LEOPARDI AND THE POETICS OF TRANSLATION

1 7 2 Y L E O P A R D I A N D T H E P O E T I C S O F T R A N S L A T I O N G I U S E P P E M A Z Z O T T A Jonathan Galassi’s new translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s poems may well mark a turning point in the way the poet is received in the English-speaking world. Leopardi’s influence on poets (from Baudelaire to Giuseppe Ungaretti) and philosophers (chiefly Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) is a matter of record. To them, Leopardi appeared as a poet-philosopher in the mold of the ancient Greeks. Like Alcaeus, Sappho, and Anacreon, he says essential things about life, love, and the futility of both, and he expresses them with unfamiliar, archaic words that evoke an untimely wisdom . And like Petrarch and Torquato Tasso, the two predecessors whose language he quarried, and the eighteenth-century ‘‘Arcadian ’’ pastoral poets whose lexicon he took over, Leopardi was profoundly aware of our Western classical heritage and knew that we belong to that past and yet are estranged from it. It has always been something of a mystery as to why he has not fared well on foreign shores. Matthew Arnold read Leopardi careC a n t i / P o e m s : A B i l i n g u a l E d i t i o n , by Giacomo Leopardi, translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pp., $35) 1 7 3 R fully and wavered between fascination and annoyance – he had a genuine admiration for Leopardi’s sense of the central role of poetry but cavalierly dismissed his ‘‘monotony’’ and gloom. This sort of reaction did not inspire other readers to explore the deeper aspects of Leopardi’s poetry and uncover the tragic optimism of such poems as ‘‘The Dream’’ or ‘‘Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia,’’ in which the poet counters the ‘‘truth’’ he unveils concerning the loneliness and unanswerable questions of his life with the power of his style and the rare beauty of his musical language, which together seek to hide those truths. But there are signs that a new way of looking at Leopardi’s work is emerging. The aged professor David Lurie in J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize–winning novel Disgrace (1999) thinks of writing a libretto based on Byron’s last years in Italy, and he o√ers as a counterpoint to the voices of the English Romantics (Wordsworth and Byron) Leopardi’s lyrics, which are put in the mouth of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, Byron’s mistress in Ravenna. Leopardi’s Romanticism of pathos and empathy might well trace an alternate sensibility to – though not without complicity in – the dominant sadomasochism of the major European paradigms. This sensibility is reflected in Leopardi’s simultaneously passionate and meditative style of writing, a mixture of aphorisms and epigrammatic phrases with philosophical reflections about nature, time, beauty, nothingness. Leopardi fills his verse with allusions to impending natural disasters, hidden cosmic forces, human misconceptions about history, and ideological self-deceptions , such as nineteenth-century beliefs in the myth of progress and Enlightenment utopias. He both dismantles and heightens these images of violence and spiritual disorientation. Other artists and writers (Giovanni Battista Piranesi in his ‘‘Prisons,’’ Pietro Verri in his study Tortures, Alessandro Manzoni in his representations of civil sedition, despotism, and famine) highlighted the decay of modern political and moral values. Leopardi evokes a primal form of natural violence that defines the world, and, using a delicacy of style all his own, he balances it with a vision of life’s harmonies: the serene, pastoral landscape of his native Recanati, the beauty of an evening hour, premonitions of youth, the vanishing memories of childhood, the values of brotherhood. Because of this complex weaving of style and thought he has lately been 1 7 4 M A Z Z O T T A Y emerging as the purest poet-philosopher in nineteenth-century Europe. Nothing less than this is the claim made by the present translation . Jonathan...