Only my heart pleased me…’), destined to be noteworthy as his direct interlocutor in ‘Il risorgimento’ and above all in ‘A se stesso’; the regret at not having enjoyed things … which will return in ‘Il passero solitario’; and the presence of the ‘idea’ of love which looks ahead in its form and effects to ‘Il pensiero dominante,’ and in the three final lines connects closely to the canzone ‘Alla sua donna.’”

Tornami a mente: Cf. Petrarch, sonnet CCCXXXVI, “Tornami a mente, anzi v’é dentro, quella.”

la battaglia / D’amor: Cf. Petrarch, sonnets CCCXXXVI and CIV.

t’era noia ogni contento: Cf. Zibaldone, 59: “When a man conceives of love the whole world fades before his eyes, it is no longer seen except for the beloved object, he stands in the midst of the crowd in conversations, etc., as if he were all alone, abstracted and making those gestures which your ever immobile and all-powerful thought inspires in you with no care for the wonderment or disdain of others, everything is forgotten and becomes boring, except for that one idea and that sight.”

qual tra le chiome / D’antica selva: Cf. “Alla primavera,” 71: “chiomato bosco.” The source is Horace, Odes IV, III, 11: “nemorum comae.”

taccio … contendo: Narrative present tense.

i destrier che dovean farmi deserto: Because they would soon carry his love away.

Olimpo: I.e., the heavens.

a pianger nato: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CXXX, 6: “e di lacrime vivo, a pianger nato.”

da me sì vario fui: Echoes Aeneid II, 274: “Ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo,” which in Leopardi’s youthful (1816) translation reads: “quanto da quel diverso.”

nui: Literary form of Sicilian origin (Dotti, 293).

la candida imago / … pinta nel seno: Cf. Petrarch, Rime XCVI, 5–6: “Ma’l bel viso leggiadro che depinto / Porto nel petto…” Orcel (301): “One sees here the first signs of the very personal ‘Platonism’ which Leopardi will develop especially in ‘Alla sua donna’ and ‘Il pensiero dominante.’” Cf. also “il mio possente errore” in “Le ricordanze,” 66.

sol di lei: Or, “it in itself fulfills me.” Cf. Petrarch, Rime CXXIX, 37: “che del suo proprio error l’alma s’appaga.”

XI. IL PASSERO SOLITARIO / THE SOLITARY THRUSH

Begun in 1819, when the first idylls, which it introduces, were being written, it was probably worked on again at Recanati in 1829–30, and finished in Florence in the autumn of 1830 or later. First published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835.

Rigoni (M1, 943–44): “This is the first example, in the arrangement of the Canti, of the so-called free, or Leopardian, canzone, typical of the Pisa-Recanati period … Unlike the ‘regular’ canzoni, this one is made up of strophes [or lasse, varying stanzas, derived from medieval French and Spanish poetry] that differ among themselves as to number of lines and rhyme scheme.” The poem is positioned “as prelude to the idylls, whose atmosphere it recalls, even if its formal and metrical structure presumes the experience of the great Pisa-Recanati canti of 1828–1830 … The goal of this operation seems to be that of vitalizing the perspective on the first idylls and reinforcing their unity with his later poetic production [Bandini] …

“Attention to the animal world—characteristic of Leopardi’s sensibility and thought and already touched on … both in ‘Bruto minore’ and ‘Alla primavera’—turns here to a species, birds, which the magnificent ‘Elogio degli uccelli’ in the Operette morali (1824) had celebrated for their existence consisting purely in song and flight, almost as emblems of their lightness, mobility, and freedom, which are associated with the air, their proper and natural element. But, while in the operetta they are described as ‘the happiest creatures in the world’ (birds are in fact compared to children … they are the children of the animal kingdom, they overflow with ‘extrinsic life,’ are unfamiliar with boredom, and share in the sovereign pleasure of ‘laughter’ [like ancient man in “Alla primavera”]), in this canto, infused with springtime exultation as well as the melancholy of imminent sunset, Leopardi concentrates on the particular and sorrowful image of one, distinguished instead by its self-exclusion from the lively and joyful life of its fellows. Counter-figure of the poet in not belonging to the mobile, distracted and active life, the solitary thrush yet remains much more fortunate than he because, obedient in its way to its own nature, it is free of the curse of awareness which, in addition to paralysis of feeling and separation from the whole, will bring bitterness and regret for the youth renounced [by the poet].”

Dotti (910): The canto “belongs (at least ideally) to a particular period at Recanati, the period … of memory [which would include the composition of “A Silvia” and “Le ricordanze”] which in reconstruing the inner life interprets and dramatizes it in contrast with the truth … After memory … has evoked a given moment of existence … in its fleeting beauty … as always, in its second part, the poem turns to reflection, makes the ‘negative’ emerge and proposes the sorrowful lesson of the truth. All the pain of the real is expressed here in the closing questions (the questions that will lend its poetic tone to the ‘Canto notturno’), and it’s as if the poet, with these, has tried to distance for some time—in a future avoidable only in death—imminent and fatal misfortune.”

della torre antica: Dotti (296): The campanile of the church of Sant’Agostino in Recanati.

Cantando vai… : Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCCLIII, 1, “Vago augelletto che cantando vai.” But see also the celebrated opening of Purgatorio VIII, to which Leopardi’s lines are rich in references: “Era già l’ora che volge il disio / ai navicanti e ‘ntenerisce il core / lo dì ch’han detto ai dolci amici addio; / e che lo novo peregrin d’amore / piange, se ode squilla di lontano / che paia il giorno pianger che si more.”

Quando muti questi occhi… : On “what man loses losing youth,” Dotti (443) points to Pensieri LXI and Zibaldone 4284 (1 July 1827): “The age in which man senses he no longer inspires anything is very sad. Man’s great desire, the great mover of his actions, his words, his looks, his attitudes all the way to old age, is the desire to inspire, to communicate something of himself to his spectators or hearers.”

che di me stesso?: Cf. Leopardi’s letter to G. P. Vieusseux (4 March 1826): “My life, at first through necessity of circumstance and against my will, later by inclination born of a habit converted into nature and become indelible, has always been, and is, and will perpetually be solitary, even in the midst of conversation, in which, to put it in English, I am more ‘absent’ than a blind and deaf man would be.”

XII. L’INFINITO / INFINITY

This first and most famous of the idylls was supposedly written at Recanati in the spring-autumn of 1819. It was published as “L’infinito. Idillio I,” along with “La sera del dì di festa,” “Alla luna,” “Il sogno,” “La vita solitaria,” and “Fragment XXXVII” (where it is called “Lo spavento notturno”) under the overall title Idilli, in two successive numbers (December 1825 and January 1826) of Il nuovo ricoglitore in Milan; all were subsequently included in the Bologna edition of 1826, in which “L’infinito” stands as the first poem.

An idyll is an extended lyric of ancient origin with a bucolic, pastoral setting, originally accompanied by a flute. Traces can be found in Homer, but the first complete idylls are those of Theocritus, which appealed strongly to the young Leopardi. The form has a long history of literary recuperation and imitation in Latin literature (cf. Virgil’s Eclogues) and in the Renaissance, starting with the eclogues attributed to Dante and including Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Tasso’s Aminta, etc. (Bertone, 106). For Leopardi, however, the idyll represents an attempt to cut through to the directness and simplicity of the Greek lyric, as Pound and H.D. strove to do several generations later; in this sense, his idylls may be considered the first modern lyric poems in Italian.

In a note on the manuscript of his version of Theocritus’s “Il predatore di favi” (M1, 897), Leopardi preferred the “grace” and “simple” qualities of the Greek poet to the “sublime” Horace; as d’Intino notes (Poeti greci e latini, xvii), “The ‘simple’ means, in this its first appearance, the spontaneous, i.e., the natural, but also the real, in opposition to the sublime life of concepts and ideas, or worse, of ideals.” (Leopardi had also translated the idylls of the Greek poet Moschus, whom he erroneously considered a contemporary of Theocritus and whom he called “the Virgil of the Greeks, but a Virgil who invents and doesn’t transcribe, and who in addition writes in a more delicate language, and in a time which preserves something more of the ancient simplicity.” Moschus’s poems were, no doubt, an inspiration in naming his own pastoral poems; Dotti (53), however, cites Fubini in suggesting that Leopardi’s own writing was probably more influenced by pre-romantic works such as Monti’s Pensieri d’amore and Sciolti a Sigismondo Chigi, Goethe’s Werther, and Foscolo’s Ortis.

Rigoni (M1, 946): “The structure of this idyll … is clear, and easy to define: a visual sensation (the hedge that hides from sight ‘so much of the last horizon’) arouses the imagination of spatial infinity and its ‘depthless calm’; a subsequent auditory sensation (the wind stirring in the leaves), compared with that superhuman silence, calls up the imagination of temporal infinity and the comparison between ‘the dead seasons and the present, / living one and how it sounds.’ And in this double, oceanic immensity it is sweet, to the poet’s way of thinking, to founder. It is not a matter, however, of abandonment to a theological infinity, nor in fact to an experience of the ‘sacred,’ as many have claimed or suggested: numerous notes in the Zibaldone, along an arc that stretches at least from 1820 to 1827, attest in fact to Leopardi’s polemic against any metaphysical interpretation … The most important of these—even if it comes after the date of composition of the idyll—denies infinity is real insomuch as it is contradictory of that principium individuationis which rules every form of being. Everything that exists is necessarily an individual entity, marked and distinguished by a contour and a boundary, i.e., finite. An infinite individual or an individual infinity is a philosophical absurdity, a contradiction in terms: without a limit, everything vanishes into the absolute Indistinct, into nothingness, which alone seems infinite. ‘It seems that only what does not exist, the negation of being, nothingness, can be without limits, and that the infinite comes to be essentially the same as nothing. It seems above all that the individuality of existence naturally involves a limitation of some sort, in such a way that the infinite does not admit individuality and these two terms are contradictory; therefore one cannot suppose an individual entity that does not have limits’ (Zibaldone 1478, 2 May 1826). But in a later clarification, Leopardi will reject this ‘hypostatisization’ of infinity itself as nothingness, granting it a purely mental and linguistic existence (cfr. Zibaldone 4181–82, 4 June 1826). The infinite is reduced to being the imagination of what is not seen or the nevertheless very real boundaries of which are not known, i.e., the indefinite, a key concept in his theory of pleasure as well as in Leopardi’s poetics: ‘Not only the cognitive faculty, or that of loving, but the imaginative, too, is incapable of infinity, or of knowing infinitely, but only of the indefinite, and of conceiving indefinitely. Something delights us because the soul, not seeing its limits, receives the impression of a kind of infinity, and confuses the indefinite with the infinite…’ (Zibaldone 472, 4 January 1821).” Compare the lover’s “amorosa idea” of the beloved in “Aspasia,” 39ff. As we have seen, the adjective “vago” incorporates this sense of indefinite pleasure and beauty. (See Zibaldone 100 [8 January 1820].)

D’Intino (“Coleridge-Leopardi,” 100): “Leopardi’s poetics of the indefinite, in effect, derives precisely from the rejection of the seen (which is limited to the recognition of the actual) and from that broadening of the horizon beyond the limits of the visible of which Coleridge speaks … The romantic locus par excellence [of Leopardi’s poetics] is the one in which ‘in the place of vision the imagination goes to work and the fantastic takes its place. The soul imagines what it doesn’t see, what that tree, that hedge, that tower, hides from it, and goes wandering in an imaginary space, and conceives for itself things that it could not if its sight extended everywhere, because the real would exclude the imaginary.’” (Zibaldone 171 [12 –23 July 1820]).

For Ungaretti (1950), “‘L’infinito’ is an idyll that is ironic in tone starting with its title. The idyll of infinity will in fact be a representation of the finite.” But according to Rigoni (M1, 947): “In the immediacy of the psychological experience and its poetic expression, it’s natural that the illusion of the loss of limits be lived as reality and therefore present the characteristics proper to ecstasy, with the inevitable admixture of fear and pleasure: this alone, in the end, determines the meaning of the poem, as it does the deep emotion it provokes in the soul of the reader.”

ermo colle: Monte Tabor, not far beyond the Porta di Monte Morello of Recanati, near Palazzo Leopardi. The expression is derived from classic Italian writers such as Galeazzo di Tarsia. Gardini (86) also sees the first line of the poem as derived from Leopardi’s translation of the idylls of Moschus and from Theocritus and relates the “colle” to the hill of Antela in “All’Italia.” He calls “L’infinito” “a modern version of pastoral … which, through temporal suspension and utopian evasion, saves the individual from despair, providing some kind of reprieve from historical decay.”

mi sovvien l’eterno: Dotti (301) quotes Fubini, according to whom “the immediate antecedent of ‘L’infinito’ and in particular of these lines” is a passage from Leopardi’s Ricordi d’infanzia e di adolescenza (also written in 1819): “My considerations on the plurality of worlds and the nothingness of us and of this earth and on the greatness and power of the nature that we measure with its torrents, etc. which are a nothing on this globe which is a nothing in the world and, aroused by a voice calling me to dinner, our life and time and celebrated names and history, etc. then seemed a nothing.” Cf. also the great apostrophe on the insignificance of man on earth in “La ginestra,” 167–200.

Immensità: Originally “infinità.” Cf. the description of a similar situation in Alfieri’s Vita (Parte I, Epoca III, cap. IV) (1790): “Sitting on the shore with my shoulders leaning on a tallish rock which deprived me of all sight of the earth from behind, in front of me and around me I saw nothing but sky and sea; and so between these two immensities … I spent an hour of delights daydreaming.”

E il naufragar m’è dolce… : Orcel (304) asserts that this phrase likely has mystical origins.

XIII. LA SERA DEL DÌ DI FESTA / THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY

Written at Recanati between 1819 and 1821, and usually assigned to 1820; first published in the Milanese journal Il nuovo ricoglitore in December 1825, under the title “La sera del giorno festivo. Idillio II.” The situation from which the poem derives is described in Zibaldone 50–51: “My unhappiness at hearing late at night after some feast day the nocturnal song of peasants passing. Infinity of the past that came to mind, thinking of the Romans [fallen] thus after so much noise and of so many events now past which I compared mournfully with the profound stillness and silence of the night, making me realize what was pleasing in the prominence of that peasant’s voice or song.”

Orcel (304): “Written in a single stanza of blank hendecasyllables (which … testifies to internal unity of the text in the eyes of the poet) … From the transparent initial nocturne—of an entirely Homeric freshness—to the song lost in the night of the last lines … the poem braids by subtle movements of leaps and reprises the typical Leopardian themes of alienation, of repetitive and destructive time, of destiny and loss. The subject of History, introduced by the classic Ubi sunt?, radically differentiates the experience incorporated in the second idyll from ‘L’infinito.’” Cf. also the letter to Giordani of 6 March 1820. Dotti (58): “A canto like ‘La sera…’ … in which the poetry of memory is overwhelmingly present, evoking the historical as well as the personal … presents itself with all the summary characteristics of a ‘conception of the world’ and … as such is bound to impose itself on European culture.” It was translated by Sainte-Beuve, Amiel, and Aulard, and imitated (and in part plagiarized) by Laforgue in his “Soir de carnival.”

rivela / Serena ogni montagna: Cf. Iliad VIII, 555ff, a passage cited and translated by Leopardi himself in his Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica as an example of the ancients’ ability to imitate nature “in such a way that it does not seem imitated but transported into their lines.” The attribution of the adjective “serena” is ambiguous: it can refer either to “luna” or to “ogni montagna.”

Già tace ogni sentiero: Cf. Virgil, Aeneid IV, 525.

l’antica natura: Dotti (303) quotes Zibaldone 2263 (20 December 1821): “Antichi, antico, antichità; posteri, posterità are very poetic, etc., words because they contain one idea: 1. vast, 2. undefined and uncertain, maximal posterities of which we know nothing, and antiquity similarly is a very obscure thing for us.” Dotti adds: “Here, however, the adjective antica by which nature is defined, followed immediately by onnipossente, seems to assume a tone that is polemical, setting the ‘I’ in opposition to destiny.”

mi fece all’affanno: Cf. “Il primo amore”: “a pianger nato” (68).
    In his letter to Giordani of 6 March 1820, Leopardi writes: “A few nights ago, before going to bed, having opened the window of my room and seeing a clear sky, a lovely ray of moonlight, and feeling warm air and hearing certain dogs baying in the distance, certain old images were awakened in me and I thought I felt a commotion in my heart, thanks to which I started screaming like a madman, begging for mercy from nature, whose voice I thought I was hearing after so long.”
    Dotti (58) notes how the calm, “majestically Goethean” opening of the canto is characteristically soon revealed as illusion, yielding to a “lyrically agitated climate reminiscent of some of Monti’s [“pre-romantic”] Pensieri d’amore.”

dov’è il suono / Di que’ popoli antichi: Dotti (304) reminds us that this is an instance of the time-honored classic—and medieval—trope of Ubi sunt? Cf. also the evocation of the “perduto impero” of Rome at the beginning of “La ginestra.” Garboli and Gallo (111): “More than almost any other poet Leopardi loves the effect of pathetic precision which derives from the demonstrative pronoun.”
    It is notable how important the sound of the past is to Leopardi (see “Sopra il monumento di Dante,” 114ff and elsewhere), as is the sound of the season in “L’infinito,” and of Silvia’s—and others’—singing throughout the Canti; indeed, the very title of the book implies how vital the aural aspect of poetry, and of experience as a whole, is for this poet.

Premea le piume: Cf. Purgatorio VI, 150 and elsewhere for this commonplace idiom (cf. also “Il primo amore,” 20).

Un canto … / Lontanando: Cf. Zibaldone 1928 (16 October 1821), where Leopardi describes the effect of “a song … heard from afar … which little by litte grows distant,” becoming insensible, lost in the vastness of space.

XIV. ALLA LUNA / TO THE MOON

The fourth idyll, written at Recanati, perhaps in July 1819 or 1820, and possibly before “L’infinito” (Orcel, 305); first published in Il nuovo ricoglitore (as “La ricordanza. Idillio III”), then in the Bologna edition of 1826. Until the Florentine edition of 1831, the poem was called “La luna o la ricordanza,” or simply “La ricordanza”; the title was changed to avoid confusion with “Le ricordanze” (1829). Dotti (53) suggests that here and in “L’infinito” (and later, perhaps, in “A se stesso” as well), “Leopardi in his own way wanted to compete with the sonnet.”

Rigoni (M1, 950–51): “Leopardi’s emotional world and philosophical mythmaking are animated … in the twilight or nighttime light of the stars, and, par excellence, of the moon, certainly no longer a divinity but not yet the desolate land of astronautical exploration. If modern man, who has only been brushed by the wing of metaphysical disenchantment, can no longer devote himself in any way to the cult and the celebration of the image of the sun, in the moon … he still continues to recognize a pregnant, though altered, symbolic entity. The attributes and imagery that Leopardi gives her are a sublime example of loving, extreme mythological reintegration, culminating in the ‘Canto notturno…’ (q.v.). Young virgin, pensive, immortal, aware of The All, silent but consoling presence (her setting means grief on Earth, her fall from the sky—imagined in the wonderful fragment, ‘Odi, Melisso’—pure cosmic alarm), she is also the patroness of memory … In this idyll, ‘wholly plaintive confession of a lonely and bitter life … curiously it’s less suffering or the past that dominates but the milky image of the feminine star: the irony of myth that it surprises cold reason.’ (Orcel 1982).”

or volge l’anno: Cf. Petrarch, Rime LXII, 9: “Or volge, signor mio, l’undecimo anno.” Dotti (59)—noting the importance of anniversaries for Leopardi, and citing a sketch for an elegy written on June 29, 1818, in which he writes: “Today ends my 20th year. Miserable me what have I done? Still no great accomplishment” (M1, 617)—suggests that the canto was composed on the poet’s birthday, June 29, 1819.

questo colle: Again, Monte Tabor, the “ermo colle” of “L’infinito,” outside Recanati.

Nel tempo giovanil … il corso: These two lines were a late addition of Leopardi’s, first appearing in the Neapolitan edition of 1835.

Il rimembrar delle passate cose: Cf. Zibaldone 1987–88 (25 October 1821): “As with impressions, memories of childhood in whatever era are more vivid than those of any other period. Even the remembering of images or things that were unhappy, or frightening, etc., in childhood are pleasing due to their vividness. And for the same reason unhappy memories are also pleasing in life, even when the cause of the sadness isn’t past, or when memory occasions them or intensifies them, as in the death of our dear ones, the remembering of the past, etc.” See also Zibaldone 60 (May–June 1819).

XV. IL SOGNO / THE DREAM

Written in December 1820 or at the beginning of 1821, at Recanati; published on August 13, 1825, in Brighenti’s Bolognese review, Notizie teatrali bibliografiche e urbane, ossia il Caffè di Petronio, then in Il nuovo ricoglitore (December 1825) as “Il sogno. Idillio IV,” and in the Bologna edition of 1826.

