"Thus my mind sinks into this immensity: and sinking into such a sea is sweet." Revised and organized during his lifetime, this exceptional work was described by Leopardi as a "lantern" for his ideas, feelings, and deepest concerns. It includes drastic shifts in tone and material and contains early personal elegies and idyllic poems, radical public poems about history and politics, philosophical satirical canvases, as well as the great, dark, desperate odes like "To Sylvia" and later masterpieces like "The Setting of the Moon," written shortly before Leopardi’s death. Imbued with classical references and nostalgia, yet subversively modern in their spare, condensed style and sense of alienation and skepticism, the "Canti" influenced two subsequent centuries of Western lyric poetry and inspired thinkers and writers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Beckett and Lowell. Jonathan Galassi's immediate new translation responds sensitively to the musicality of the "Canti," while his introduction discusses the paradoxes of Leopardi’s life and work.

Pages: 528, Dimensions: 13x13cm