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  • Published: 28 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141978765
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528
Categories:

Canti




Giacomo's famous Canti, available in Penguin Classics for the first time

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

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

Jonathan Galassi's direct new translation sensitively responds to the musicality of the Canti, while his introduction discusses the paradoxes of Leopardi's life and work.

  • Published: 28 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141978765
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528
Categories:

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About the author

Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (1798 -1837) was an Italian poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist. Despite living in a secluded town in the conservative Stato della Chiesa, he engaged deeply and enthusiastically with the foremost thinkers and concepts of the Enlightenment, and created a remarkable and renowned poetic work that secured his place as one of the greatest poets of modern Italy. He died of cholera in Naples in 1837.

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