Despite its formal echoes of Petrarch, of Cesarotti’s Ossian, and of Monti, the poem, for Orcel (305), marks a lowering of quality in Leopardi’s inspiration. “The figure of the young dead girl is perhaps inspired by Teresa Fattorini, daughter of the coachman of Palazzo Leopardi, who died in September 1818, and who [will later be] idealized in the canzone ‘A Silvia’” and (Gallo and Garboli, 117) “whose image is fixed in the Ricordi d’infanzia e d’adolescenza and suggested in the canzone ‘Per una donna inferma di malattia lunga e mortale’ written in March and April 1819 and never published by Leopardi.”

For Rigoni (M1, 951–52), “‘Il sogno’ is not so much an amorous canto as a nod in the direction of a multiplicity of themes and tones which Leopardi will develop later and which show how far the poem diverges from its Petrarchan models (Rime CCCLIX; Il Trionfo della Morte II [in both of which “the old poet intones an emotional dialogue with Laura in heaven” {Dotti, 63}]) … but the interest of the idyll, beyond its function as a prelude, is also in the authentically Romantic frisson with which life and death are suspended and almost assimilated by the mournful magic of the dream, however much the rhetorical-literary model does not always end up perfectly adequate and resolved.”

Dotti notes that in Leopardi’s dream-dialogue “there is no motive of Christian transcendence whatsoever” and in fact he imagines the dead beloved not more beautiful in heaven, but exactly as she was on earth, writing (in the relevant “disegno letterario” mentioned below) that “‘even the increase of beauty is prejudicial to feeling and memory,’” something “he adds with the boldness of youth ‘that was not understood by our poets, not even by Petrarch.’”

Quando in sul tempo… : Gallo and Garboli (119) compare these lines to Leopardi’s translation of the second idyll of Moschus, 4–8: “Quando il sopor su le palpèbre / più soave del mèl siede e le membra / lieve rilassa, ritenendo intanto / in molle laccio avvilupati i lumi.” [When sleep sits on the eyelids / more softly than honey / and lightly relaxes the limbs, while keeping / the eyes enclosed in a soft noose.]

or son più lune: Dotti (63) thinks the “Disegno letterario, VII” (M2, 1213), which mentions an “incontro di Petrarca morto, con Laura per la prima volta” (meeting of the dead Petrarch with Laura for the first time) could have been the nucleus of this elegy; as the plan also includes notes for “Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina” and “Bruto minore,” written in November and December of 1821, he conjectures that “Il sogno” may also date from this period.

ha poco andare: The image of life as a journey is Petrarchan. Cf. Rime LXXV, 14: “Questi avea poco andare ad esser morto.”

e duro è il fato… : I.e., hope extinguished by premature death, and not by experience. The theme recurs in “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale,” 33–43.

Intenderlo potessi: On Leopardi’s desire to die see his letter to Brighenti of 12 April 1820: “It’s time to die. It’s time to yield to fate.”

come vecchiezza: Leopardi to Giulio Perticari (30 March 1821): “Fortune condemned my life to go without youth; for from childhood I passed to old age.” Cf. also Leopardi’s treatment of the theme in “Il passero solitario.”

Nascemmo al pianto… : See the same phrase in “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” 48.

il cor t’assalse: Cf. Petrarch’s similar question to Laura in the second chapter of Il Trionfo della Morte, 76–84. Dotti (311) notes Petrarchan borrowings throughout this passage and the poem as a whole.

La fe: In editions before 1835, this read as “L’amor.”

incerto raggio: Dotti (312) quotes Fubini: “‘To this adjective, above all—which Leopardi found used thus in Virgil (cf. Aeneid III, 203 and VI, 270) and more frequently in Cesarotti’s Ossian, to indicate the light of the sun or the stars veiled by clouds or something else—is entrusted the task of recreating, at the end of the composition, that precious suggestion of the indefinite with which it was begun.’”

XVI. LA VITA SOLITARIA / THE SOLITAR Y LIFE

Possibly written at Recanati in the summer of 1821; first published in Il nuovo ricoglitore, Milan, in January 1826 as “La vita solitaria. Idillio VI,” and then in the Bologna edition of 1826.

Orcel (306): “The last of the idylls … preserving the traces of the 18th-century taste for poems on the four parts of the day (Parini, Pindemonte), alternating somewhat conventional passages with the ecstatic song of Leopardi at his greatest, needs to be re-established in its subtle internal unity, the end of each stanza calling up the following one by a game of thematic analogies (stanza I: death as refuge → stanza II: annihilation at midday → stanza III: coldness of heart and solitude → stanza IV: the moon as sole companion).”

Rigoni (M1, 953): “The ‘solitary life’ tends in fact to configure itself—beyond certain conventional situations or images—as a refuge in which a man tired and disillusioned by the world rediscovers in some degree his confidence in things and in the beings of nature and attempts the renewal of feeling and imagination through forgetting the truth, understood and suggested here in both its ‘social’ and ‘metaphysical’ senses. Except that the effects of this forgetfulness, already precarious in itself, are different, and even, at least apparently, contradictory: on the one side, in fact, it is represented as an experience that renews and comforts, refreshes and enlivens; on the other, in the description of the sunstruck, silent, immobile midday [“a regressive ecstasy, nirvana-light that devours sensibility and consciousness along with things, dispensing the peace of extinction and oblivion” (950)], rendered by means of an enchanting series of negative tropes, as the diving into a state of insensibility and unconsciousness similar to the ‘ancient stillness’ of death. From this comes the impression of uncertainty and emotional hesitation that the reading of the idyll leaves up to its last lines, which express a mixed wish of resignation and hope.”

alla capanna mia: The rustic country house of the Leopardi family at San Leonardo, outside Recanati. The poem’s opening echoes that of “Alla primavera,” although in a different, intimate key, “Arcadian, not to say Tassian” (Dotti, 313).

là dove segue: Before the Neapolitan edition of 1835, this passage read: “dove si piglia [or prende] / lo sventurato a scherno” [where the unfortunate man / is held in contempt].

il ferro: Ferretti (104) notes that the Bologna edition lacked this strong Alfierian endorsement of suicide; “ferro” there was “pianto” [complaint], perhaps imposed, according to Moroncini (Dotti, 314), by the Bolognese censors.

Talor m’assido in solitaria parte… : The scene recurs in “Le ricordanze,” 104–109, where Leopardi recalls suicidal fantasies in a similar setting. The contemplation of “altissima quiete” also evokes the “profondissima quiete” of “L’infinito.” Fubini (Dotti, 314) draws attention to a similar passage in “Appressamento della morte,” IV, 70–72, adding that they may derive from Cesarotti’s translation of Gray’s “Elegy” (1772), or from Foscolo’s version of the same in letter XXXV of the Ortis (1798).

lor quiete antica: See the discussion of the term “antico” in the notes to “La sera del dì di festa.”

Era quel dolce / E irrevocabil tempo… : This theme is expanded on in “Le ricordanze,” 119–35, for which this poem almost seems a kind of preliminary sketch. Leopardi, Zibaldone 1534 (20 August 1821): “The words irrevocabile, irremeabile [irremediable], and others like them will always produce a pleasing sensation … because they arouse an idea that is without limits and impossible to be entirely conceived. And therefore they will always be extremely poetic and the true poet knows how to make use of and enjoy such words to very great effect.”

Odo sonar nelle romite stanze: Cf. Zibaldone 4421 (1 December 1828): “On my solitary walks through the city, it’s usual for the view inside the rooms I see from below in the street through open windows to excite very pleasing sensations and lovely pictures in me. Which rooms would interest me not at all if I saw them from inside. Is this not an image of human life, of its states, its goods and joys?” Cf. the similar setting of “A Silvia.”

Infesto alle malvage menti… : Note the triple repetition of “infesto” in the last stanza. For Dotti (318), Leopardi here “is competing with a kind of Ossianic poetry, and in particular with the opening lines of Parini’s “La notte.” “Ossianic” poetry was inspired by Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry published in 1760 and translated by Melchiore Cesarotti as Canti di Ossian in 1763, which enjoyed an enormous vogue in the late eighteenth century and was highly influential for the romantic writers in the nineteenth. The largely invented “primitive” odes of the so-called Homer of the North spoke to a pre-romantic taste for a melancholic, pessimistic, death-haunted, “authentic” view of nature and man’s place in it in contrast to the resolutely sunny rationality of the Enlightenment. Among the leading Italians of this school were Ippolito Pindemonte (1753–1828), author of I cimiteri, and Ugo Foscolo (I sepolcri) (1778–1827).

Se core e lena a sospirar m’avanza: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCXCIV, 11: “altro che sospirar nulla m’avanza.”

XVII. CONSALVO

Probably written in the spring of 1833 during the period of Leopardi’s love for the Florentine socialite Fanny Ronchivecchi (1801–89), wife of the naturalist Antonio Targioni Tozzetti, whom Leopardi had met in Florence in 1830 (and who was in turn infatuated with Leopardi’s friend Antonio Ranieri); published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835, where for tonal and thematic reasons it was placed between the idylls and the canzone “Alla sua donna.”

The poetic “novella”’s dramatic situation, and its Spanish names, are derived from the poem in the style of Tasso, Il conquisto di Granata (The Conquest of Granada) by Girolamo Graziani (1604–75), of which Leopardi had anthologized a part in his Crestomazia italiana poetica (1828).

In the Disegno letterario (XII) of 1818 (M2, 1218–19) he wrote: “Farewell to Telesilla (dying) … Comic or tragic scenes. Historical or ideal characters. For example a man in my situation who speaks of love to a woman for the first time.” This in fact does happen for the first time for Leopardi “(if only in poetic fiction) in the course of his long, silent and despairing love” (Dotti, 67) for Fanny.

Orelli (76) notes the “nearness” of the name Elvira to “Silvia,” and demonstrates numerous linguistic affinities in the two texts. Orcel cites the “sadomasochistic aperçus” in the piece and writes (307): “One fails to understand how Leopardi, whose poetry is always of a great formal restraint, could have been attached to this melodramatic, weepy ‘novella,’ contrary to his own aesthetic.” The poem nevertheless was among Leopardi’s most popular works in his own day.

Rigoni (M1, 955), remarking on de Sanctis, who, “betrayed by his taste for passion and the popular,” called it “a masterpiece,” as well as on Carducci’s highly critical denunciation, notes how the poem is related to other, even great canti—“Il pensiero dominante,” “Amore e Morte”—especially in its “deep anxiety in the face of a supreme state of happiness. But will not the failure of the attempt also depend on the fact that Leopardi has tried for once to imagine and represent the achievement of such a moment?”

a mezzo / Il quinto lustro: Originally, “al mezzo di sua vita.” Dotti (320): “The correction was intended to conceal the poet’s allusion to himself, as he was thirty-five at the time of his love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti.”

Ma ruppe alfin… : Dotti (166–68) notes how Leopardi here, as in “Il primo amore” fifteen years earlier, has recourse to echoes of Petrarch and Dante (the latter drawn from the episode of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno V) as he tries “to sublimate his own amorous experience by reliving it and fusing it with exemplary models.” In the “atmosphere of extreme agitation and turbulent transgression” that animated Leopardi’s “most secret inspiration,” he relied on his great predecessors to present it “in more reassuring forms.”

Addio per sempre: For Leopardi’s meditation on the emotion caused by final farewells, see Zibaldone 644–46 (11 February 1821) and 2242–43 (10 December 1821), where he writes that the reason for such emotion is linked “to that infinity which contains in itself the idea of a finished thing, beyond which there is nothing more; of a thing that is finished forever, and that will never come again.”

Due cose belle… : Cf. the canzone “Amore e Morte” (XXVII), written at about the same time as “Consalvo.”

ma cotanto / Esser beato no consente il cielo… : Cf. the last lines of the “Coro di morti,” translated in the section “Other Texts,” p. 352. Fubini (quoted in Dotti, 325) cites a passage from the first of the Operette morali, “La storia del genere umano”: “[Love] very rarely brings two hearts together, embracing one and the other at the same time, and bringing about reciprocal ardor and desire in both; though he is asked for this with the the greatest insistence by all of those whom he occupies; but Jove doesn’t allow him to satisfy them, except for a few; for the happiness that results from such a benefit, is surpassed by that of the divine by too small a degree.” See also “Alla sua donna,” 30–33.

Dimani all’annottar: I.e., at the end of the first day following his death.

XVIII. ALLA SUA DONNA / TO HIS LADY

Written at Recanati in six days in September 1823, at “the moment in which the poet, before throwing himself with the Operette [morali] into speculation on the arid truth of existence, before assuming the look and attitude of the Lucian of his age, stops to reflect on the consoling value of the illusions” (Dotti, 68); published in the Bolognese edition of 1824, as the tenth of the canzoni, it was moved to sixteenth position in the Florentine edition, and finally to the eighteenth in the Naples edition of 1835.

Moroncini, quoted in Rigoni (M1, 956), suggests that Leopardi first wrote the second, third, and fifth stanzas, later adding the first and fourth. Like “Il primo amore” and fragment XXXVIII, “Alla sua donna” was in some degree inspired by Leopardi’s feeling for his father’s cousin Contessa Geltrude Cassi-Lazzari, who visited the Leopardi household in December 1817 and again in 1818.

Orcel (308) credits Rigoni with finding Leopardi’s source in a brief prose piece of the seventeenth-century moralist Saint-Evremond, “Idée de la femme, qui ne se trouve point, et qui ne se trouvera jamais,” adding that “in this love inspired from afar, it’s not forbidden to hear an echo of the ‘amor de lonh’” of the Provençal troubador Jaufré Rudel. (But the absent beloved is a central, indispensable feature of the Italian lyric tradition, from Dante’s Beatrice to Petrarch’s Laura all the way to Montale’s Clizia.)

Leopardi wrote in his preamble to the reprinting of the first ten canzoni—“ten canzoni and not even one amorous”—in Il nuovo ricoglitore (I, 9, 1825 [Rigoni (M1, 163–65)]): “The lady, who is the beloved of the author, is one of those images, one of those celestial and ineffable phantoms of beauty and virtue, which often occur to our imagination during sleep or sleeplessness, when we are little more than children, and then on rare occasions in sleep, or in a sort of alienation of the mind, when we are young. Finally, she is the woman who can’t be found. The author doesn’t know whether his lady (and calling her this, he shows he loves only her) has ever been born till now, or will ever be born: he knows that now she does not live on earth, and that we are not her contemporaries; he looks for her among the ideas of Plato, he looks for her in the moon, in the planets of the solar system, in the constellations. If this canzone wants to be called amorous, it will nevertheless be true that love such as this can neither arouse nor suffer jealousy, because apart from the author no tender lover wants to make love with a telescope.”

Orcel (308): “The ‘hymn’ … which borrows the form of a canzone almost totally liberated from classic schemes”—anticipating “the so-called ‘free canzone’ characteristic of the years 1826–30” (Rigoni [M1, 956])—“concludes Leopardi’s first great poetic season … The canzone is in effect the purest example of Leopardi’s peculiar [Petrarchan] ‘Platonism’ which, far from contradicting his radical materialism, is its despairing countersong. Among the numerous pieces in this group, beyond ‘Il pensiero dominante’ and ‘Aspasia,’ one should mention the letter to Jacopsen (23 June 1823): [“In love, all the joys that vulgar souls experience aren’t worth the pleasure that one sole instant of ravishment and deep emotion give. But how to make this emotion last, or be renewed often in life? or find a heart that responds to it? Several times I’ve avoided for several days meeting the object who had charmed me in a delicious dream. I knew that this charm would have been destroyed by approaching reality. Yet I always thought of this object, but I didn’t consider her according to how she was; I contemplated her in my imagination, the way she had appeared in my dream.”]; and Zibaldone 4418 (30 November 1828): ‘For the sensitive and imaginative man … the world and things are in a certain sense double.’” (See notes to “Le ricordanze.”)

Rigoni (M1, 957): “The precise meaning of this canzone, born of an incurable nostalgia for Elsewhere,” has not always been agreed upon. “A mind of the subtlety and penetration of Manzoni, though abyssally far from the intellectual and poetic universe of Leopardi, declared … that he understood nothing of it … The canzone constitutes a hymn to Woman, to Beauty, to an archetypal universe or one at least superior to the real because it would be the only one capable of redeeming and beatifying ‘this arid earth,’ this ‘deathly life’—if it ever existed. From such paradoxical but anything but extrinsic Platonism, from the point of view of an absolute materialism which nevertheless doesn’t seem to be from down here (‘the world doesn’t seem to me to have been made for me,’ he once wrote to his brother Carlo), from a sort of extraordinary ‘atheistic idealism’ (Orcel, 1982), emerges the miracle of this, with its suspension in dream, with its piercing images of two antithetical conditions, with the fluctuations and reversals and continual returns from one to the other, embodied in the recurrence of the conditional, interrogative, adversative forms of its poetical music.”

Fubini (quoted in Dotti, 69) sees the canzone as the “synthesis of all his preceding work, both canzoni and idylls, of which modes, themes, voices of one and the other are discreetly re-evoked,” and as the linchpin between the first canti and those that follow the epistle to Pepoli.

Nulla spene: “Spene” is an alternative of “speme,” preferable here, according to Straccali (Dotti, 329), to avoid “cacophony with the word that follows [“m’avanza”].”

ignudo e solo: I.e., devoid of his body. Cf. Petrarch, Rime CXXVIII, 101–102: “Ché l’alma ignuda e sola / conven ch’arriva a quel dubbioso calle.”

peregrina stanza: An unknown dwelling place. In a marginal annotation Leopardi cites Petrarch, Rime LXIX, 9–11: “et per camino, / … / m’andava sconosciuto e pellegrino.”

Or non aggiunse: Adversative, but less so than the original “Ahi, ma” (Dotti, 330).

Simile a quella che nel cielo india: Cf. Petrarch, Rime LXXIII, 68: “simile a quella ch’è nel ciel eterna,” though “the Petrarchan ‘eterna’ is replaced with the Dantesque ‘s’india’ (Dotti, 330); see Paradiso IV, 28.

Del giovanile error: Cf. the “antico error” of the canzone to his sister, Paolina, and Petrarch, Rime I, 3: “In sul mio primo giovenil errore.”
    Leopardi wrote to Jacopsen (13 June 1823): “Pour moi, je regrette le temps où m’était permis de l’y chercher, et je le vois avec une sorte d’effroi que mon imagination devient sterile.”

dell’imago, / … m’appago: Cf. the end of “Il primo amore”: “Spira nel pensier mio la bella imago / … / … e sol di lei m’appago.”

eterne idee: The Ideas of Plato, “immaterial and primitive forms of things” as Leopardi describes them in a note to Petrarch’s sonnet (Rime CLIX): “In qual parte del ciel, in qual idea” (Rigoni [M1, 958]).

L’una sei tu: Orcel (309) cites C. Galimberti’s suggestion that “l’una” in some sense stands for “luna,” the moon: “the ‘traveler’ of the hymn effectively evokes the ‘companion’ of ‘Alla primavera’ and the ‘eternal pilgrim’ of the ‘Canto notturno’ and of so many other canti.”

ne’ superni giri: Cf. Dante, Purgatorio XXX, 93.

Questo … ricevi: Dotti (332): “The line constitutes the principal proposition that subordinates the two propositions of uncertainty in a complex and insuperably harmonious syntactical ensemble, an ensemble that suggests, rhythmically as well, the indefinite miracle of archetypal Beauty.”

XIX. AL CONTE CARLO PEPOLI / TO COUNT CARLO PEPOLI

Written at Bologna in March 1826 and published as the final text in the Bologna edition of the Versi that year.

Conte Carlo Pepoli (1796–1881), a Bolognese nobleman and scholar, was a friend of Leopardi from 1825 to 1830; in 1826, he was vice president of the Bolognese Accademia dei Felsinei. A political liberal imprisoned and then exiled after the riots of 1831, he eventually taught Italian literature at London University, where Carlyle judged him “a very pretty man.” He wrote the libretto for Bellini’s I Puritani (1835), which for Rigoni (M1, 960) shows some traces of Leopardi’s influence.

