Canti by Giacomo Leopardi and translated by Jonathan Galassi

This is poetry from Italy.

Canti by Giacomo Leopardi translated by Jonathan Galassi is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This is a Book originally written in Italian. This was published in 2010.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780374235031E12.

Canti, by Giacomo Leopardi and translated by Jonathan Galassi from Italian, brings Italian-language poetry from Italy into English through Leopardi’s Canti, philosophical melancholy, and one of Italian poetry’s major monuments brought into English. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is the pressure of a voice that has already changed the weather around it. I would read it for song, melancholy, infinity, and the vast inward weather of thinking too much with beauty, not as a fixed lesson about Italy. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Canti belongs in the translated poetry library because it belongs as an essential Italian classic for any translated poetry library.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.