The Best Poet You've Never Heard Of (?) Gets Translated

BookForum has an interesting review of Jonathan Galassi's new translation of the life work of the great "Italian" poet Giacomo Leopardi (scare quotes because Italy didn't exist as a political entity when Leopardi lived). Here's who Leopardi was:

Galassi notes in his introduction that Leopardi is Italy's "first modern poet," whose experimentalism and philosophical themes culminate in what became a major concern for the following two centuries of Western lyric: "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."

Here's just what the Canti is:

The mere forty-one compositions that make up the Canti, a carefully structured life-in-verse in the tradition of the Petrarchan canzoniere (songbook), contain a dazzling variety of styles and themes, from confessions of private pain and humiliation to philosophical satires and grand pronouncements on current events. Leopardi's engagement with contemporary Continental philosophy and insatiable interest in international literary culture has helped make the Canti the rare work of Italian poetry to find its share of foreign readers and translators.

Though Leopardi "may be the most erudite, philosophically astute, and linguistically refined poet you've never heard of," he has, in fact, been translated numerous times, and very well. Galassi is the latest in a long line of esteemed translators, and, notably, this review goes in-depth into the issues of translation on this work and on previsou versions thereof:

The difficulty of translating Leopardi's verse is well known. Eamon Grennan, whose well-regarded translation of Leopardi's Selected Poems (1997) generally takes more dramatic liberties with the original than does Galassi's, renders the title of the idyll as "Infinitive" and the above lines as "And a notion of eternity floats to mind, / And the dead seasons, and the season / Beating here and now, and the sound of it." Like Galassi, John Heath-Stubbs in Poems from Leopardi (1946) goes for a more literal version, but his capitalization of "Eternity" gives the poem an unwelcome allegorical feel, and his rendering of suon as "noise" instead of "sound" jars the ear. Thomas Bergin and Anne Paolucci are the closest to Galassi—and to Leopardi—with "and the eternal comes to mind, / and the dead seasons and the present living / one, and the sound of it" (Selected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi [2003]). In this passage as elsewhere, Galassi fulfills the promise of his en face edition by drawing the reader to the Leopardian language that shadows his translations throughout.

All in all, it's a fine review, a particularly good example of the genre of translation review. Cheers to BookForum for putting a wonderful-sounding book in capable hands.