Orcel (309) notes that the poem falls exactly between the publication of the first twenty operette morali (1824) and the poetic “risorgimento” of 1828, “a moment of transition and perhaps of artistic uncertainty” (Rigoni [M1, 959]) i.e., of Leopardi’s “so-called conversion from the beautiful to the true” (Dotti, 72). The “epistle”—as it was originally called, in recognition of its Horatian inspiration—was commissioned by the Accademia dei Felsinei and read there publicly on the evening of Easter Monday, where it was coolly received (see Damiani, All’apparir del vero, 282–83). The poem, “which is modeled on Horatian sermo and on Parinian ‘verso sciolto’ [unrhymed hendecasyllables imitative of classical hexameters]” (Dotti, 70), can fairly be characterized as “versified prose” (Orcel, 309), argued in “a protracted and gray argumentative style” (Rigoni [M1, 959]), though it does rise to lyricism at certain points, particularly its last forty lines. Rigoni (959): “We are naturally … in the atmosphere of so-called ‘cosmic pessimism’ … the causes of evil and unhappiness have been extended, from the arena of civilization and history, to the order of nature itself, to the original and intrinsic condition of things.”

Leopardi wrote to Giordani (6 May 1825): “As to the type of work I am engaged in, as I have changed from what I was, so has my work changed. Everything that adheres to the affectionate and eloquent bores me, has the flavor of a joke and ridiculous childishness. I am looking for nothing more than the truth, which I so hated and detested before. It pleases me ever more to discover and touch with my hand the misery of man and things, and to shiver coldly, examining this unhappy and terrible mystery of the life of the universe. I see well now that, since my passions are spent, there is no other source and base for pleasure in my work than an empty curiosity, the satisfaction of which still has much power to delight; a thing that before, while the last spark remained in my heart, I could not understand.”

ozio: from Latin otium, or ease, where it has far less pejorative sense than it takes on soon after the poem’s opening, coming as it does to represent emptiness, boredom, lack of energy; elsewhere Leopardi uses the term (cf. “Ad Angelo Mai,” 164) to characterize the lack of ambition and aspiration of pre-Risorgimento Italians.

franger glebe… : Cf. Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata I, 63: “Il ferro uso a far solchi, a franger glebe.”

la bella / Felicità: Rigoni (M1, 959): “the real and single goal of life” for Leopardi.

Di medicina in loco… : Cf. Leopardi’s bitter denunciation of the gods’ “gift” to man of illness, old age, and death in “Il tramonto della luna,” 34–50.

men loco avesse / Al travagliarne il cor: On this theme, Orcel (309) refers the reader to the “Storia del genere umano,” the great introductory allegory to the Operette morali.

Nè la lentezza accagionar dell’ ore: Cf. “A un vincitore nel pallone,” 62–63: “nè delle putri e lente / Ore il danno misura.”

quell’una / Cui natura apprestò… : See the apologia for suicide in “Bruto minore,” 55–70.

Lui delle vesti… : The following two stanzas constitute a variation on Virgil, Georgics II, 503ff.

adamantina… : Dotti (337): “The whole image quite closely evokes Horace Odes II, 24, 5–7: ‘si figit adamantinos / summis verticibus dira Necessitas / clavos’ … except that instead of the figure of Necessitas in Leopardi there is that of Noia.”

s’asside / Su l’alte prue… : Cf. Horace, Odes II, XVI, 18–22; “la negra cura” is the “atra cura” of Odes III, I, 40.

di remoti / Lidi turbando… : Cf. Leopardi’s critique of colonialism in the last lines of the “Inno ai patriarchi.”

Or quando al tutto irrigidito e freddo… : Cf. “Il passero solitario,” 53ff.: “Quando muti questi occhi all’altrui core.”

ogni alto senso, / Ogni tenero affetto… : Cf. the apostrophe to Nerina at the end of “Le ricordanze,” 171ff: “D’ogni mio vago immaginar, di tutti / I miei teneri sensi…”

Altri studi: Dotti (340): “philosophical, political and moral reflections, the outlines of which can be read in a series of Disegni letterari (IX, X, XI, XII) [M2, 1214–19] datable starting in 1825 (up to 1829) … Yet Fubini notes: ‘In reality [Leopardi] also signals, even as he writes this epistle, that his spirit is returning to sensibility and to poetry, a sensibility and a poetry that are different but no less genuine than those of another time.”

d’ammirar son pago: Cf. Zibaldone 4257 –58 (21 March 1827): “The great mastery of nature, the incomparable order of the universe, is endlessly praised … Let us admire … this order, this universe: I admire it more than others: I admire it for its depravity and deformity, which to me seem extreme. But let’s wait to praise it until we know at least, with certainty, that it is not the worst of all possibilities.”

gli ozi: Originally Leopardi wrote “anni” (years). Gallo and Garboli suggest that Leopardi is referring to the Operette morali, which Leopardi was then writing and which would be published the following year.

ancor che tristo: Cf. “Alla luna,” 15–16: “Il rimembrar delle passate cose, / Ancor che triste…”; “Le ricordanze,” 60: “ancor tristo.”

O mal grati… : Cf. “La ginestra,” 68: “Ben ch’io sappia che obblio / Preme chi troppo all’età propria increbbe.”

vago: Dotti (342): “‘inagnnoso e dolce’ [deceiving and sweet] in one of Leopardi’s many variants.”

Diva più cieca: Dotti (342): “Glory is not only a vain thing, but a divinity who grants her favors even more arbitrarily and capriciously even than fortune and love.”

XX. IL RISORGIMENTO / THE REAWAKENING

Written at Pisa from April 7 to 13, 1828; published in the Florentine edition of 1831. The poem, Leopardi’s first since “Alla sua donna” of 1823 with the exception of the epistle to Carlo Pepoli (Bologna, 1826), inaugurates the great PisaRecanati period of 1828–30.

Leopardi here adopts a songlike, Metastasian meter used by Parini in a poem, “Brindisi,” anthologized in the 1828 Crestomazia italiana poetica, and which, as Orcel (310) puts it, “often evokes the language of 18th-century Italian opera.” Rigoni (M1, 962): “The singularity of this [‘sort of summary interior autobiography’] comes from the fact that this inner history [of the devastating loss of early illusions; followed by a period of deep indifference; and, finally, a new rebirth of feeling, to which the poem’s title alludes], including as it does the negative assertions of Leopardi’s philosophy, is countermanded by the tremendously light and singable meter of the Metastasian, Arcadian canzonetta, thereby creating—at least in [the first and second parts]—a certain dissension between tone and content … [This is] the only time that Leopardi has made use in the Canti of a meter so inappropriate for him.” Yet this very paradox betrays the poet’s grateful reattachment to the “salutary illusions” that make life worth living. As he wrote to his sister, Paolina, from Pisa (2 May 1828): “I have now finished the Crestomazia poetica: and after two years I wrote some verses this April; but verses really in the old style, and with my heart of previously.” Still, this is a “reawakening that does not deny the painful discoveries made about illusions and truth, about what should be and is instead, on what the heart conceives of and what is really real” (Dotti, 75).

Dotti (77–78) also discusses Emilio Bigi’s views of the development of Leopardi’s thought between the end of 1824, the year of the Operette, and the beginning of 1828, during which he adopted an extreme material nihilism, while also focusing on the human suffering that the nothingness of existence involves, the paradoxical disjunct between nature’s tendency to preserve life and man’s desire for happiness. For Dotti “it is probable that his continual immersion in ‘negative’ thought ended in awakening—by reaction—the desire for song in the poet.”

i dolci affanni / Della mia prima età: Cf. “Il passero solitario”; “Il risorgimento” is almost an abstract of the ideas embodied there.

del cor profondo: Cf. Petrarch, Rime XCIV, 1.

nel novo stato, / Quando … / Prima il dolor mancò: Leopardi described his state of depression thus to Giordani (19 November 1819): “If in this moment I were to go mad, I believe that my madness would be to sit with my eyes always lowered, with my mouth open, with my hands between my knees, without laughing or crying, or moving from the place in which I found myself except from necessity. I have no more breath to understand any desire, not even for death, not because I fear it in any way, but I see no disparity between death and this life of mine, where not even pain comes to console me. This is the first time that boredom not only oppresses and tires me, but exhausts me and lacerates me like a heavy pain; and I am so appalled by the vanity of all things, and by the condition of men, with all the passions dead as they are spent in my soul, that I go beyond myself, considering that my desperation, too, is also a nothing.” The return of feeling after this paralyzing anomie is the “novo stato” of “Il risorgimento.”

beato errore: And “error beato” (86): “salutary illusions.”

E voi, pupille tenere: Orcel (310) notes that this line is borrowed from a famous aria in Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi ed i Curiazi (libretto by Antonio Sografi) (1797).

Candida ignuda mano: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CC, i: “Non pur quell’una bella ignuda mano.”

dalla grave, immemore / Quiete: Leopardi’s trance recalls the evocation of death by the souls in the “Coro di morti” (1824).

Nella novella età: Cf. Inferno XXXIII, 88: “Innocenti facea l’età novella.”

Tutto un dolor mi spira: Cf. Metastasio, Demetrio II, XII: “Tutto non è dolor.”

o povero / Mio cor: Dotti (348) notes Fubini’s observation that “the ‘heart’ … is the true protagonist or object of this Leopardian canto.” Cf. also Zibaldone 513–14 (16 January 1821): “It takes very little for illusions to retake possession of and reconquer our soul, even in spite of us; and man (as long as he is alive) returns infallibly to hope for that happiness he had despaired of; he knows the consolation he had believed and judged impossible; he forgets and discredits the bitter truth which had sent down deep, deep roots into his mind; and the most secure, total, and repeated, even daily, disenchantment, doesn’t resist the forces of the nature that evokes errors and hopes again.”

con la vista impura: Dotti (349): “Fubini justly observes that impura here has an active value, and that therefore the expression is understood: with the aspect that takes away from things the natural purity, the natural capacity to have illusions and to feel”; and that “the image ‘makes us think of the malevolent look of a hostile divinity,’ the infausta verità of line 116. One can read, in any case, of the inauspicious effects that Truth, in the ‘Storia del genere umano,’ the first of the Operette morali, has on men.”

So che natura è sorda: The characterization of nature as indifferent to man is a Leopardian commonplace; cf. the closing lines of “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale.”

Il mondo: Dotti (351): “capacity to communicate, to know how to live.”

concedi al fato: Latinism meaning “to die.” Cf. Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata IV, 44: “Quando il mio genitor, cedendo al fato/ forse con lei si ricongiunse in cielo.”

XXI. A SILVIA / TO SILVIA

Written at Pisa soon after “Il risorgimento,” on August 19 and 20, 1828; published in the Florentine edition of 1831.

Orcel (311): “‘A Silvia’ is the first true ‘canzone libera’ (or ‘leopardiana’), in which the amplitude of the stanza, the alternating of hendecasyllables and settenari, the number and placement of the rhymes, are freed from every preestablished rule. The transparent and melancholy speed of the verse, whose rhythmic syntax acts contrapuntally with the apparent measure, and the miraculous weight of a language capable of amplifying in two words its historic measure (‘paterno ostello’) or of making literary profundity and the flavor of dialect resonate in the same word (‘tenerella,’ ‘innamorati’) are at the heart of this masterpiece of the Italian lyric”.

The figure of Silvia—the name, like that of Nerina in “Le ricordanze,” derives from Tasso’s Aminta—was inspired by Teresa Fattorini, the daughter of the coachman of the Leopardi household, who died of consumption on September 30, 1818. Rigoni (M1, 963) draws our attention to two passages in the Zibaldone that can be helpful to our understanding the genesis of the poem. At 2242–43 (10

December 1821) Leopardi discusses the emotion that a sensitive individual feels realizing that something “is over forever, especially if it was once his and familiar to him.” And at 4310–11 (30 June 1828) he discusses the ineffable impression that the pure and innocent freshness of young girls who have not yet become women can arouse without reference to desire or passion, especially if one thinks of the fragility of their situation and the painful destiny that awaits them.

In any case, the inspiration for “Silvia” becomes irrelevant when the reader realizes that she is a universal emblem of the mortality of “youthful hope” (Orcel), a Persephone figure, like her “cousin” Nerina (see d’Intino, “I misteri di Silvia”). Rigoni (M1, 964): “To reintegrate and reanimate in song the experience of destruction, to restore feeling and the enchantment of being in the very description of its vanity and ruin, this is the secret and miracle of Leopardi’s poetry and this is also the mysterious effect that a note of the Zibaldone [259–60 (4 October 1820)] attributes to art itself: “Works of genius have this property, that even when they bring to life the nullity of things, even when they show clearly and make felt the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible desperation, nevertheless to a great soul who finds himself in a state of extreme despondency, disenchantment, nothingness, anomie and discouragement with life or in the most bitter and deadly misfortune … they always offer consolation, reignite enthusiasm, and, though discussing and representing only death, restore, at least momentarily, the life he had lost.”

Dotti (87–88) notes that De Sanctis and Carducci both referred to the poems of the Pisa-Recanati period as a new group of “idylls” but makes the convincing argument that only the poems so-called by Leopardi are deserving of the term. “Is it truly a matter only of the poet’s abandonment to memory, of foundering in it, his consolation and refuge?… [“A Silvia” and “Le ricordanze”] don’t hesitate to turn to the denunciation of nature, and even let us say of life … to read these lyrics without prejudice it doesn’t take long to see that the lesson of the Operette, far from being surpassed, has not been forgotten at all.”

fuggitivi: Darting, from modesty and shyness; cf. “erranti” in “Il risorgimento.” But Rigoni (M1, 965) quotes R. Bacchelli: “More distantly, in a veiled way, the adjective insinuates the idea of transitoriness implicit in the previous expression: ‘of your mortal life.’” The line originally read, “ne la fronte e nel sen tuo verginale” [in your forehead and virgin breast]; it was changed to “e ne gli sguardi incerti e fuggitivi” [and in your hesitant, startled eyes]. Dotti (352) alludes to the passage in Zibaldone 4310 (30 June 1828) written soon after this poem, in which Leopardi writes that a woman in her twenties is more likely to inspire passion, while a young girl from sixteen to eighteen still has something of the angelic and divine, which, though it may not cause us to fall in love, elevates our soul and leads us to imagine the unhappiness that awaits her, the fleetingness of her beauty, and the compassion she arouses in us—for her, for us, for human fate, and life itself.

salivi: Stefano Agosti, in Il testo poetico (Milano: Rizzoli, 1972, 40), notes that the word is a virtual anagram for Silvia’s name. Cf. also “solevi” in the next stanza (Orelli [76], who notes numerous assonantal echoes throughout).

al tuo perpetuo canto: For Rigoni (M1, 965) the phrase recalls Virgil’s description of Circe’s song, “adsiduo resonat cantu … / arguto tenues percurrens pectine telas” in Aeneid VII, 12 (cf. also the “assiduo canto” of “Il canto della fanciulla,” translated in the section of “Other Texts” in the “Argomenti di idilli”).

vago: Leopardi wrote “dolce” (sweet) in the manuscript margin. But “vago,” as we have seen, is an altogether broader, more comprehensive, characteristically open Leopardian term, suggesting indefinite, untested possibility, “that divine wavering in the imagination of confused and brilliant ideas, essential to true poetry and similar to the joys experienced in childhood, of which Leopardi speaks in Zibaldone 100” (8 January 1820) (Dotti, 353). See also the introductory notes to “L’infinito.”

sudate carte: Literally, “sweated-over.” Cf. “A un vincitore di pallone,” 4: “sudata virtude.” Orelli (74) sees an echo from a Latin letter of Petrarch’s, Impia mors, which Leopardi translated in March 1827 (“Epistola di Francesco Petrarca al Cardinale Giovanni Colonna”) (M1, 608–10, ll. 65ff.): “indarno / ti fien gli studi e le trattate carte?”

Che percorrea la faticosa tela: Cf. Virgil, Aeneid VII, 14: “arguto tenuis percurrens pectine telas.”

chiuso morbo: In his brilliant essay “I misteri di Silvia: Motivo persefoneo e mistica eleusina in Leopardi,” Franco d’Intino (229–30) argues that Silvia’s murderous illness was “contracted … in a mortal struggle with an icy principle of authority” and quotes Claudio Colaiacomo’s suggestion that “chiuso” should be taken in an active sense, incorporating the notion of military siege “that belongs to the Latin ‘claudere.’” D’Intino’s psychologically motivated interpretation sees the canto as enacting a conflict between “the creative desire of the imagination and an authoritarian principle simultaneously both loved and hated” (237) and finds numerous affinities with the early “Appressamento della morte” (see notes to XXXIX, p. 480).

innamorati: According to Rigoni (M1, 965), citing Leopardi’s commentary on Petrarch’s Rime XLII, 13, and LXXIII, 69 (Zibaldone 4140 [6 October 1825]), the term means “to inspire love, to fascinate.”

negaro i fati / La giovinezza: Cf. “La sera del dì di festa,” 14 –15: “A te la speme / Nego, mi disse, anche la speme.”

Tu: Dotti (356): “Refers to hope which nevertheless … is incarnated in Silvia.”

una tomba ignuda: The closing foreshadows the Gods’ imposition of the grave as the endpoint of human life in Leopardi’s last poem, “Il tramonto della luna.”

Mostravi di lontano: D’Intino (“I misteri di Silvia,” 255–56) notes that “the idea of this gesture is not new” and refers us to Leopardi’s letter on Tasso “which contains the Eleusinian theme of the contemplation of the death-life paradox”: “You understand the great crowd of emotions that is born of considering the contrast between the greatness of Tasso and the humbleness of his tomb” (L, 390). He also cites “All’Italia,” 125–27: “La vostra tomba è un’ara; e qua mostrando / Verran le madri ai parvoli le belle / Orme del vostro sangue” and “Le rimembranze,” 136–37: “diman la tomba / Ti mostrerò di tuo fratello.”

D’Intino (257) also points to the “sudden movement from the perfect tense of ‘cadesti’ to the imperfect of ‘mostravi,’ which, linking with the canto’s initial imperfects (‘splendea,’ ‘salivi’) in a certain sense points it … toward a new beginning and a rebirth”—in an eternal cycle of memento mori.

XXII. LE RICORDANZE / THE RECOLLECTIONS

Written at Recanati from August 26 to September 12, 1829. First published in the Florentine edition of 1831. The title recalls the 1816 idyll, “Le rimembranze” (translated in “Other Texts,” pp. 339ff.), which was excluded from the Canti, and “La ricordanza,” the original title of the poem that was eventually titled “Alla luna.”

In contrast with the summary abstraction of “Il risorgimento,” here, in his most relaxed, descriptive, and evocative poem, Leopardi indulges in description, detail, local color, in reifying the emotions evoked by vivid memories, and with great success. Written at a time when he had returned to Recanati forever, as he thought, from his sojourn in Bologna, feeling that the trajectory of his life was over, the poem, “the true lyric realization, long dreamed of, of the poet’s plan to write a proper autobiography (interior), his Storia di un’anima [History of a Soul]” (Fubini, quoted in Dotti [83]), “entrusts itself to the free movement of memory, the themes and tones of his interior and ‘idyllic’ autobiography aroused by the return to places objects images emotions dreams of one time and the comparison between what he was and felt then and what he is and feels now” (Rigoni [M1, 964]), celebrating “memory as partial compensation for the souffrance of life” (Dotti, 83). The figure of Nerina, a kind reprise of Silvia—much as the meditation on Silvia’s fate was a kind of spur to the personal evocation of regret here—appears at the end of the poem as its ex post facto interlocutor and justification, the embodiment of Leopardi’s idea “of a thing that is finished forever, and that will never come again.” (See notes to “Consalvo,” p. 431.) Rigoni: “In the whole last and longest lassa of the canto, an insistent elegiac variation on this painful theme, Leopardi projects in reality the very figure of farewell, of the curtain that, unrealized and fatal, falls on his and on all experience.”

Vaghe: Once again, evocative of unknown, untested potential, undefined mystery and beauty. (See notes to “L’infinito” and “A Silvia.”)

seduto in verde zolla: The setting is reminiscent of “L’infinito” and “Alla luna” and of the ending of “Aspasia.” Typically, Leopardi conceives of himself as a solitary figure, surrounded by and alien from inanimate nature.

Nè mi diceva… : Among the numerous letters in which Leopardi expresses his disdain for his hometown is this one to Karl Bunsen (5 September 1829), written at the time he was working on “Le ricordanze”: “Condemned by lack of means to this horrible and detested residence, and already dead to all enjoyment and all hope, I live only to suffer, and pray only for the rest of the tomb.”

Per invidia non già… : Dotti (359) recalls Zibaldone 83–84 (1819), in which Leopardi, responding to some observations of Mme de Staël’s, sees the envy of common people for those superior to them as a combined “disdain, compassion, and ill-will for those who don’t think the way they do.” Superior people thus are not envied for something common people don’t understand, but are simply felt sorry for; and when it involves the young, it is believed that when they are grown, they’ll see things differently and think like everyone else. “And this precisely,” Leopardi concludes, “is the experience I’ve had and am having.”

un’immagin dentro / Non torni: Cf. Zibaldone 4418 (30 November 1828): “To the sensitive and imaginative man, who lives, as I have long lived, continually feeling and imagining, the world and objects are in a certain sense double. He will see a tower and countryside with his eyes; he will hear with his ears the sound of a bell; and at the same time in his imagination he will see another tower, hear another sound. In this second sort of object consists all that is beautiful and pleasing in things. Sad is that life (and yet life is commonly like this) that doesn’t see, hear, sense if not simple objects, only those from which the eyes, ears and other senses receive the sensation.” Cf. also “the amorous idea” of the beloved, often starkly contrasting with the person herself, in “Aspasia,” 39ff.

ancor tristo: Cf. “ancor che triste” at the end of “Alla luna.”

e il dire: io fui. Dotti (361): “The acknowledgment that all is ineluctably past.” Cf. Inferno XVI, 84: “quando ti gioverà dicere I’ fui.”

queste dipinte mura: Leopardi is describing frescoes in the rooms of Palazzo Leopardi.

Il garzoncel, come inesperto amante: Cf. the “dolce / E irrevocabil tempo” of “La vita solitaria,” 44–52. Dotti (362) notes that “celeste beltà” is grammatically the object of both “fingendo” and “ammira.” The line “fuses the image of the life dreamed of by the young boy and also the ‘celestial beauty’ he dreams of.”

Che di cotanta speme oggi m’avanza: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCLXVII, 32: “Questo m’avanza di cotanta spene,” earlier evoked by Foscolo in his sonnet “In morte del fratello Giovanni,” 11: “Questo di tanta speme oggi mi resta.” And see the description of similar emotions in “La sera del dì di festa,” 21–22: “Intanto io chieggo / Quanto a viver mi resti…”

la dolcezza / del dì fatal tempererà d’affanno: This is almost the inverse of the last image of “Consalvo,” because here the poet is mourning “a life not lived” (Dotti, 364).

Pensoso di cessar… : Cf. Zibaldone 82 (1819), in which Leopardi recalls suicidal fantasies: “I was extremely bored by life, on the edge of the pool in my garden, and looking at the water and bending over it with a certain shudder, thought: if I threw myself in here, and immediately having floated on the surface, I would clamber over this rim, and having forced myself to come out after having been terrified of losing my life, coming back unharmed I would feel a few moments of happiness at having saved myself, and of fondness for this life that I now so despise, and which would then seem more valuable to me. The tradition around the leap from Leucade [the rock from which Sappho jumped to her death (see notes to “Ultimo canto di Saffo”)] could be based on an observation like this one.” Cf. the similar emotions evoked at the end of “A un vincitore nel pallone.”

funereo canto: A reference to Leopardi’s youthful canticle, “Appressamento della morte” (The Coming of Death), written in 1816. (Fragment XXXIX is a revision of the beginning of the poem.) The line itself recalls Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV, 430: “carmina iam moriens canit exequalia Cygnus.”

O Nerina!: Like her “twin sister” Silvia (Dotti [85], though he finds Nerina “much less autobiographical … much more allusive and intentionally symbolic”), her name, like Silvia’s, as we have seen, is borrowed from Tasso’s Aminta. To some, she is a refiguring of Silvia, or evokes another young girl from Recanati, Maria Belardinelli, who died at twenty-six; in any case, she exists as a fiction, the poet’s symbolic interlocutor and memento mori.

Terra natal: Recanati, her birthplace. G. De Robertis (222): “Whence the capital letter.”

Se torna maggio… : The ancient festival of Calendimaggio, on the first of May, “when young men, accompanied by music and singing, carry a flowering branch to the girls’s houses to hang on their doors” (Fubini, quoted by Dotti [367], who adds that these lines echo the ballads of Poliziano).

non torna / Primavera… : Orcel (313) cites Francesco Flora’s identification of the end of the stanza as an echo of Guarini’s Il pastor fido III, i, 1–10: “O primavera … / tu torni ben, ma teco / non tornano i sereni / e fortunati dì…; ma teco altro non torna, / che del perduto mio caro tesoro / la rimembranza misera e dolente.”

XXIII. CANTO NOTTURNO DI UN PASTORE ERRANTE DELL’ASIA / NIGHT SONG OF A WANDERING SHEPHERD IN ASIA

The last canto of the Pisa-Recanati period, written at Recanati between 22 October 1829 and 9 April 1830; published in the Florentine edition of 1831 under the title “Canto notturno di un pastore vagante in Asia.”

The idea for the poem was suggested by an article by the Baron de Meyendorff, “Voyage d’Orenbourg à Boukhara, fait en 1820,” which appeared in the Journal des savants of September 1826. In Zibaldone 4399–400 (3 October 1828) Leopardi noted: “Many [of the Kirghiz] spend the night sitting on a rock looking at the moon and improvising very sad words on melodies which are no less so.” Rigoni (M1, 967) quotes Mario Fubini and Emilio Bigi: this citation “was found among other testimony relative to the existence of oral lyric song even among the most primitive and ignorant people, prior to the more complex epics, not to mention dramatic works: and all these observations confirmed in him the conviction that the lyric is the ‘first-born of all’ genres, indeed the one genuinely poetic genre, ‘belonging to every man even uneducated who tries to amuse or console himself with song.’ Indeed, in this last phase of his meditation about poetry, and a few months before the composition of the ‘Canto notturno,’ he came to the point of recognizing the similarity between the condition of primitive and modern men, who cannot recognize any other poetry than the lyric, the pure and simple voice of the heart.”

Dotti (92–93), quoting Bigi, asserts that the “Canto notturno” represents a different way of confronting the same material as in the two preceding canti, i.e., “the unhappiness and desolation of existence, but no longer from the viewpoint of autobiographical memory, but of compassion for a general condition, human and non-human … After the lyric song of memory we see Leopardi confront the lyric song of thought” (94). Cf. Zibaldone 4175 (22 April 1826): “Not only men, but the human race was and will always be necessarily unhappy. Not only the human race but all animals. Not only animals but all other beings in their way. Not individuals but species, races, globes, systems, worlds”—which passage is followed (4176–77) by the famous description of a garden “as a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or we mean, felt, it’s certain that not being would be much better for them than being.”

Once again, as in “Alla luna,” the moon—“detached from her traditional sacredness and from her interior and supersensible reality” (Guido Ceronetti)—serves as the poet’s interlocutor, inspiration, and supreme alter ego. Rigoni (M1, 968): “Only in the forms of existence devoid of or poor in life (according to a distinction noted in the Zibaldone between existence as pure exteriority and life as sentient interiority), only in the inorganic or animal world does that happiness denied to man who has discovered, with consciousness and history, the uselessness and boredom of everything seem imaginable (and it is to be remembered that the lines on the flock directly inspired the beginning of the second of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen [Untimely Meditations or Unmodern Observations], ‘History in the Service and Disservice of Life’, focused in fact on the theme of happiness as ‘oblivion,’ as the ability to feel, while it lasts, in a nonhistorical way).”

Rigoni, who calls this the Leopardi poem most worthy of the term “canto,” notes its vivid, reduced, and essential syntax, and the musical, rhythmic effect of “the disconsolate repercussion, like an echo in the desert,” of the rhyme in -ale at the end of each stanza.

Orcel (313) cites De Sanctis: “a biblical poem, a page out of Job,” though he hears echoes of Ecclesiastes in its repetitive, desolate rhythms.

Gardini (89) sees the poem as “anti-bucolic, a reversal of ‘L’infinito,’ in which references to the pastoral … are ironically antiphrastic … Nothing is left but despair.”

For Dotti (96) “the mythical Asian shepherd represents the mourning voice of humanity both ancient and modern, as if the centuries had been erased and the poetry of mythic antiquity, even oral, is one with that of modern times … It’s from this perspective, into which ideological attitudes, established convictions, esthetic considerations, and, naturally, determined states of mind flow and blend, that Leopardi seems to have finally found the key to representing in powerful synthesis his complex conception of the world, and for embodying it ‘lyrically.’”

Poi stanco si riposa in su la sera: Cf. Petrarch’s description of the shepherd’s life in Rime L, 29–38.

Vecchierel bianco… : Cf. Petrarch, Rime XVI, 1: “Movesi il vecchierel canuto e bianco.” Leopardi’s allegorical vision of human life here derives from Zibaldone 4162–63 (17 January 1826).

Ed è rischio di morte il nascimento: Cf. the description of parents’ duties and behavior toward their children and Leopardi’s bemusement about it in Zibaldone 68 (1819) and 2607 (13 August 1822): “By God! what is man born for? and why does he have children? so that he can then console the children he’s had for the mistake of having been born?”

poco ti cale: Cf. the end of “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale,” where Leopardi asserts that nature has no care for human good or ill.

degli eterni giri: Cf. Purgatorio XXX, 93. Cf. the “superni giri” of “Alla sua donna,” 50.

O greggia mia… : Rigoni (M1, 969) notes that G. Negri, in the late nineteenth century, cited Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1741) as a source for this passage. The poem was translated into Italian prose by Ludovico Antonio Loschi, under the title Notti (Nights) (Venice, 1726). Dotti (374) quotes from part II, p. 22: “Guida la tua gregge in un pascolo pingue. Tu non la udirai belare mestamente […] Ma la pace di cui godono esse [le pecore] è negata ai loro padroni. Un tedium, una scontentezza che non dà mai tregua rode l’uomo e lo tormenta da mane a sera.” (Guide your flock into a rich pasture. You won’t hear them bellow mournfully […] But the peace they [the sheep] enjoy is denied to their masters. A tedium, a discontent that never lets up gnaws at man from morning to evening.)

Quanta invidia ti porto!: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCC, i: “Quanta invidia io ti porto … avara terra!”

tedio non provi: For Leopardi’s views on the innocence and contentedness of animals see Zibaldone 69 (1819) and 2221 (3 December 1821). Cf. also the related discussion in “Bruto minore,” 61–70.

E pur nulla non bramo: Fubini (quoted in Dotti [375]) cites as a source lines 89–91 of the third act of Alfieri’s Mirra: “io non trovo mai pace / Né riposo né loco. Eppure sollievo / Nessuno io bramo.” [I never find peace / Or rest or room. And yet / I desire no relief.] What the shepherd says is different, however. It is not that he does not desire relief; he wants for, desires, nothing.

il tedio: Boredom, anomie, which Leopardi calls the most noble of the emotions (Pensieri LXVIII) is “the absence of any special sensation of good or evil” in which one experiences “the natural unhappiness of man” (Zibaldone 4498 [4 May 1829]). Cf. Zibaldone 4043 (8 March 1824): “Boredom is manifestly an evil, and being bored is an unhappiness. Now what is boredom? It’s neither evil nor particular pain (in fact the idea and nature of boredom exclude the presence of any particular ill or pain whatsoever), but simple life fully felt, experienced, known, wholly present to the individual, and occupying him. Therefore life is simply an evil: and living, or living without, whether by extension or intension, is simply a good, or a lesser evil, or else preferable in itself and absolutely to life.” See also the introductory notes to “La quiete dopo la tempesta” below.

Forse… : Dotti (375) cites Angelo Monteverdi, who believes that the canto was written in several stages: the first, second, and fourth stanzas at first, to which the third was later added, followed by the fifth, which, “given its inconclusive character” (94), was originally set between the second and third. Finally, Leopardi moved this stanza to fifth position and added the sixth and final stanza. For Monteverdi, the first “forse” of this last stanza is soon “rejected” by another “forse” in line 139, which begins “the second part of the stanza and which, repeated again [in 141], seems almost to transform into a ‘certainly.’”

Forse s’avess’io l’ale: Cf. the refrain “Deh, l’ali avessi anch’io / Qual tu da girne a volo” from Celio Magno’s “Vago augellin,” which Leopardi anthologized in his Crestomazia italiana poetica, as well as the lines “Credevi d’aver l’ale / Da volar su le nubi” from the canzone “Ressurga su la tumba avara e lorda” attributed to Andrea da Basso (fifteenth century).

E noverar le stelle… : Cf. Petrarch, Rime CXXVII, 85: “Ad una ad una annoverar le stelle.”

funesto: Originally “misero.” In Zibaldone 2671 (8 February 1823) Leopardi copied from Barthélemy’s enormously popular novel Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce: “Among many of the nations which the Greeks call barbarian, a child’s day of birth is a day of mourning in his family.”

XXIV. LA QUIETE DOPO LA TEMPESTA / THE CALM AFTER THE STORM

Written at Recanati between September 17 and 20, 1829; published in the Florentine edition of 1831.

This great canzone libera and the following one, both written before the “Canto notturno,” make a kind of diptych, “a true unicum, conceived and realized as such” (Dotti, 99). Each is a “parable” (Dotti again) richly dressed in exquisitely observed local detail, “a country scene illustrated and sung so as to point to a precise and unequivocal meaning” concerning Leopardi’s theory of pleasure and, more precisely, the negativity of pleasure and the tension between opposites: “everything is animated by contrast, and languishes without it” (Zibaldone 2156 [24 November 1821]); and the following year, after discussing uniformity as the cause of boredom, Leopardi writes (Zibaldone 2600–2602 [7 August 1822]): “Here is how ills come to be necessary for happiness itself, and take on the true and real essence of goods in the general order of nature: mainly that indifferent things, i.e., not good and not bad, are the cause of boredom per se, as I have shown elsewhere, and also do not interrupt pleasure, and therefore don’t destroy its uniformity, so vividly and fully as ills do, and can only do. From which the convulsions of the elements and other such things that cause anguish and the evil of fear in natural or civilized man, and equally in animals, etc. Illnesses and a hundred other inevitable evils for the living are recognized as conducive, and in a certain way necessary to the happiness of the living, and therefore with reason contained and collocated and received into the natural order, which looks in all ways toward predicted happiness. And this is not only because these evils give prominence to the good, and because health is enjoyed more after illness, and calm after the storm: but because without these evils, goods would not even be good in the short run, coming to be boring, and not being enjoyed nor felt as goods and pleasures, and the sensation of pleasure not being able, inasmuch as it is truly pleasing, to last long.”

Orcel (314): “The first stanza, marked formally by an echo of Tasso’s madrigals and a dancing rhythm of phrase, launched by an internal rhyme in the first two lines, links with the more gnomic form of the two that follow, in which Promethean sarcasm (culminating in the madrigalesque rhyme ‘assai felice / se respirar ti lice’) is appeased in view of the final peace of death.”

Rigoni (M1, 970–71): “It is nevertheless clear that compared to the tone of detached philosophical observation of these notes, which predate the radicalization of Leopardi’s ‘pessimism,’ the canto is distinguished by an attitude of precise and bitter reaction, which ironizes on the benevolence and generosity of nature and laments how even the rare and miraculous pleasures allowed to man, far from having their own consistency and reality, are only the effect of the suspension of pain. The dynamic of contraries, form and law of multiplicity, now appears as an intrinsic and permanent evil, a perverse and irremediable system: that convulsive disequilibrium, that ‘violent state’ which life is cannot be reordered and cured except in the ‘quiet,’ which is indeed truly blessed, of death.”

ripete il suo verso: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCXXXIX, 3: “E li augeletti incominciar lor versi.”

a prova: Dotti (378): “Competing with others. An archaic locution of which Leopardi was fond.” Cf. “Il risorgimento,” 127, and “La quiete dopo la tempesta,” 13.

studi: Occupations or concerns. Leopardi uses the word in its Latin sense, as he does “famiglia” and “mostro” elsewhere in the poem.

El paventò la morte: Leopardi notes in several places that the man who has been in danger of death comes to love life again. Cf. the end of “A un vincitore nel pallone” and Zibaldone 82 (Dotti, 379).

cara agli eterni: Originally, “degna di pianto.” Dotti (379): “In his definitive version the poet chose to accentuate the polemical and sarcastic.”

XXV. IL SABATO DEL VILLAGGIO / SATURDAY IN THE VILLAGE

Begun after September 20, 1829, and finished on the twenty-ninth, at Recanati; published in the Florentine edition of 1831.

This perfect companion piece to the canto that precedes it, likewise a canzone libera, Rigoni writes (M1, 971–72), “manifests the idea that pleasure is never actual (in both the philosophical and temporal senses of the term) but always and only future or, secondarily, past, because pleasure consists in the undefined”—it is “an intellectual, not real, subject” (“Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare” in the Operette morali)—“and the undefined, irreconcilable with reality and the present, lives only in the imagination or eventually in memory.” The poem “faithfully mirrors … the theoretical reflections of Leopardi, who strictly locates pleasure only in the future as various notes attest, from Zibaldone 532–35 (20 January 1821) to Zibaldone 4492 (April 1829), which cites Rousseau… : ‘L’on n’est heureux qu’avant d’être heureux.’” (Cf., however, “Alla luna,” which evokes the masochistic pleasure painful memories can arouse in youth.)

“In analogy with the last stanza of the preceding canto, which turned the ‘storm’ and ‘calm’ into metaphors not only for ‘suffering’ and ‘pleasure,’ but also for ‘life’ and ‘death,’ the last stanza of this canto transforms the Sabbath into a metaphor for a first stage of life, with the exhortation to the unthinking ‘boy’ … to enjoy it as long as possible and not be unhappy if his ‘Sunday,’ his so painfully antiphrastic ‘feast day,’ is slow in coming.”

il zappatore: Cf. “l’avaro zappador” of Petrarch, Rime L, 15–24.

fornir l’opra: Cf. Petrarch, Rime XL, 9: “Ma però che mi manca a fornir l’opra.”

Cotesta età fiorita: Gallo and Garboli (204) cite Iacopo (or Giacomo) Marmitta’s “Sopra la primavera,” which Leopardi included in his Crestomazia: “Quanto diletta e piace / questa stagion novella! / Però tu, che la face / spregi d’amore, o bella / e più che orsa crudel, mia pastorella; / mentre che primavera / nel tuo bel viso appare, / non gir superba e fera:/ ch’a queste dolci e chiare / verran poi dietro l’ore fosche, amare: / e di tua vita in breve / porteran seco il verno, / e la pioggia e la neve: / onde, oh dolor interno! / te stessa avrai, com’or me lasso, a scherno.”

ma la tua festa: Many, including Rigoni and Orcel, interpret the last two lines as follows: “But don’t be sorry / that your holiday is slow in coming.” As Nicola Gardini has pointed out, however, this is not grammatically defensible. But G. De Robertis (250) writes: “Everyone sees however how much the poet’s particular arrangement of his words contributes to their total effect, especially in the anticipating of la tua festa, in immediate contrast with the grieving and piteous ma, which suddenly casts a sad shadow and denies, almost before it’s said, the promised and awaited joy.”
    The lines resonate with the close of fragment XLI, the last lines in the Canti: “Ai presenti diletti / La breve età commetti.”

XXVI. IL PENSIERO DOMINANTE / THE DOMINANT IDEA

Written at Florence in 1831, or between the spring of 1833 and the spring of 1835; published in the Naples edition of 1835. Inspired, like the three following canti and “Consalvo,” by Leopardi’s unhappy love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti.

This canzone libera, “of a singular and nearly abstract beauty and a very interior musicality—comparable in some respects to another ‘canto-manifesto’ [Dotti, 110], ‘Il risorgimento’—in which the loving emotion that is its object is never named”—“because [Karl Vossler, quoted in Dotti (110)] in the face of the newness of the experience it would have seemed too insignificant, because every reference to past things … might have given the impression of a diminution: ‘I have no word for this.’”—“blends a polemic against the vulgarity of the century with its Platonic” exaltation of the idea of love. The singularity of the poem is enriched by a language in which, in the light of a strange atheist idealism, echoes of Petrarch … [and of Dantean stilnovism] blend with a [Latinate] vocabulary that is often neutral or willfully dry” (Orcel, 316).

For Rigoni (M1, 973), “the beauty of ‘Il pensiero dominante’ consists in its dreamlike enchantment no less than in its sure knowledge of the truth. In fact, Leopardi here renews, albeit in a different register, the miracle of the canzone “Alla sua donna,” which was to bring together—in a sublime paradox—the experience of metaphysical disillusionment with the capacity to lose oneself in the joy of Platonic illusion. The entire canto is an exaltation of the idea of love, which not only dominates the mind, distancing it from every other idea, dissolves death itself into a ‘game,’ and raises the poet up above the utilitarian baseness of the century, but is enough to make one forget the truth by inspiring visions equal to ‘the dreams of the immortals.’ [Dotti (113) cites Walter Binni’s observation that the fourteen stanzas of the poem are like rays, “miraculous effects” projecting from a central nucleus in which love reigns over the poet’s entire spirit.] This idea is certainly an illusion and ‘patent error’ but an illusion and an error of a divine nature, which holds out against the truth and often even ‘approximates’ it, being confused with life itself: as Leopardi had written stupendously at the end of the ‘Storia del genere umano’ [in the Operette morali]: ‘it will not be given to Truth, though all-powerful and battling with it continually, either ever to exterminate it from the earth, or to defeat it, except rarely,’ for ‘it is not given to the nature of genius to oppose the Gods.’” This blending of “two apparently contradictory attitudes also explains, beyond the return of the antitheses which had woven together ‘Alla sua donna,’ its singularly suggestive tone and rhythm.”

Cf. Pensieri LXXXII: “No one becomes a man before he has had a great experience of himself, which in revealing him to himself, and determining his opinion of himself, in some way determines his fortune and condition in life. For this great experience, before which no one in the world is much more than a child, ancient life provided infinite and ready material; but today private life is so poor in occasions, and universally of such a nature, that, for lack of opportunities, many men die before the experience I am speaking of, and therefore live as children little differently than if they hadn’t been born.

“But once it happens, either early in life, as for some, or later on, and after other loves of minor importance, as seems to happen more often, certainly at the end of a great and passionate love, man knows the mediocrity of his familiars, among whom he was used to walking with intense desires, and grave needs, perhaps not felt before; he knows ab esperto the nature of the passions, because when one of them burns it inflames all the others; he knows his own nature and temperament, knows the measure of his own faculties and powers; and from now on he can judge if and how much it behooves him to hope or despair for himself, and, for as much as he can understand of the future, what place in the world is destined for him. Finally, life in his eyes has a new look, already transformed in him from something heard about to something seen, from imagined to real; and he feels himself in the midst of it, perhaps no longer happy, but, so to speak, more powerful than before, that is, more able to make use of himself and of others.”

Par novo ad ascoltar ciò ch’ei ragiona: Cf. Petrarch, Rime LXXI, 7–13, and Dante’s canzone “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona.”

a far dimora: Cf. Dante’s canzone “Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute,” 3–4: “ché dentro siede Amore / Lo quale è in segnoria de la mia vita.”

Gli altri pensieri miei… : Cf. Petrarch LXXII, 40–45. Cf. Leopardi’s description of the single-mindedness of love in Zibaldone 59 (1819).

Necessitade estrema: Tacitus’s “ultima necessitas,” death.

A scherno / Ho gli umani giudizi: Cf. the “Palinodia” and “La ginestra,” with its denunciations of credulous modern notions of progress. Dotti (112): “Rarely has Leopardi declared his own superiority with such energy and passion … in what amounts to a declaration of principle, a challenge to the world.”

A’ bei pensieri: “The study of beauty, the emotions, the imagination, the illusions” (Leopardi to Giordani, 24 July 1828): the very things necessary “to make existence useful and bearable” (Dotti, 389).

A quello onde tu movi… : Leopardi here is referring by extension to the Aristotelian notion of God as the prime, or unmoved, mover of the universe. “The insistence on the moment of reasoning and the celebration of Love’s effects on man typical of this stanza bring the canto ever nearer to the great ideological canzoni of our stilnovistic poetry and its heirs” (Dotti, 389–90).

il ver pongo in obblio: Cf. Petrarch CCCXXV, 45: “’l mio mal posi in oblio.”

in grembo a morte: Cf. Alfieri, Alceste II, iii: “di morte in grembo.”

Altri gentili inganni… : Orcel (316): “Actually seeing had the tendency to weaken the beauty of the poet’s fantasies … The idea is already expressed in the letter to Jacopsen of [23 June] 1823” (quoted in the notes to “Alla sua donna”).

colei: Most likely Fanny Targioni Tozzetti.

Nella terrena stanza: Cf. “Alla sua donna,” 15: “peregrina stanza.”

XXVII. AMORE E MORTE / LOVE AND DEATH

Written at Florence in 1832 or 1833 and, like both its predecessor and “Consalvo,” inspired by the poet’s attachment to Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, to whom Leopardi wrote on 26 August 1832: “Love and death are the only beauties the world possesses, and the only things, absolutely the only ones, worthy of being desired”; published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835. Cf. the inscription for a bust of Raphael that Leopardi composed in 1832 (Damiani [M2, 1016]): “RAFFAELE D’URBINO / PRINCE OF PAINTERS / AND MIRACLE OF GENIUS / INVENTOR OF INDESCRIBABLE BEAUTY / HAPPY FOR THE GLORY IN WHICH HE LIVED / HAPPIER FOR THE LOVE IN WHICH HE BURNED / HAPPIEST FOR HIS DEATH OBTAINED IN THE FLOWER OF HIS YEARS / NICCOLÒ PUCCINI THESE LAURELS THESE FLOWERS / SIGHING FOR THE MEMORY OF SO MUCH HAPPINESS / MDCCCXXXII ”

Rigoni (M1, 975–76): “It is the ancient topos of the twinship of Love and Death, widely taken up again in European poetry of the early 19th century” and in fact evoked by Leopardi’s friend August von Platen in his poem “Tristan”: “Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen / Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben” [He who sees Beauty with his eyes / is already in the lap of Death]. “Exactly the opposite of Leopardi, in whom paradoxically the song of Death becomes the song of Life and Youth, the only form of life not destroyed but dissolved in eternal Nothingness” (Dotti, 116).

Leopardi develops the theme in the context of his own philosophical considerations discussed passim in the Zibaldone, e.g., “on ‘the physical pleasure of death,’ experienced not as active but ‘highly languid’ pleasure (2567 [16 July 1822]). In respect to the stormy raging of desire, death is shown wearing the features of beauty, and of liberating pity: from this derives both the personification of Love’s companion as a sweet child, and the more or less ‘languid’ or at least distended and melodic development of the canto [in which rhyme, uncharacteristically in the later Leopardi, abounds]. But the last stanza, in which the craving to fall asleep on death’s ‘virgin breast’ is associated with the repudiation of all other puerile consolation and the refusal to kiss and bless the despised hand of fate, testifies precisely to [Leopardi’s fundamental] nature as an ‘implacable innocent’ (to use an expression of Bontempelli [1937]).”

Cose quaggiù sì belle: Cf. “Consalvo” (also written in 1832), 99–100: “Due cose belle ha il mondo: / Amore e morte.”

per lo mar dell’essere: Cf. Paradiso I, 112.

Bellissima fanciulla: Death. Angiola Ferraris (Dotti, 114) notes the “neoclassical spirit” (one imagines a staue by Canova) of this description.

saggio core: Stilnovistic. Cf. Cavalcanti: “Beltà di donna, e di saccente core.”

Nè cor fu mai più saggio: Dotti (396): “The syntax of these lines recalls the first stanza of Guinizelli’s canzone ‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore.’”

Quando novellamente: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCLXIV, 110: “Quando novellamente io venni in terra.” “Nel cor profondo” is Petrarchan, too (XCIV, 1), as in “Il risorgimento,” 6.

Languido e stanco … / desiderio di morir: Cf. the “Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie” in the Operette morali, the introductory chorus to which is translated in “Other Texts.”

Allor questo deserto: Life, without love.

Abbandonando all’alba il corpo stanco: I.e., to sleep.

L’uom della villa: Cf. Purgatorio IV, 23.

sprona: Used by both Dante and Petrarch. Literally, spurs.

Pongon le membra giovanili in terra: Cf. Petrarch, Rime XXXVI, 11: “colle mie mani avrei gìa posto in terra / queste membra noiose.”

t’inchina / A disusati preghi: Cf. Petrarch’s canzone to the Virgin, Rime CCCLXVI, 11: “al mio prego t’inchina.” Orcel (317) notes “the slippage of the ‘Vergine bella’ toward the ‘beautiful child’ whose features Leopardi gives to Death.”

dell’età reina: Literally, queen of the age. The phrase likewise derives from Petrarch’s canzone to the Virgin, 13.

Me certo troverai… : A typical Leopardian close in which he portrays himself alone and apart, observing life without illusions; cf. the end of “Aspasia” and “La vita solitaria.”

antica viltà: Dotti (401): “Indicates the age-old secular intellectual misery of the common people, enslaved to prejudices. Cf. this passage from the ‘Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico’ [in the Operette morali]: ‘And men are cowards, weak, with ignoble and narrow spirits; docilely always hoping for good … ever ready and ever resolved to console themselves for whatever ill fortune, to accept whatever recompense in exchange for what has been denied them or what they’ve lost, to accommodate themselves in whatever condition to a however more iniquitous and barbarous fate, and when they are deprived of every desirable thing, to live according to false beliefs, as healthily and vigorously as if they were the truest or most well-founded in the world. I for myself laugh at the human race in love with life; and I judge very unmanly their wanting to be fooled and deluded like idiots, and beyond the evils they suffer, to be almost the laughingstock of nature and destiny.’ In these and the following lines, ever more decisively, Leopardi excoriates beliefs in the beyond and, above all, Christian resignation before the suffering of life.”

XXVIII. A SE STESSO / TO HIMSELF

Written at Florence before the spring of 1835, quite possibly in 1833, following the end of his attachment to Fanny Targioni Tozzetti; published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835.

The poem (Orcel, 318) “is closely related to the sketch for the hymn ‘Ad Arimane’ (the god of darkness of pre-Islamic Iran) [likely written in 1833] … Flowing in the dimensions of the most peaceful of the idylls (‘L’infinito’ and ‘Alla luna’), allying concision with internal pulverization (broken phrases, brutal coups, enjambments, etc.), this darkly beautiful piece illustrates marvelously the pre-Nietzschean paradox that Leopardi developed at the beginning of the Zibaldone (260) [quoted in the notes to “A Silvia,” p. 441] to the effect that works of genius, while speaking only of death give back to the soul the life that it had lost.” Croce and Cesare Luporini, among others, however, have found it poetically wanting, reading it as “a kind of note left on the table” (Dotti [116], who in contrast cites Monteverdi’s analysis of the artful tripartite construction of the canto [119], each five-line section beginning with an exhortation to the poet’s heart to be still).

As Beckett wrote in his Proust (1931) (New York: Grove Press, 1970, 7): “The wisdom of all the sages, from Brahma to Leopardi … consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Rigoni (M1, 977): “Such extinction is realized in this canto, however, not in the form of a serene—philosophical or mystical— renunciation, but rather in the desperate tension between the vindication of the solitary and sovereign, albeit futile, dignity of his heart … and disdain for everything that exists, the denunciation of universal filth, the two poles of a tragic wisdom that sees Ahrimanic malevolence superseded in the vanitas vanitatum of Ecclesiastes.”

l’inganno estremo: The illusion of love. “Ad Angelo Mai,” 129: “Amor, di nostra vita ultimo inganno.”

Perì: Cf. Foscolo, “Di se stesso”: “Non son che fui. Perì di noi gran parte…”

In noi: Dotti (403): “In me and in my heart.”

Assai: Enough, or too much.

fango: Cf. “Ad Angelo Mai,” 179: “Questo secol di fango.”

il brutto / Poter… : Cf. the beginning of “Ad Arimane” and Zibaldone 4175–77 (22 April 1826): “Everything is evil. That is to say that everything that exists is evil.”

l’infinita vanità del tutto: Cf. the “vanity of vanities” of Ecclesiastes 12:8.

XXIX. ASPASIA

Written, or finished, at Naples in the spring of 1834 or 1835; published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835.

Aspasia of Miletus was the celebrated hetera allied with Pericles. The name was used by Parini (cf. “Il mattino,” 681) for Ninon de Lenclos (1620–1705), the French author and courtesan.

Like its predecessor—though now from a removed distance, and “on the safe shore of the intellect” (Croce, quoted in Dotti [123])—the canto, “a letterconfession directed to himself” (Dotti, 126), bears acerb witness to the end of Leopardi’s infatuation with Fanny Targioni Tozzetti (as Leo Spitzer [Dotti, 120] puts it, “singing about disenchantment is a harder thing than singing the intoxication of feeling”). “Aspasia”—“a poem of the intellect … returning to itself after the shipwreck of amorous passion” (Dotti, 127)—“describes the oxymoron of a Platonic passion, in which the loved one is revealed to be unworthy of the archetype imprinted on her, having failed to incarnate ‘the woman who can’t be found’ [see notes to “Alla sua donna”]” (Damiani, All’apparir del vero, 446).

“Aspasia” is an autobiographical expatiation, in a neoclassical mode, on the ideas in “Alla sua donna” and “Il pensiero dominante” (and in its own way a disabused rewriting of “Consalvo”), “where love is likewise conceived as error and illusion but sung in all its radiant vital potential”; here, however—in “bitter confirmation that reality has defeated the ideal forever” (Dotti, 123)—“Leopardi changes tone, mixes the lexicon of mourning with that of ecstasy, carries out … a final and definitive act of destruction of both love and woman, who returns now only as a ‘beloved ghost’” (Rigoni [M1, 979]).

erinni: Literally, the Furies.

arcana: Literally, hidden, secret.

Novo ciel, nova terra… : Cf. Revelation 21:1: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”

finch’a quel giorno / Si fu due volte ricondotto il sole: I.e., until two years had passed.

Simile effetto: See Zibaldone 1785–86 (24 September 1821) for a discussion of the similar effects on man of music and feminine beauty. See also the conclusion of “Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna.”

l’amorosa idea: Cf. “Il pensiero dominante.”

in chi dell’uomo al tutto / … è minor: Cf. Ovid, Heroides XIX, 6–7: “fortius ingenium suspicor esse viris; / Ut corpus teneris ita mens infirma puellis.” Dotti (408–409) quotes Fubini: “Note … the crudely and polemically misogynist tone, in correspondingly impacted and heavy language.”

Nè tu finor giammai… : Cf. “La sera del dì di festa,” 9–10: “e già non sai nè pensi / Quanta piaga m’apristi in mezzo al petto.”

un lungo / Servaggio: Cf. the “lunghi affanni / E di servaggio” under Laban that Jacob had to submit to in order to win the hand of Rebecca in the “Inno ai patriarchi” (84–85).

a cui piegar sostenni / L’altero capo: Cf. the broom, bending in response to necessity at the end of “La ginestra,” 303–305: “E piegherai / Sotto il fascio mortal non renitente / Il tuo capo innocente.”

a’ tuoi superbi / Fastidi: Cf. Virgil, Eclogues II, 15: “superba … fastidia.”

Il mar: The mention of the sea argues for the poem’s being written after Leopardi had arrived in Naples in 1833.

XXX. SOPRA UN BASSO RILIEVO ANTICO SEPOLCRALE / ON AN ANCIENT FUNERAL RELIEF

Marti (Dotti, 124) argues that the canto was drafted in Rome in 1831–32, where, in the studio of the neoclassical Carrarese sculptor Pietro Tenerani (1789–1869), principal disciple of the great Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), Leopardi saw “the bas-relief for the burial of a young woman, full of sadness and sublime constancy” (letter to Carlotta Lenzoni, 29 October 1831) now in the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Lucina (significantly, he makes the sculpture ancient in his poem); published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835.

Rigoni notes “conceptual and rhythmic analogies” with the last part of the “Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio” (1827) in the Operette morali and with Zibaldone 4277–78 (9 April 1827). These concern whether the subject should be considered fortunate or unhappy “in correlation with the problem of the immortality of the soul” (Dotti, 414). The poem represents a clear break with the Aspasia poems occasioned by Leopardi’s relationship with Fanny Targioni Tozzetti. Orcel (320): “A song of an entirely ancient pietas.” To G. A. Levi (1931), “one of the most delicate and even sublime things” written by Leopardi.

“Here too as in ‘A Silvia,’ ‘Le rimembranze,’ and elsewhere, the death of a young woman—a subject Leopardi had long contemplated (see “Disegni letterari,” XII [M2, 1218])—is the occasion for a sober reflection on the ‘marvel that cannot be praised’ of nature and her contradictions, the blind hurtling of human consciousness against the insoluble and inextricable … a lucid and sensible argument on the paradoxical relationship between life and death, between him who goes and him who stays, which is reflected … in the contrast/conflict between the logic of the intellect and the natural, unsuppressible reaction of … the spirit” (Rigoni [M1, 980–81]).

The opening of the poem also suggests that of “Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina.”

Mai non veder la luce… : Best not to be born (cf. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1289). Leopardi repeats this classical commonplace, first expressed by Theognis, 425–28, several times; he quotes it from Barthélemy’s Voyage in Zibaldone 2672 (10 February 1823), and in both the autobiographical “Detti memorabili di Filippo Ottonieri” and the “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico” in the Operette morali.

Come vapore in nuvoletta accolto… : Cf. Wisdom of Solomon 2:4: “Our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist,” and Job 7:9: “As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away.”

Che per uccider partorisci e nutri: Cf. “Ad Arimane” (356): “per uccider partorisce ec…” (See also Zibaldone 4257–58 [21 March 1827], quoted in the notes to “Al Conte Carlo Pepoli.”) Dotti (416): “In this epigrammatic phrase Leopardi summarizes one of the central themes of his thought.” Cf. also Zibaldone 4485–86 (11 April 1829): “Nature necessarily, according to the law of destruction and reproduction, and to maintain the current state of the universe, is essentially, regularly, and perpetually the persecutor and mortal enemy of all individuals of all kinds and species to whom it gives life; and it begins to persecute them from the very moment it produced them.”

The passage foreshadows the complaint against divine cruelty toward the human race in “Il tramonto della luna” (1836), 34–50. Indeed, the two poems are closely interrelated throughout.

Misera ovunque miri: Cf. Imitatio Christi I 22: “Miser es ubicumque fueris et quocumque te verteris.” Also the “Canto notturno,” 21–38.

Piacqueti che delusa: Cf. the similar argument in “Il tramonto della luna,” 35. Fubini (quoted in Dotti [417]) notes that “Piacqueti” “corresponds to the Latin expression placuit: it was your decree.”

scemo / Rimaner di se stesso: Cf. Purgatorio XXX, 49–50: “scemi / di sé.”

XXXI. SOPRA IL RITRATTO DI UNA BELLA DONNA / ON THE PORTRAIT OF A BEAUTIFUL LADY

As with the previous poem, with which this makes a pair known as the canzoni sepolcrali, or sepulchral odes, this was written at Naples between 1831 and 1835, and may likewise have been inspired in part by plaster models made in 1831 by Pietro Tenerani for a memorial for Margaret Compton, Marchioness of Northampton, who died in Rome in 1830. The sculpture is now in the Ashby Castle Church, Northamptonshire. (See Novella Bellucci, “Lo scultore della Psiche,” in Novella Bellucci and Luigi Trenti, eds., Leopardi a Roma, catalogue of an exhibition at the Museo Napoleonico, Rome, 10 September–10 December, 1998. Milano: Electa, 1998, 227).

Rigoni (M1, 982) notes that the poem “is distinguished … by its insistence on the specific baroque theme of desengaño, the miserable and vile transformation into ‘mud’ and ‘bones’ performed by death on … feminine beauty.” If “Sopra un basso rilievo” is classical in its detachment, its companion’s violent conceptual and formal antitheses, expressive of two opposing realities, recall the structure— and the disenchantment—of “Aspasia,” suggesting, as Marti has argued (Dotti, 124), that this second sepulchral ode was written later, in the wake of the final detachment from the illusion of love that is the burden of the “Aspasia” cycle, and as such is part of it, “or at least documents it” (Dotti, 126).

Ezra Pound’s translation, “Her Monument, the Image Cut Thereon,” was published in his Canzoni, 1911.

il simulacro / Della scorsa beltà: Orcel (321): “D. De Robertis notes with finesse that these lines constitute a kind of ‘anti-Sepolcri,’ evoking the image in Foscolo of the Muses (with their immortal song) as ‘guardians of tombs.’”

quel labbro, ond’alto: Cf. Parini’s sonnet “Quando costei”: “Volo al bel labbro onde il piacer trabocca.” The imagery here recalls the protagonist’s enraptured reactions to his beloved in “Consalvo” and “Aspasia.”

di pallor si tinse: The line is drawn from a loose translation of Archilochos made by Leopardi in 1823–24 (M1, 605).

Misterio eterno: Dotti (421) calls this asseveration “a bit emphatic.”

Quale splendor… : Cf. the “Raggio divino” of the beloved’s beauty in “Aspasia,” 33.

Ammirabil concetto: The “amorosa idea” of “Aspasia,” 39, which the poet has evoked once more in the preceding lines.

natural virtù: Music, by the very nature of its sounds, expresses emotion immediately and purely. Cf. Zibaldone 79 (1819): “The other arts imitate and express nature, from which feeling is derived, but music imitates and expresses only the same feeling in person, which is derived from itself and not from nature”; Leopardi also approvingly quotes Mme de Staël’s claim about music that “c’est celui qui agit le plus immédiatement sur l’âme.” Dotti (422) also recalls the relations between music and feminine beauty in “Aspasia,” 34–37 and 67–70.

polve ed ombra: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCXIV, 12: “Veramente siam noi polvere et ombra,” which in turn derives from Horace, Odes IV, 7, 16: “pulvis et umbra sumus.”

Da sì basse cagioni: Dotti (423): “Entirely material causes, motives (like the flowering and disappearance of beauty).” G. De Robertis (301): “These last lines have a flavor of the distant gnomic, and a quick rhythm that is not at all in keeping with the weight and meaning of their miserable questioning”—questioning “destined to have no answers” (Dotti, 423): “eternal mystery / of our being.”

XXXII. PALINODIA AL MARCHESE GINO CAPPONI / RECANTATION FOR MARCHESE GINO CAPPONI

Written in 1834 or 1835 at Naples; published in 1835 as the culminating poem of the Neapolitan edition of the Canti.

A palinode is a Greek recantation; this is Leopardi’s satire, inspired by Parini’s “Il giorno,” and based on Virgil’s fourth eclogue, on the optimistic fantasies and the fads and foibles of his time—“Science, Culture, Technology, Industry, Politics, Newspapers, Progress, Happiness, expressions of the absurd faith in the advent of a new golden age” (Rigoni [M1, 984])—which gives brilliant, biting expression to “the polemical (and very often visionary) side of Leopardi’s historical and metaphysical nihilism” (Orcel, 321). The Greek term “is used with an ironic and polemically bitter intention” (Dotti, 424); the poem’s tone is closely allied with that of the “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico” (1832), which brings the Operette morali to a close. Gino Capponi (Florence, 1792–1876), was an economist and politician, author of a history of the Florentine republic, and founder with G. P. Vieusseux of the influential liberal review L’Antologia. He met Leopardi in 1827 and was apparently the one judge who voted to give the Operette morali the prize of the Accademia della Crusca in 1829. Capponi accepted Leopardi’s dedication of the “Palinodia” to him, though he was in fact one of the “ingenuous” optimists excoriated in the poem. As he wrote to Niccolò Tommaseo in November 1835: “Leopardi has offloaded some of his attacks onto my back, kindly deriding me as a believer in newspapers, whiskers, cigars, and the wisdom and the blessedness of the century” (quoted in Rigoni [M1, 985]).

EPIGRAPH Il sempre sospirar nulla rileva: Petrarch, Rime CV: “Mai non vo’ più cantar com’io soleva, / Ch’altrui non m’intendeva, ond’ebbi scorno; / et puossi in bel soggiorno esser molesto. / Il sempre sospirar nulla rileva.” [I’m never going to sing again the way I did, / For no one understood me, and I was scorned; / and it can be harmful in a lovely place. / Always sighing redeems nothing.] Marti (quoted in Dotti [132]) sees the epigraph as marking “a shift” on Leopardi’s part away from personal suffering in favor of an active, dynamic opposition to the progressive ideology of his time.

candido Gino: Orcel (321): “The epithet is to be understood in the Latin sense of ‘sincere,’ ‘well-meaning’ (Italian publishers used to address [their offerings to] the ‘candid reader’); but the adjective’s ironic resonance is very probable.” Cf. Horace’s salutation, “candide iudex,” to his friend Tibullus in Epistles I, 4, 1.

del mio mal consorte / L’umana specie: Leopardi always rejected the insinuation of his contemporaries that his own ideas were the result of his personal predicament. Cf. the letter to de Sinner of 24 May 1832 quoted in the notes on “Bruto minore,” p. 402.

fumo / … onorato: Glorious, like the smoke of battle. The trope continues in the following lines. Leopardi’s satirical view of newspapers is also mooted, among other places, in the “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico”: ”I believe in and embrace the profound philosophy of the newspapers which, killing every other literature and every other occupation, massively grave and displeasing, are the lords and light of the present age.”

Come nulla quaggiù dispiace e dura: Parody of a line of Petrarch, Rime CCXI, 14: “Come nulla quaggiù diletta e dura” [How nothing down here pleases and survives].

Aureo secolo… : Literal translation of a passage in Simmacus quoted in Zibaldone 1181 (18 June 1821), and which itself recalls Virgil, Eclogues IV, 46–47. The ostentatious, highly familiar classical reference underlines the satirical thrust of the passage (Dotti, 427)—and the distance of this golden age from the emotional and spiritual one imagined in “Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna.”

Universale amore: Rigoni (M1, 986): For Leopardi, a pernicious myth that has “produced universal egotism” (Zibaldone 890 [30 March–4 April 1821]).

choléra: Leopardi uses the French spelling, as if to underline the snobbish exoticism of the disease; there was a widespread cholera epidemic in France in 1832.

pino o quercia / Suderà latte e mele: Parody of Virgil’s fourth eclogue and of the last chorus of the first act of Tasso’s Aminta.

E le macchine al cielo emulatrici: Cf. Virgil, Aeneid IV, 89: “aequataque machine caelo”; for Virgil “machine” refers to high buildings or constructions but the hubristic intention is the same. Dotti (427) notes that Leopardi had already satirized the nineteenth-century faith in machinery in the “Proposta dei premi fatta dall’Accademia dei Sillografi” (Operette morali).

Di Sem, di Cam e di Giapeto il seme: Shem, Ham, and Japeth were the sons of Noah, from whom the human race descended.

Ghiande: In the first Golden Age, men ate acorns.

Contrarie in campo le fraterne schiere: Cf. the denunciation of internecine strife in “La ginestra,” 135–44.

A galleggiar sortiti: Cf. the like political predictions of “Ad Arimane.”

Volta nè Davy: Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), Italian inventor of the voltaic pile, an early electric battery, from which he obtained the first electric current; the English chemist and physicist Humphry Davy (1778–1829) invented the miner’s safety lamp and isolated several elements, including chlorine and iodine.

un Gange: I.e., a river of ink.

l’eclittica: The sun’s orbit, i.e., anywhere on earth.

eternamente / Sarà… : Cf. the “Proposta di premi fatta all’Accademia di Sillografi” in the Operette morali, in which the academy hopes one day or another to find “some thread of healthy or other genius” that will save men “from egotism, from the predominance of mediocrity, from the prosperous fortune of the insensate, the ribald, and the low, from the universal not-caring and the misery of the wise, the costumati and the magnanimous.” See also “To Ahriman” (357): “And the world raves seeking new orders and laws and hopes for perfection.”

Queste lievi reliquie: Cf. the also parodic line in Virgil’s fourth eclogue, 31: “Pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis.”

e por quegli odii in pace: Dotti (431) makes reference to the long pages of the Zibaldone 3773–810 (25–30 October 1823) on human unsociability.

coton: Cotton clothes were more expensive; Dotti (431) notes that the cotton industry was then being broadly developed in Britain and in the United States.

l’arsa cucina: The irony here derives from the association of an elevated, literary epithet like arsa (blackened by smoke) and a common term like cucina (kitchen) (Dotti, 431–32).

Liverpool: Hub of the English cotton and slave trades.

sotto l’ampie / Vie del Tamigi: The tunnel from Wapping to Rotherhithe, begun in 1804 and finally completed in 1842.

quanti: For Leopardi’s sardonic view of statistics, see the “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico”: “But long live statistics! long live economic, moral, and political science, portable encyclopedias, manuals, and the very beautiful creations of our century.” And in a letter to Giordani (24 July 1828): “Most of all it doesn’t enter my mind that the high point of human wisdom lies in political knowledge and statistics.”

per opra / Di possente vapore: Steam-powered typographical machines.

Come d’aeree gru… : This exquisitely modulated classical simile is “probably the most finely ironic” (Dotti, 433) moment of the poem.

Quale un fanciullo… : With this next simile, Leopardi abandons irony for his customary grave, disabused consideration of human nature. The same comparison of nature to a child who continually destroys what he creates can be found in Zibaldone 4421 (2 December 1828); cf. also the sketch for the hymn “Ad Arimane.” The simile also foreshadows that of the apple and the ants in “La ginestra,” 202ff.

Distruggendo e formando: Leopardi, in the “Frammento apocrifo di Stratone da Lampsaco” in the Operette morali: “But given that the said power [of nature] never stops operating on and modifying matter, therefore those creatures that it continually forms, it also destroys, making new creatures from their matter.” Cf. also the discussion of the related notion of hostile mother nature, who creates only to destroy, in the notes to “Sopra un basso rilievo sepolcrale,” p. 462.

Queste … miserie estreme: Cf. “La quiete dopo la tempesta,” 42–45: “O natura cortese, / Son questi i doni tuoi, / Questi i diletti sono / Che tu porgi ai mortali.” Cf. also the “necessità diverse” which nature provided to keep humans busy in “Al Conte Carlo Pepoli,” 32–36.

E non pur … / … altre parti: These two lines were not printed in the Neapolitan edition of 1835.

un popol fanno / Lieto e felice: Leopardi wrote to Fanny Targioni Tozzetti (5 December 1831): “I laugh at the happiness of the masses because my little brain cannot conceive of a happy mass made up of unhappy individuals.” And in the “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico” (1832) he caricatures the newly popular notion of the “masses”: “Individuals have disappeared before the masses, the modern thinkers elegantly say. Which means that it’s unnecessary for the individual to put up with any inconvenience … Let the masses do it; what they are going to do without individuals, being made up of individuals, I wish and hope the intendants of individuals and masses, who today illumine the world, will explain to me.”

In più sublimi ancora e più riposti / Subbietti: Orcel (322) calls this “raillery against the religious and spiritualist renewal then particularly present at Naples (Leopardi also wrote a satirical in terza rima, ‘I nuvoi credenti,’ ‘The New Believers’ [likely also 1835], not included in the Canti).” These “exponents of Neapolitan Catholic spiritualism constitute a target analogous and parallel to that represented by the Florentine liberals in the “Palinodia” (Rigoni [M1, 1065]).

prosteso adora / Oggi: Recalls the last lines of Parini’s “Notte”: “La gloria e lo splendor di tanti eroi / Che poi prosteso il cieco vulgo adora.”

Tra il fumo degl’incensi: I.e., on the altars of religion.

Un già de’ tuoi… : The liberal Catholic thinker Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–74), one of Capponi’s principal collaborators on the Antologia and a bitter enemy of Leopardi’s, who by 1833 had moved to Paris. See Leopardi’s brilliant and bitter satire on Tommaseo’s intellectual arrogance and self-certainty, “Potenze intellettuali: Niccolò Tommaseo” (1836) (M2, 1017–20). Capponi (Rigoni [M1, 988]), however, believed Leopardi was referring here to Manzoni, whom Leopardi also met in Florence.

la matura speme: The Italian hope for liberty.

un suono / Di lingua che dal latte si scompagni: Cf. Petrarch’s canzone “Tacer non posso” (Rime CCCXXV), 87–88: “con voci, anchor non preste, / di lingua che dal latte si scompagne.”

se lode / Cerchi e fama: Cf. “La ginestra,” 68–69: “Ben ch’io sappia che obblio / Preme chi troppo all’età propria increbbe.” And in the “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico,” the friend says: “Or more probably you’ll be disdained, as understanding modern philosophy badly, and caring little for the progress of society and its lights.”

vassi alle stelle: Parodic version of Virgil, Aeneid IX, 641: “sic itur ad astra.”

Del secolo i bisogni: Fubini (Dotti, 439) notes that Leopardi, repeating this phrase, first used in ll. 237–38, is satirizing the journalistic parlance of the day.

enorme il pelo: Young Italian liberals sported sideburns and big beards to symbolize their opposition to the Austrians and their “collaborators.” The aulic vocabulary—“conceda,”“ostenta,” etc.—is patently satirical.

Qual de’ barbati eroi… : “Verse of Parinian coinage, both for the image of the ‘barbati eroi’ and for the ironically aulic hypermetric line” (Fubini, quoted in Dotti [440]).

comincia a salutar col riso: Cf. Virgil’s fourth eclogue, 60: “Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.” The entire passage is rife with parodic echoes of Virgil’s poem.

XXXIII. IL TRAMONTO DELLA LUNA / THE SETTING OF THE MOON

Written in the Villa Ferrigni at Torre del Greco in the spring of 1836; published in the Florentine edition of 1845. According to legend—since disproved—Leopardi was supposed to have dictated the last six lines to Ranieri (or to the German historian Heinrich Wilhelm Schulz, who was visiting him at the time) six hours before his death.

The analogical development of the poem, in which the setting of the moon is likened to the disappearance of youth, recalls that of “Il passero solitario,” though this new canzone libera is infinitely more impersonal and detached. This is not a return to the idyllic evocation of the world by moonlight, but a highly structured translating of “radical conceptual convictions into images [“not allegorical but symbolic” (Dotti, 197)]—having hidden the proposition so as to have it blossom like a flower born in the heart of the man who suffers” (Dotti, 139). Dotti (193): Strongly characteristic of Leopardi’s late poetry is “the disappearance of the ‘I’ into a collective voice: the overwhelming and seemingly conclusive imposition of thinking; the translation of this thinking into imagery; the development, in fact, and often in highly dramatic forms, of the poetry which, in a lower and almost psalm-like tone, began with the restless questioning of the ‘Canto notturno’ … It’s certain that all the canti of the late Leopardi are operette morali in verse, so to speak, canti that open on a complex, and highly articulate, ideological landscape.”

zefiro: The spring wind.

Tal si dilegua… : The second stanza functions as the corresponding part of a an extended simile, comparing the moon (“Quale…”) with youth (“Tal…”). Dotti (442): “The poet takes up the suggestive images created by the lunar night … to fix and render them precisely in their allusiveness … The simile is taken up point for point and laden with allegorical values, though with a very delicate touch.”

Del cammin lungo: Cf. “Alla luna,” 13–14: “Nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo / La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso.” After youth, “man realizes [Dotti, 443] that the years that remain to him will be particularly long, oppressive … devoid of the pleasure of youth …
    “The image of the traveler in life is very frequent in the ancients and in Petrarch, but in Leopardi it takes on a very different meaning. While in the first the traveler seeks above all to reach his goal well, which for the Christian world is also eternal salvation, in [Leopardi] the viatore asks to no effect what the endpoint of the road he must still travel is. In the first, the traveler knows and rushes; in Leopardi he knows nothing and wanders in confusion. Or if he knows something, he knows that the world in which he finds himself is alien to him, as is he in the world’s eyes.”

l’umana sede: Man’s home, the earth.

estremo / Di tutti i mali… : Cf. Pensieri VI: “Old age is the worst of all evils: because it deprives man of all his pleasures, leaving him with his appetites; and carries along it all his pains.” Cf. Petrarch, Rime CCXXVII, 4: “Che il desir vive e la speranza è morta.” “The definition that the ancients gave to death Leopardi reserves for old age” (Dotti, 444, who also notes that the collocation of “trovato” and “ritrovar” “has a hard polemical significance”).

Ma la vita mortal… : Cf. Catullus V, 4–6: “Soles occidere et redire possunt; / nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, / nox est perpetua una dormienda.”

alla notte / Che l’altre etadi oscura: Old age, which erases the memory of the other times of life.

XXXIV. LA GINESTRA / BROOM

Written, like the preceding poem, at the Villa Ferrigni, Torre del Greco, in 1836 and published in the Florentine edition of 1845.

“La ginestra” is widely considered a kind of “spiritual testament” of the poet (Rigoni [M1, 989]). Its critique of nineteenth-century notions of progress, addressed more baldly and prosaically in the “Palinodia,” is here “personified” in the anthropomorphized figure of the broom, often referred to as the national flower of Italy, with its wise way of bending before the cruel vicissitudes of nature.

The poem has been criticized by Croce and others for the mixture of “poetry and non-poetry,” i.e., for the alternation between lyric description and philosophical argument—which in essence is the primary alternation in the Canti, what Heidegger called “pensiero poetante,” or “thinking in poetry,” “the transfiguration of reflection into imagery” (Dotti, 143) that marks the ultimate stage of Leopardi’s poetic achievement.

Orcel (323): “From the aesthetic viewpoint, one could not deny that the most discursive strophes are close to a versified prose, but beyond the hammering or sarcastic power that the versification justly imprints them with, it is worth remembering that … Croce’s distinction is the fruit of a post-romantic confusion between poetry and lyricism”—a feeling, I would submit, that Leopardi’s own greatest lyrics are in part responsible for.

Dotti (200) notes “the progressive moving of Leopardi’s thought and poetry in the direction of approaches always less attuned to lyrical subjectivity and always closer to the conquest—wished for by the poet himself, though he considered it debatable—of a ‘truth’ which could stand as the basis for a renewal of humanity. If, in other words, in the shepherd’s song, the night sky was the symbol of the irrational and fatal alienation of the universe from man, that same sky in ‘La ginestra’ teaches us how such alienation may, at least in certain respects, be healed through understanding.”

Leopardi’s poem (which involves and subsumes numerous themes and gestures of his earlier work) is a national poem in much the same way that the song of Simonides in “All’Italia” is—it seeks to define a national spirit, a civic life, that has always been one of Leopardi’s major themes. In this sense, the poems balance each other and create the arena for the consideration of these themes that is the Canti.

EPIGRAPH le tenebre che la luce: With his epigraph, Leopardi underlines his belief, underscored in the lines that follow, in rational enlightenment, in opposition to the spiritualism of his era.

donna de’ mortali: Ancient Rome.

d’afflitte fortune: Cf. Petrarch, Rime CXXVIII, 59: “le fortune afflicte e sparte.”

fur città famose: Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabia, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

Con gli abitanti insieme: According to Orcel (324), Leopardi’s meditations on the desolate ruins around Vesuvius throughout the poem derive from the reminiscences of Jacopo Sannazaro (1457/8–1530), court poet to Ferdinand I of Naples (in his elegy Ad ruinas Cumarum and prose Arcadia, chapter XII).

Or tutto intorno / Una ruina involve: Cf. Petrarch’s canzone “Spirto gentil,” Rime LIII, 35: “e tutto quell ch’una ruina involve.”

Il nostro stato: The “umano stato” and “stato mortale” of the “Canto notturno”; the “mortale stato” of “Sopra un ritratto di una bella donna.” Dotti (449) notes the “harsh ironic accent” of these lines. The aulic term “possanza” (for “potenza”) in 41, e.g., “is used in an ironic sense in regard to the ‘progressive’ intellectuals and their optimistic faith in the century” (Dotti, 448).

Le magnifiche sorti e progressive: The phrase, which has become proverbial, was coined by Leopardi’s cousin Terenzio Mamiani (1799–1885), a Catholic-optimist writer from Pesaro, in the preface to his Inni sacri (Paris, 1832). “Words of a modern, which explains all their elegance,” wrote Leopardi, in his notes on the Canti (M1, 151).
    Rigoni (M1, 991) asserts that “there is not, definitively, a political nor, a fortiori, a progressive Leopardi,” though he notes the poet’s approval of the demythifying rational or “destructive” tendencies of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought, which for Leopardi involved a return to the healthy scepticism of classical culture. Cf. Zibaldone 4192–93 (1 September 1826): “Bayle’s observation that reason is rather an instrument of destruction than of construction, applies very well, in fact returns to what I seem to have observed elsewhere, that the progress of the human spirit, from the Renaissance on, and especially in these times, has consisted and consists more and more primarily not in the discovery of positive truths, but of substantially negative ones; or rather, in other words, in knowing the falsity of what in the past, more or less long ago, was considered sure, or rather the ignorance of what was thought to be known: though in fact, faute de bien observer ou raisonner, many similar negative discoveries are considered positive. And that the ancients, in metaphysics and morals principally, and also in politics … were equal to or more advanced than us, solely because and to the degree that they preceded the supposedly positive discoveries and realizations of the truth, to which we slowly and laboriously arrived and continually arrive at by renouncing, and discovering and knowing their falseness, and persuading ourselves of this, and promulgating such new discoveries and popularizing them.”

Dal risorto pensier: The resurgence of classically inspired rational thought in what we today know as the Renaissance but was called the Risorgimento in the eighteenth century.

Di cui lor sorte rea padre ti fece: G. De Robertis (335): “Who through their ill fortune were born from you, like you, insanely proud like you.”

Non io / Con tal vergogna… : I.e., by encouraging your infantile fantasies. Cf. the proud self-assertion of “All’Italia,” 37–38: “io solo / Combatterò, procomberò sol io.” Dotti (449) also mentions “Bruto minore,” 106, in this vein.

The Le Monnier edition of 1845 includes the following three lines, which were dropped in the Mestica edition (1886) because they had been crossed out in the manuscript:

E ben facil mi fora

imitar gli altri, e vaneggiando in prosa

farmi agli orecchi tuoi cantando accetto.

[And it would be very easy for me / to imitate others, and, raving in prose, / make my singing acceptable to your ears.]

Preme… : Obscures in its own night, buries (diction from Foscolo). Cf. also the “Palinodia,” 246–50, on this theme. Fubini (quoted in Dotti [449]): “The future perfect relates to an understood ‘before I go underground’: Leopardi is conscious of speaking his last words.” The line evokes a canzone of Dante (Rime XLIX, 59: “Per che parlar con voi si vole aperto,” “and the Dantesque atmosphere is also emphasized by the inversions that call attention to the vibrant moral tension.”

Libertà vai sognando: Cf. Dante, Purgatorio I, 71: “Libertà va cercando…”

e servo … / Vuoi di novo il pensiero: Leopardi is referring to the “utopian humanitarianism” (Dotti, 450) and religious idealism of the French thinkers of the restoration like Lammenais and the Baron d’Eckstein, who were also widely influential in Italy.

in parte: Rigoni (M1, 992): “The limiting expression ‘in parte’ becomes clear only if we interpret correctly Leopardi’s historical notion, according to which the best orientation of modern civilization is a continuous and incomplete return to the antique.” See Zibaldone 4289 (18 September 1827): “The present progress of civilization is another Renaissance; it still consists, in large part, in retrieving what has been lost.” Cf. also Leopardi’s plan (1829) for a “Parallelo della civiltà degli antichi e quella dei moderni” (M2, 1217).

nato a perir, nutrito in pene: Fubini (quoted by Dotti [451]): “repeats epigrammatically the ideas expressed in the ‘Palinodia,’ 173–81.”

Empie le carte: Dotti (452): “The expression, also found in the Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, IV, 14, 5, indicates the stupid and prideful volume of writings by the ‘new believers.’”

Che a sollevar s’ardisce: Cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura I, 66–67, referring to Epicurus: “mortales tollere contra / Est oculos ausus, primusque obsistere contra.”

e di voler matrigna: Cf. the expostulation against nature, “illaudabil maraviglia,” marvel that cannot be praised, in “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepocrale,” 45ff. “My philosophy makes nature evil in all things, and totally exculpates men, directs its hatred, or if not its complaint, to a higher principle, to the true origin of the suffering of the living” (Zibaldone 4428 [January 1829]).

e incontro a questa / Congiunta… : The idea of the alliance of men in a constant war—“which Leopardi imagines being against nature and fate” (Dotti, 453)—is found in Hierocles of Alexandria, cited in Zibaldone 4226–27 (16 November 1826). Cf. also the passage in Zibaldone 4279–80 (13 April 1827) that ends: “This could serve as the ‘Letter to a young man of the 20th century.’”

come fur: As they were in ancient times.

quell’orror che primo: Cf. Leopardi’s description of the formation of society in “Inno ai patriarchi,” 43–50.

Conversar: Society, from Latin conversor, to abide, frequent.

probità del volgo: Dotti (454): “Ironic and polemical (hence the use of the Latin term volgo): man’s intellectual honesty, his way of thinking and conceiving.”

Sovente in queste rive: Gardini (90–91) sees this as a reappearance of “the restless ghost of the pastoral” and notes that “sovente” and “queste” “are patently reminiscent of the first line of ‘L’infinito.’ … Whatever is left of the juvenile pastoral … here becomes one with the historical embodiment of Nature’s destruction.”

Veggo dall’alto fiammeggiar le stelle: Cf. Petrarch, Rime XXII, 11 (“poi quand’io veggio fiammeggiar le stelle”). See also the “Canto notturno,” 84.

o prole / Dell’uomo: For Dotti (456) the vocative is “inspired more by compassion than by polemical scorn … [In contrast, see Zibaldone 3171–72 (12 August 1823),] where, Pascal-like, he had interpreted man’s awareness of his smallness as a sign ‘of his nobility, of the power and immense capacity of his mind, which, enclosed in such a small and minimal being’ had yet been able to succeed in ‘knowing and understanding things so superior to his nature’ and embracing with his thought the immensity ‘itself of existence and of things.’”

i derisi / Sogni: Religious beliefs, the object of scorn on the part of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers.

là: G. De Robertis (345) notes that this is “one of the many indeterminate expressions dear to Leopardi. It imparts a sense of vagueness and fable.”

liquefatti massi: Leopardi is quoting Sannazaro (Arcadia XII), who in turn quotes Virgil, “liquefacta saxa” (Georgics I, 473).

quasi calpesta: Cf. Isaiah 66:1: “Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool” (see also Acts 7:49).

il villanello: Cf. “lo villanello,” Inferno XXIV, 7.

ancor minaccia / A lui strage… : Cf. Statius, Silvae IV, iv, 84–85: “necdum letate minari / cessat apex.”

riluce: Cf. Virgil, Aeneid II, 312: “Sigea igni freta lata relucent,” translated in 1816 by the young Leopardi: “Riluce la sigea vasta marina.”

Mergellina: In Leopardi’s day, a northern suburb of Naples.

Torna al celeste raggio / … l’estinta / Pompei: Systematic excavations of Pompeii began in 1768, but only became regularized at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Under Napoleonic rule (1806–14) they were particularly vigorous and methodical, but continued after the Bourbon restoration.

cui di terra / Avarizia o pietà rende all’aperto: Cf. the different attitude of “Ad Angelo Mai,” in which Mai is praised for this very activity.

Diritto: Can modify either “il peregrino” (standing) or “lunge contempla” (looking directly).

E nell’orror della secreta notte: Dotti (460) observes that these lines (280–88) “seem to want to vie with Ossianic poetry.” Cf. Foscolo, Sepolcri, 207–208: “e all’orror de’notturni / silenzi.”

Passan genti e linguaggi: Cf. Petrarch, “The Triumph of Time,” 112–14: “Passan vostre grandezze e vostre pompe / passan le signorie, passan i regni: / Ogni cosa mortal Tempo interrompe.”

ella nol vede: Cf. Dante’s description of Fortuna, Inferno VII, 94: “ma ella s’è beata e ciò non ode.”

E l’uom d’eternità s’arroga il vanto: Cf. Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata XV, 20, 3–6: “Muoiono le città, muoiono i regni / Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba, / e l’uom d’esser mortal par che si sdegni: / o nostra mente cupida e superba!”

tue molli foreste: Cf. Lentae genistae, Virgil, Georgics II, 12.

Non per voler ma per fortuna: For Dotti (462), this anticipates Heidegger’s notion of man “thrown” into the universe.

inferma: Weak, but also foolish.

XXXV. IMITAZIONE / IMITATION

Imitation of a poem, “La feuille,” written in 1815–16 by the French poet Antoine-Vincent Arnault (1766–1834), on his having to leave France after the defeat of Napoleon. It was published anonymously with no title in the Spettatore italiano XI, 12 (1818). Leopardi’s version was written in 1828 and published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835. The original text follows:

De ta tige détachée,

Pauvre feuille desséchée,

Où vas-tu?—Je n’en sais rien.

L’orage a brisé la chêne

Qui seul était mon soutien;

De son inconstante haleine

Le zéphir ou l’aquilon

Depuis ce jour me promène

De la forêt à la plaine,

De la montagne au vallon;

Je vais où le vent me mène,

Sans me plaindre ou m’effrayer;

Je vais où va toute chose,

Où va la feuille de rose

Et la feuille de laurier.

Rigoni (M1, 995) writes that Leopardi’s imitation stands between the two extremes of the tradition of the fallen leaf as emblem of human mortality—these being represented by Iliad VI, 146–50: “Very like leaves / upon this earth are the generations of men— / old leaves, cast on the ground by the wind, young leaves / the greening forest bears when spring comes in. / So mortals pass; one generation flowers / even as another dies away” (tr. Robert Fitzgerald), and Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne,” 13–18: “Et je m’en vais / Au vent mauvais / Qui m’emporte / Deçà, delà / Pareil à la / Feuille morte.” “Leopardi occupies an equidistant point, offering a version of the theme which partakes of the world of each but does not coincide with either: he keeps intact the purity of vision of the Ancient, though without being able to have its ingenuity; he already feels all the melancholy of the Décadence without yet knowing its aromas and poisons, its vent mauvais. And in this consists the faultless singularity of his work, as of his spirit.” The theme is also touched on in fragment XLI.

Vo pellegrina: Dotti (464) quotes Bacchelli: “Wanderer, outsider, exile. It has all three meanings.”

e tutto l’altro ignoro: Fubini (quoted by Dotti [464]): “not only the goal but everything else that is not its sad experience.”

XXXVI. SCHERZO

Written at Pisa, 15 February 1828, after the completion of the Operette morali; published in the Naples edition of 1835.

Rigoni (M1, 996) notes that the ironic tone of this sketch “connects to Leopardi’s assiduous and revolutionary meditation on the absolute value of style; on the knowledge and inimitable practice of the ancients in exact opposition to the moderns, who are concerned only with ideas and content; on the consequent immortality of the works of the former and on the ephemeral fate of the books of the latter.” The theme is common in the Zibaldone; on “the universal negligence as to style” (Dotti, 465) see 4268–71 (2 April 1827). Dotti (466) also mentions Leopardi’s following observations (4271–72) on “the hurry with which books were being written in Leopardi’s day, having now become real and proper merchandise.” See also “Parini” and the “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico” in the Operette morali.

María de las Nieves Muñiz Muñiz (497) suggests that canti XXXV and XXXVI—united by theme, metrics, and “a certain madrigalesque lightness”—constitute a related pair, “a kind of prologue to the epilogue of the Canti,” and that both turn on the idea of repetition. “The secret heart of the epilogue to the Canti, then,” adds d’Intino (“Spento il diurno raggio,” 702) “is … the rediscovery of the self in artistic labor—and in the book … The frame of the epilogue exhibits and represents the theme of human time, opposed (in the ‘Scherzo’) to the time of artistic labor and of the book of the Canti.”

La: A “vividly Tuscan pleonasm” (Dotti, 465) used with an ironic nod to the Tuscan Accademia della Crusca (Gallo and Garboli, 293), which considered itself the arbiter of Italian style. Other aulic expressions—“Mostrommi,” the Petrarchan “a parte a parte,” “hassi a far”—are employed with strong ironic intent.

La lima: The “lima,” or file, was used for correction and polishing. Cf. Horace, Ars poetica, 291: “limae labor.”

Frammenti / Fragments

XXXVII

This “Arcadian” fragment, written at Recanati in 1819, was originally titled “Lo spavento notturno” (Nocturnal Fear), though the manuscript bears the title “Il sogno” (The Dream). It appears in Leopardi’s “Argomenti e abbozzi di poesia” as “Argomenti di Idilli, I” (M1, 636), where its source is given as an actual dream of the poet’s. Rigoni (M1, 997) cites Leopardi’s mention of ancient beliefs that the moon could fall from the sky in chapter IV of his Saggio sopra gli errori poplari degli antichi, and notes the “Greek manner” of the fragment, adding that a characteristic of the piece is that the poet has dreamed and is amazed by his dream, just like the ancients.

It was first published as “Lo spavento notturno. Idillio V” in Il nuovo ricoglitore no. 12 (December 1825), but it was too different in tone and language from the other idylls, which express “situations, affections, historical adventures” of the poet’s soul (“Disegni letterari, XX” [M2, 1218]), and was not republished after the Bologna edition of 1826 until the Naples edition of 1835, where it appeared among the “Frammenti” as no. XXXV.

The piece makes frequent use of both archaic and popular forms of speech— “contarti,” “dar di colpo,” “vomitava,” “Anzi,” “intorno intorno,” “svelta,” “Egli ci ha”—in its attempt to create an atmosphere of timeless Arcadian comedy.

Grande quanto una secchia: The image is drawn from Dante, Purgatorio XVIII, 76–78: “La luna […] / fatta come’un secchion che tutt’or arda.”

Chi sa?: Dotti (468): “Alceta doesn’t pick up on his companion’s irony and continues with his ingenuous reflections. Even in this brief passage you sense that he incarnates the figure of the child, the ancient primitive, lost in his dreams and illusions (compared with the more expert and detached Melisso).”

XXXVIII

Fragment in terza rima of an elegy, an echo of “Il primo amore” and like it inspired by Leopardi’s cousin Geltrude Cassi-Lazzari. Written at Recanati at the end of 1818, after Cassi’s second visit to Recanati; published in the Bologna Versi of 1826 under the title “Elegia II” (“Elegia I” was later retitled “Il primo amore” and inserted in the Canti), it appeared among the “Frammenti” as no. XXXVI in the Naples edition of 1835. For the inspiring theme, see the fifth “argomento di elegia” (1818) (M1, 617), which is also related to the taste for tempestuous nature evoked in the “Ultimo canto di Saffo” and elsewhere (including fragment XXXIX, below).

XXXIX

This is the first canto, slightly revised, of Leopardi’s youthful Dantesque canticle in terza rima, “Appressamento della morte” (Approach of Death), written in November–December 1816; the selection was published in the Naples edition of 1835, among the “Frammenti,” as no. XXXVII.

A storm was supposed to be the subject of one of the idylls (cf. “Le fanciulle nella tempesta” [M1, 636]) and also appears in a passage of chapter XIII, “Del tuono” (On Thunder), of the Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi [M2, 804–20]. The lines are rich in borrowings from and allusions to Virgil, Ovid, Theocritus, Dante, and Petrarch.

Straccali (1), opens his edition of the Canti with this text: “It’s not improbable that the poet chose to select … this fragment, and modify its subject [from “the Poet himself, intent on reaching an exalted goal” to “a woman seeking an amorous goal”] and its ending as well as its form, having the thought of the premature death of this girl which always remained in his mind as the image of youth, and of all the deceptions and illusions that make this time of life joyful … And in fact as Silvia, in the poem that bears her name, while still in the time of sweet dreams, dies overcome and defeated by crude sickness, so the girl of this fragment, totally smiled on by hope (see vv. 25–27), falls overcome and defeated by the forces of nature which suddenly turn inimical … With a poet’s intellect, Carducci [writes]: ‘Let us call her the pilgrim of love and truth and put this symbolic poem at the beginning of the volume of loving and despairing poems.’”

For d’Intino (“Spento il diurno raggio”), this early, never published fragment is an “archeological find” (702), a critical reading of the “Appressamento” (714), which he interprets as the record of an unresolved struggle between a classically inspired, secular Leopardi and a Leopardi under the Dantesquely inflected influence of the religious ideology of the poet’s mother. The passage, rewritten as described by Straccali, is included in the Canti to memorialize Leopardi’s movement from the “ingenuous poetry of the ancients” that he had previously translated, “to the sentimental and philosophical”(702) poetry of the moderns—and his determination to be a poet over and against the expectations of his parents. It “represents, in 1835, a kind of coming to terms with his own education” (712).

In questa ombra giacea la valle bruna: Cf. “Il tramonto della luna,” 13–14: “ed una / Oscurità la valle e il monte imbruna.”

di pietra: Dead.

XL. DAL GRECO DI SIMONIDE / FROM THE GREEK OF SIMONIDES

Written at Recanati between 1823 and 1824; published in the Naples edition of 1835 among the “Frammenti” as no. XXXVIII.

Leopardi’s poem is a free translation of an iambic fragment by Semonides of Samos, called Semonides of Amorgos, a Greek poet of the seventh century B.C. whom Leopardi confused with the more renowned Simonides of Keos (556–468 B.C.), celebrated in “All’Italia.” De Ceccatty (Chants, 353): “The original poem has been identified (Lirici greci, poeti giambici, ed. Antonio Alori (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 1993), 50).” The translation can be related to Leopardi’s discovery, as he was beginning to write the Operette morali, of ancient pessimism through reading Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s celebrated novel, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1787), in which a young Scythian is supposed to visit Greece and report on the customs and conditions of her various republics after Alexander’s defeat of the Persians.

The 1826 Florence edition of the Versi included another text of 1823, the socalled “Volgarizzamento della satira di Simonide sopra le donne” (Translation of Simonides’ satire on women) (M1, 601–604), though it is in fact by Semonides of Samos.

La bella speme… : Lines 10–18, with some variations, are quoted in chapter X of “Il Parini, ovvero della gloria” (1824) in the Operette morali. The fragment was also published separately, under the title “La speranza,” in the Corriere delle dame of Milan, no. 45, 10 November 1827.

E nullo in terra vive: Our unrealistic expectations for the future receive a witty ironic treatment in the “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” (1832) in the Operette morali. Pluto here is the dispenser of wealth (Orcel, 327).

pria che la speme in porto arrive: Cf. the use of the same image in “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale,” 74.

XLI. DELLO STESSO / BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Written at Recanati between 1823 and 1824; published in the Neapolitan edition of 1835 as no. XXXIX. The authorship of the fragment—whether it is by Semonides of Samos or Simonides of Keos—is uncertain, though for Leopardi (see notes to fragment XL) this was not an issue.

Umana cosa… : The first line does not correspond to the Greek text. Dotti (479) observes that it seems to have been inspired by a line of Petrarch’s, “come nulla qua giù diletta e dura” (Rime CCCXI, 14), which is also parodied in the “Palinodia,” 25.

il veglio di Chio: Homer was supposed to have hailed from Chios.

Le foglie e l’uman seme: See Iliad VI, 146: “Very like leaves / upon this earth are the generations of men” (tr. Robert Fitzgerald). Cf. the use of the same trope in fragment XXXV, “Imitazione.”

Ai presenti diletti: Dotti (480): “The finale of the whole, more than the Greek text, is inspired by an Horatian atmosphere.” De Ceccatty (Chants, 361), who reads the last lines as “a rhetorical question, in ironic form,” says it is probable that Leopardi was here translating a commentary on Simonides rather than the poem itself. G. De Robertis (377): “This is the ancient wisdom that Leopardi was not willing to accept, and that here, at the end of the Canti, seems to mark the difference, and the distance, between two civilizations.” Cf. also the end of “Il sabato del villaggio.”

Other Texts

LE RIMEMBRANZE / MEMORIES

Idyll written at Recanati in 1816 and repudiated by Leopardi in the index of his works. The characters’ names come from Theocritus. The evocations of memory prefigure especially the apostrophe to Nerina at the end of the similarly named “Le ricordanze.”

Pur vidi / Aperta una finestra… : Foreshadows the evocation of the “romite” and “quete” “stanze” of “La vita solitaria” and “A Silvia.” See p. 429 for Leopardi’s description in the Zibaldone of how his imagination was excited by looking into the rooms of a house.

IL CANTO DELLA FANCIULLA / THE GIRL’S SONG

Probably written in April 1818 and subsumed into “A Silvia.”

il tempo / Aspettato: Cf. the “festa / Ch’anco tardi a venir” of “Il sabato del villaggio.”

Cagion d’affano: Cf. the contrasting argument of “Alla luna” (1819), where the memory of even sad things is welcome.

CORO DI MORTI NELLO STUDIO DI FEDERICO RUYSCH / CHORUS OF THE DEAD IN THE STUDY OF FREDERICK RUYSCH

The eerily eloquent “Coro di morti,” which James Thomson (204) called “one of the marvels of literature,” appears at the beginning of the dark and brilliant “Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie” (Dialogue of Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies) (August 1824) in the Operette morali. The embalmer Ruysch is awakened by the singing of his mummies at the moment that a cosmic cycle is coming to an end, during which the dead are allotted fifteen minutes in which to speak. Ruysch questions them about their dying and how they knew they were dead, but the time is up before they can answer.

Damiani (M2, 1324): “The dead intone their chorus in a spirit of resignation as to the incomprehensibility of life, similar to that which the living have in respect to death. In the negation of happiness, which fate imposes on mortals, returns the impossibility of knowing the mystery which oversees the cycles of life and death. If in fact the living don’t know about death, though it is ‘alone eternal in the world,’ neither do the dead answer the last question of the embalmer—‘How do you know you’re dead?’—which remains hanging in the void … Prevented from knowing their fundamental nature, the beings are naturally inclined toward pleasure, which yet has no place or time except in the interstices between life and death, in the instant in which the pain of existence ceases, to which the living are bound to the point of always hoping that ‘an hour or two of life’ remains.”

Ruysch (d. 1731) was a renowned Dutch anatomist, doctor, and naturalist. Leopardi’s note on the manuscript: “Fontenelle Éloge de M. Ruysch. Thomas Éloge de Descartes, not. 32.” Thomas writes (M2, 1325): “M. Ruysch’s mummies prolonged their life in some respect, said M. Fontenelle, whereas those of ancient Egypt only prolonged their death. One could have said that they were men asleep, ready to speak at their awakening.”

si volve: Damiani (M2, 1325): “Latininism. The eternal totality of death embraces creation as a negative and all-comprehensive horizon of being, of that ‘causa sui’ [cause of itself] which Spinoza defined, in the first line of his Ethics, as ‘id, cuius essentia involvit existentiam’ [that, the essence of which involves being].”

si posa: Rests, but also has an end.

Il pensier grave: Damiani (M2, 1325): “The painful thought” (of the life that is past). In the “deep night” in which oblivion involves everything, one seems to hear, up close, the echo of Foscolo’s Sepolcri (lines 17–19) and, more distantly, the fragment of Pindar reported by Plutarch: “from there vomit endless darkness / the slow rivers of the dismal night.”

quel punto acerbo / Che di vita ebbe nome: “The terrifying sacred hymn sung by the dead … acts as a prelude to the dialogue, imbued with black humor, between scientist and mummies. The universal question, the one out of which every poem is born in being posed as a way of considering life … is asked in tragic terms under a comic halo. Neither of the two elements elides or excludes the other. Rather, they touch each other in a certain zone. And in three lines surfaces … the ‘interrogating doctrine of Leopardi’: ‘What were we? / What was that bitter instant / known as life?’” Andrea Zanzotto, “Tentativi di esperienza poetica (Poetiche-lampo),” in Il Verri, 1–2, 1987.

Però ch’esser beato: The rhythm of the last line recalls that of the closing sentence of “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale”: “Ma da natura / Altro negli atti suoi / Che nostro male o nostro ben si cura.”

AD ARIMANE / TO AHRIMAN

Rigoni (M1, 1099): “Ahriman or Angra Mainyu is the divine spirit of Evil in Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism, the religion of pre-Islamic Iran. The sketch for the hymn is of interest above all as testimony to or confirmation of Leopardi’s idea of the absolute sovereignty of evil in the universe: not foreseeing the opposition to Ahriman by any Omuzd (Ohrmazd, Ahura Mazdah), the notion professed by Leopardi assumes in fact … the character of a black monism. Thus are explained also the noted pages of Zibaldone 4174–4178 of 22 April 1826, which affirm with repetitive obsession that ‘All is evil’ without distinction or possible exception (and are consonant, surprisingly, with the ‘system’ exposed by Saint-Fond at the end of the second part of Sade’s Juliette). But the sketch is also important in relation to some passages in the Canti, which lead back to it: ‘A se stesso,’ 14–5; ‘Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale,’ 47; ‘Palinodia,’ 154–64; ‘La ginestra,’ 124–5,” as well as the closing of “Amore e morte.”

A probable source is Byron’s Manfred, in which Ahriman is a character.

e il giusto e il debole sarà oppresso: Cf. the very similar argument in the “Palinodia,” 69–81.

7° lustro: The Latin lustrum was a period of five years. Leopardi is asking not to live beyond his thirty-fifth birthday, 29 June 1833; it is therefore presumed that the sketch was written shortly before this date.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions of Leopardi

Geoffrey L. Bickersteth, trans., The Poems of Leopardi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923.

Rolando Damiani, ed. Giacomo Leopardi: Lettere. Milano: I Meridiani, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2006.

Rolando Damiani e Mario Andrea Rigoni, eds. Giacomo Leopardi: Poesie e Prose. 5 vols. Milano: Edizioni della Meridiana, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1987. Poesie, ed. Mario Andrea Rigoni con un saggio di Cesare Galimberti [M1]. Prose, ed. Rolando Damiani [M2]. Zibaldone, ed. Rolando Damiani.

Domenico De Robertis, ed. Canti di Giacomo Leopardi. 2 vols. Edizione critica e autografi. Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1984.

Giuseppe De Robertis, ed. Giacomo Leopardi: Canti. Firenze: Felice Le Monnier Editore, 1925.

Franco d’Intino, ed. Giacomo Leopardi: Poeti Greci e Latini. Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1999.

———, Giacomo Leopardi: Scritti e frammenti autobiografici. Testi e Documenti di Letteratura e di Lingua, XVI. Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1995.

Ugo Dotti, ed. Giacomo Leopardi: Canti. Milano: Universale Economica Feltrinelli, sixth edition, 2008.

Niccolò Gallo e Cesare Garboli, Giacomo Leopardi: Canti, con un’ appendice di scritti del poeta. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1993.

Franco Gavazzeni e Maria Maddalena Lombardi, eds. Giacomo Leopardi: Canti. Milano: BUR Poesia, fourth edition, 2004.

Francesco Moroncini, Canti di Giacomo Leopardi: Edizione critica. Bologna: Licino Cappelli, 1961.

Carlo Muscetta e Giuseppe Savoca, eds. Giacomo Leopardi: Canti, Paralipomeni, Poesie Varie, Traduzioni Poetiche e Versi Puerili con le concordanze dell’opera poetica leopardiana. Parnasso Italiano IX. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1968.

Alfredo Straccali, ed. I Canti di Giacomo Leopardi commentati da. Firenze: G. C. Sansoni, Editore, 1892.

English Translations

Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Giacomo Leopardi: Poems. Translated and with an introduction. New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, 1963.

Giovanni Cecchetti, Giacomo Leopardi: Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues Translated with an introduction and notes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Patrick Creagh, “Giacomo Leopardi: Ten Odes,” PN Review 9, no. 3 (1982): 11–21.

W. S. Di Piero, Pensieri. Translated with an introduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Angel Flores, ed. Leopardi: Poems and Prose. Introduction by Sergio Pacifici. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966.

Eamon Grennan. Leopardi: Selected Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

John Heath-Stubbs, Poems from Giacomo Leopardi. Translated and with an introduction. London: John Lehmann, 1946.

Paul Lawton, Giacomo Leopardi: Canti. Selected and introduced by Franco Fortini. Dublin: UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 1996.

J. G. Nichols, Giacomo Leopardi: The Canti, with a selection of his prose. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1994.

Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs, ed., trans., and introd., Giacomo Leopardi: Selected Poetry and Prose. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Anne Paolucci, ed., Giacomo Leopardi: Selected Poems, with Excerpts from the Poet’s Journals, Letters, and Notes. Translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Anne Paolucci. Smyrna, Del.: Griffon House Publications, 2003.

G. Singh, ed. I Canti di Giacomo Leopardi nelle traduzioni inglesi. Bibliographic essay and anthology of versions from the Anglo-Saxon world. Preface by Mario Luzi. Introduction by Mario Foschi. Recanati: Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani TranseuropA, 1990.

James Thomson (“B.V.”), Essays, Dialogues and Thoughts (Operette Morali and Pensieri) of Giacomo Leopardi. Edited by Bertram Dobell. London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1905.

Joseph Tusiani, Leopardi’s Canti. Introduction and notes by Piero Magno. Preface by Franco Fortini. Fasano: Schena, 1998.

Arturo Vivante, Giacomo Leopardi: Poems. Translated and with an introduction. Wellfleet, Mass.: Delphinium Press, 1988.

Other Translations

René de Ceccatty, Giacomo Leopardi: Chants. Paris: Rivages Poche, Petite Bibliothèque, 2011.

María de las Nieves Muñiz Muñiz, Giacomo Leopardi: Cantos. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1998.

Michel Orcel, ed. Leopardi, Chants/Canti. Translation, introduction, and bibliography by Michel Orcel. Preface by Mario Fusco. Paris: Flammarion, 2005.

Biographical Works

René de Ceccatty, Noir souci. Paris: Flammarion, 2011.

Pietro Citati, Leopardi. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2010.

Rolando Damiani, All’apparir del vero: Vita di Giacomo Leopardi. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1998. Revision of Vita di Leopardi, 1992.

Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude. Introduction by Shirley Hazzard. New York: Books & Co. / Helen Marx Books, 1999.

Critical Works

Adriano Bon, Invito alla lettura di Giacomo Leopardi. Milano: Mursia, 1985.

Yves Bonnefoy, L’enseignement et l’exemple de Leopardi. Bordeaux: William Blake & Co. Edit., 2001.

D. S. Carne-Ross, “Leopardi: The Poet in a Time of Need.” In Instaurations: Essays in and out of Literature, Pindar to Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, pp. 167–192.

Francesco De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature. 2 vols. Translated by Joan Redfern. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1968.

———, Leopardi. Edited by Carlo Muscetta and Antonio Ernati. Turin: Einaudi, 1983.

Franco d’Intino, “Coleridge-Leopardi: per una poesia potenziale?” La questione Romantica: Organicism/Meccanismo I, no. 1 (Autunno 1995): 93–107.

———, “I misteri di Siliva. Motivo persefoneo e mistica eleusina in Leopardi.” Filologia e critica XIX, no. ii (maggio–agosto 1994): 211–71.

———, “Spento il diurno raggio.” In A. Maglione, ed. Lectura leopardiana: I quarantuno canti e ‘I nuovi credenti.’ Venezia: Marsilio, 2003, 697–717.

Nicola Gardini, “History and Pastoral in the Structure of Leopardi’s Canti.” Modern Language Review 103, no. 1 (January 2008): 76–92.

Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008.

Giorgio Orelli, “Connessioni leopardiane.” Strumenti critici n.s. a. ii, no. 1 (gennaio 1987): 73–96.

Nicolas J. Perella, “Translating Leopardi?” Italica 77, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 357–85.

Antonio Prete, Il pensiero poetante: Saggio su Leopardi. Expanded edition. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006.

Natalino Sapegno, “Giacomo Leopardi.” In Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, eds. Storia della letteratura italiana. Vol. 7, L’Ottocento. Milano: Garzanti, 1965, 733–865.

Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo: Saggi e interventi. Ed. Mario Diacono and Luciano Rebay. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1974.

J. H. Whitfield, Giacomo Leopardi. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954.

Other Works

Giorgio Bertone, Breve dizionario di metrica italiana. Torino: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Saggistica letteraria e linguistica, 1999.

Marco Sonzogni, ed. Or volge l’anno/At the Year’s Turning: An Anthology of Irish Poets Responding to Leopardi. Dublin: Dedalus, 1998.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In preparing this book, I have drawn largely on the work of a few editors, first of all Mario Andrea Rigoni, whose 1987 Meridiani edition incisively synthesizes and interprets the vast library of Leopardi criticism. Leopardi’s leading modern biographer, Rolando Damiani, has also created exemplary editions of the poet’s prose and letters. I am also indebted to Ugo Dotti’s rigorous and suggestive scholarship, in which he often quotes incisively from his own predecessors, in particular Mario Fubini. And I have been encouraged and inspired by the excellent French translation and commentary of Michel Orcel (2005), who, while largely relying on Rigoni, contributes much that is fresh in the way of psychoanalytic and other perspectives. My gratitude to these scholars is boundless.

For other help of various kinds, I would also like to express my great thanks to the following: Frank Bidart; Patrizio Ceccagnoli; Eric Chinski; Jeff Clark; Bill Clegg; Jesse Coleman; Nicola Crocetti; Franco d’Intino, whose criticism of my commentary was essential; Donatella Donati; Stuart Dybek; Jane Elias; James Fenton; Enrico Ferorelli, who gave me his mother’s schoolgirl copy of Giuseppe De Robertis’s edition of the Canti; Susan Galassi; Louise Glück; Susan Goldfarb; Eliza Griswold; Walter Kaiser; William Logan; Andrew Mandel; Maureen McLane; Susan Mitchell; Paul Muldoon; Michael Palma; Tim Parks, who first set me on the course of trying to translate Leopardi; Francesco Rognoni; Jeff Seroy; Robert Silvers; Alyson Sinclair; my gifted editor Lorin Stein; Leon Wieseltier; C. K. Williams; Christian Wiman; and, most of all, Frederick Seidel, who worked tirelessly to try to free me from the bonds of translationese.

My daughters, Beatrice and Isabel Galassi, have been constant sources of tenderness and encouragement.

And with Tom Le I have known a happiness that daily disproves the great Giacomo’s contention that love is illusory.

I have dedicated these versions to two friends whose interest in and support of my engagement with Leopardi over the years has been deeply sustaining: Nicola Gardini, brilliant, fecund writer and critic, who has helped me to cut my own path through the forest of Leopardi studies; and Shirley Hazzard, great novelist and cultrice of Italy and her artists, who knows Leopardi and so much else by heart.

INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

A se stesso (XXVIII)

A Silvia (XXI)

A un vincitore nel pallone (V)

Ad Angelo Mai (III)

Ad Arimane

Al Conte Carlo Pepoli (XIX)

Alla luna (XIV)

Alla primavera (VII)

Alla sua donna (XVIII)

All’Italia (I)

Alone eternal in the world,

Although Peace is gathering

Although the sun is working to repair

Amore e Morte (XXVII)

Ardent Italian, do you constantly

As in the solitary night

Aspasia (XXIX)

Beloved beauty who inspires

Broom or, The Flower of the Wilderness (XXXIV)

Bruto minore (VI)

Brutus (VI)

By the Same Author (XLI)

Calm After the Storm, The (XXIV)

Canto di verginella, assiduo canto,

Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia (XXIII)

Cara beltà che amore

Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai,

Chorus of the Dead in the Study of Frederick Ruysch

Consalvo (XVII)

Consalvo was nearing the end of his stay,

Coro di morti nello studio di Federico Ruysch

Credei ch’al tutto fossero

Dal greco di Simonide (XL)

Dello stesso (XLI)

Di gloria il viso e la gioconda voce,

D’in su la vetta della torre antica,

Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento,

Dolcissimo, possente

Dominant Idea, The (XXVI)

Dove vai? chi ti chiama

Dream, The (XV)

E voi de’ figli dolorosi il canto,

Era il mattino, e tra le chiuse imposte

Era in mezzo del ciel la curva luna,

Errai, candido Gino; assai gran tempo,

Evening of the Holiday, The (XIII)

Every earthly happening

Fate gave birth at one and the same time

First Love (X)

Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte

From the Greek of Simonides (XL)

Girl’s Song, The

Here on the dry flank

High on the rooftop of the ancient tower,

How do you bear this tortured and tormented

Human things last only a short while,

Hymn to the Patriarchs (VIII)

I felt, on the verge

I was wrong, great Gino, far too long

Il canto della fanciulla

Il passero solitario (XI)

Il pensiero dominante (XXVI)

Il primo amore (X)

Il risorgimento (XX)

Il sabato del villaggio (XXV)

Il sogno (XV)

Il tramonto della luna (XXXIII)

Imitation (XXXV)

Imitazione (XXXV)

Infinity (XII)

Inno ai patriarchi (VIII)

Io qui vagando al limitare intorno, (XXXVIII)

It was morning, and the sun’s first light

Italo ardito, a che giammai non posi

King of the real, creator of the world,

La donzelletta vien dalla campagna,

La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto (XXXIV)

La mattutina pioggia, allor che l’ale

La quiete dopo la tempesta (XXIV)

La sera del dì di festa (XIII)

La vita solitaria (XVI)

Le ricordanze (XXII)

Le rimembranze

Learn the look and happy sound of glory,

L’infinito (XII)

Listen, Melisso: I want to tell you a dream (XXXVII)

Love and Death (XXVII)

Lungi dal propio ramo,

Lurking here around the threshold, I (XXXVIII)

Memories

Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina (IV)

Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia (XXIII)

Now that Italian valor lies uprooted,

Now you’ll rest forever,

Now you’re abandoning the peace and quiet

Odi, Melisso: io vo’ contarti un sogno (XXXVII)

O graceful moon, I can remember, now

O graziosa luna, io mi rammento

O my country, I can see the walls

O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi

Ogni mondano evento

On an Ancient Funeral Relief (XXX)

On the Marriage of His Sister Paolina (IV)

On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence (II)

On the Portrait of a Beautiful Woman (XXXI)

Or poserai per sempre,

Palinodia al Marchese Gino Capponi (XXXII)

Passata è la tempesta:

Perchè i celesti danni

Perchè le nostre genti

Placida notte, e verecondo raggio

Poi che del patrio nido

Poi che divelta, nella tracia polve

Presso alla fin di sua dimora in terra,

Quale in notte solinga,

Quando fanciullo io venni

Questo affannoso e travagliato sonno

Qui su l’arida schiena

Re delle cose, autor del mondo, arcana

Reawakening, The (XX)

Recantation for Marchese Gino Capponi (XXXII)

Recollections, The (XXII)

Sappho’s Last Song (IX)

Saturday in the Village (XXV)

Scherzo (XXXVI)

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,

Setting of the Moon, The (XXXIII)

Shimmering stars of the Bear, I never thought

Silvia, do you remember still

Silvia, rimembri ancora

Solitary Life, The (XVI)

Solitary Thrush, The (XI)

Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve

Sometimes your image comes to mind again,

Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava in Firenze (II)

Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna (XXXI)

Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale (XXX)

Spento il diurno raggio in occidente, (XXXIX)

Sweetest, potent

Tal fosti: or qui sotterra

That day comes back to mind when I first knew

The crescent moon was high up in the sky

The girl comes in from the country

The light of day had died out in the west, (XXXIX)

The morning rain—now that the hen

The night is soft and bright and without wind,

The storm is over:

This lonely hill was always dear to me,

To a Champion at Pallone (V)

To Ahriman

To Angelo Mai (III)

To Count Carlo Pepoli (XIX)

To Himself (XXVIII)

To His Lady (XVIII)

To Italy (I)

To Silvia (XXI)

To Spring (VII)

To the Moon (XIV)

Torna dinanzi al mio pensier talora

Tornami a mente il dì che la battaglia

Tranquil night, and bashful light

Ultimo canto di Saffo (IX)

Umana cosa picciol tempo dura,

Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, io non credea

What are you doing, moon, up in the sky;

When as a child

Where are you going,

Where are you going? Who is calling you

You were this: but here, now, underground

Young girl’s song, insistent song

Your grieving sons will sing in praise of you

ACCLAIM FOR Canti

“In every way exceptional, setting the bar very high for all subsequent translations … Galassi’s edition works admirably on every level: as a highly readable way into Leopardi for the general reader; as a thoroughly annotated and lucid study-text; and above all, for poetry readers, a wonderfully vibrant and fluent new rendering of this difficult, masterful poet.”

— OLIVER DIXON, PN Review

“With the help of his detailed notes—he seems to have read everything about Leopardi in several languages—Mr. Galassi’s versions offer the reader without Italian the surest possible grasp of Leopardi’s poems.”

— ERIC ORMSBY, The Wall Street Journal

“Galassi grants the impossibility of transferring Leopardi’s musicality into English, yet his versions often have their own swing to them, and they always verify the depiction of Leopardi in the introduction as a discouraged but genuine patriot and a philosophical hapless lover. They reflect, too, the romantic displacement of devotion from God to nature, the distrust of science, the exaltation of eros, and the despair of meaningful change that Matthew Arnold’s English harbinger of modernism, “Dover Beach,” attests. An absorbing presentation of a literary giant.”

— RAY OLSON, Booklist

“A towering figure among European Romantic poets and a national hero of Italian letters, the tormented, learned, sometimes hyperbolic Leopardi (1798–1837) has inspired other writers—and defied translators—since before his early death: the forty-one elegies, odes, love poems, and meditations called Canti lie at the heart of his work … To Leopardi’s elaborate stanzas Galassi (who has also translated Montale) brings a light touch and a feel for modern speech. This bilingual version comes with copious notes aimed at beginners, informed, but not overwhelmed, by Italian scholarship.”

—Publishers Weekly

“With this carefully annotated version of the entire Canti—along with Flowers of Evil and Leaves of Grass the most influential poetic collection of the nineteenth century—we have at last not only an excuse but an obligation to read the fiercely learned but also fiercely intimate productions of a great writer whose energies were exhaustively distributed among classical translations, philological studies, and philosophical dialogues. Yet it is these poems that establish the passion and the power of this Italian master, so properly as well as poignantly given here by Jonathan Galassi. What a privilege as well as a joy finally to claim Leopardi, along with Baudelaire and Whitman, for one’s own.”

— RICHARD HOWARD

“With Jonathan Galassi’s lucid translation and informative commentary, Leopardi the poet at last begins to take on palpable existence for the English reader. On one level, Leopardi, like Pindar or Mallarmé or Celan, will always be untranslatable, because his haunting music and idiosyncratic language cannot be transported; but in other respects, Galassi’s splendid new achievement will, for the non-Italian reader, provide an entry into the incomparable world of one of the greatest lyric poets of the nineteenth century.”

— WALTER KAISER

“Leopardi’s language, rooted in the classics and in the romantic spirit of his age, informs both the beauty and the ineffability of his work. Its distinctive tenor has not proven easy to translate, and for those of us whose first language is English, Jonathan Galassi’s long labor of love with Leopardi’s poetry is a welcome gift. His translations convey, to an astonishing degree, the tone, the delicacy and depth, the intimacy and passion, of the great originals, making them seem like recent discoveries.”

— W. S. MERWIN

GIACOMO LEOPARDI Canti

TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED

BY JONATHAN GALASSI

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (1798–1837) 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.

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.

FARRAR, STRAUS, AND GIROUX

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Galassi

All rights reserved

Published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 2011

Some of these translations originally appeared, certain of them in very different form, in The Antioch Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Paragone, Ploughshares, Poesia, and Poetry.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-53305-2

www.fsgbooks.com

Frontispiece: Monument to Clelia Severini (1825), by Pietro Tenerani. San Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome.

Photograph by Annie Schlechter

eISBN 9781466867291

First eBook edition: February 2014