Leopardi, Giacomo

Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues (Biblioteca Italiana)

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A book that's worth more than what is costs.
An Essential Masterpiece of Western Literature

Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues (Biblioteca Italiana)
Giacomo Leopardi , and Giovanni Cecchetti
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Paperback

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Thoughts (Hesperus Classics)
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Customer Reviews:

A book that's worth more than what is costs........2005-02-27

Operette Moralli is quite humorous some times. A more accurate translation of the title would be "small ethical works," but the current title is more truthful to the actual content. Giacomo Leopardi's work deals with subjects like suicide, egoism of men, the role hope plays in out lives, the genius's fate, similarities between fashion and death (I was as surprised as you are but he's actually right!), pleasure, happiness, poetry, philosophy, death, love, etc.

I think his humorous dialogues show much more invention and wit than other, more serious, essays. Although seriousness pervades every work it's not always visible. The hopelessness and pessimism that runs through most of the Operette Moralli may not suit the style of most people. But hopelessness here is the result of strength, and it's done with no hatred. Some of his opinions are surprisingly contemporary.

There are better books out there in my opinion, but this is still a very good book, and as Leopardi himself notes: "... books now are mostly written in less time than one needs to read them, and you see very well that since they cost what they are worth, they also last in proportion to what they cost."

An Essential Masterpiece of Western Literature.......2002-08-21

Leopardi is the greatest Italian poet since Dante and Petrarch.

He should be just as famous, however, for this prose work, which is a collection of short essays and philosophical dialogues.

Cecchetti is an eminently qualified translator, and this California Press paperback gives you a marvelous opportunity to revel in what is indisputably a neglected (in English, at least)
Major Work.

If you like Beckett, or especially the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or even Kafka and Borges, you will also find reading Leopardi a superb, rewarding experience!

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beautiful poetic pessimism

Leopardi Afresh

Cosi` tra questa immensita` s'annega il pensier mio...

Leopardi
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Thoughts (Hesperus Classics)

Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues (Biblioteca Italiana)

Collected Poems 1920-1954: Revised Bilingual Edition

Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition

Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950

ASIN: 0691016445

Amazon.com

By general consensus, Giacomo Leopardi is the greatest Italian poet since Dante. His influence on the major Italian poets who come after him--Montale, Ungaretti, and Pavese--is indisputable. Yet he's not well known to English speakers, largely because his work has resisted translation. That's why this fine new version of Selected Poems is particularly welcome. The Irish poet Eamon Grennan has managed to clear away the cobwebs, judiciously employing a loose blank verse reminiscent of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Along with capturing the lyrical fluidity of Leopardi's rhythms, Grennan reminds us that a poem like "The Solitary Thrush" is exactly contemporary with Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"--and that Leopardi is more acid than the Romantics ever were: <blockquote> You'll not grieve, surely,
For the life you've led, since even
The slightest twist of your will
Is nature's way. But to me,
If I fail to escape
Loathsome old age--
When these eyes will mean nothing
To any other heart, the world be nothing
But a blank to them,
Each day more desolate, every day
Darker than the one before--what then
Will this longing for solitude
Seem like to me? What then
Will these years, or even I myself,
Seem to have been? Alas,
I'll be sick with regret, and over and over,
But inconsolable, looking back.
</blockquote> Just as Hamlet leaps out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, Leopardi (who died in 1837) ceases to accept the consolations of the Enlightenment. Refusing to find a fixed center of the universe, he admits to the presence of the void. No poet before him so actively conveys the force of nothing: "Tomorrow the hours will be leaden / With emptiness and melancholy." Indeed, the recognition of such metaphysical boredom, which the Italians call la noia, strikes Leopardi as the very badge of humanity: "To suffer want, emptiness, and hence noia--this seems to me the chief sign of the grandeur and nobility of human nature." --Mark Rudman

Book Description

These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets.</p>

By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), Leopardi: Selected Poems should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a "criticism of life." The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti.</p>

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beautiful poetic pessimism.......2001-11-06

giacomo leopardi is an incredibly fascinating and yet somewhat obscure figure, and anyone who avoids his poetry because of it's pessimism or nihilism is really missing out. at times he becomes unbearably depressing and this is certainly a turn off past a point, but we should admire him nonetheless for his candor and commitment to expressing what he believed was truth. his bleak outlook on human life, contrary to popular belief, did not necessarily stem from his individual misfortunes (such as becoming a hunchback) or personal misery. he was simply a brilliant, lucid man who was aware that human life is ephemeral and without ultimate justification or meaning. anyone with the slightest bit of poetic or philosophical sensitivity to the nearly unfathomable miracle of the world and our lives can immediately understand where he is coming from. in any case, whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, you cannot afford to miss out on leopardi's work.

Leopardi Afresh.......2001-07-28

... The great Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is radiant again in a fresh translation, "Leopardi: Selected Poems" ... that appeared just as Iris Origo's marvelous 1935 biography, "Leopardi, A Study in Solitude" ... was reissued. Leopardi's birth into an aristocratic Tuscan family was no protection against a case of scoliosis that left him hunchbacked, a permanent invalid, unlovable in the eyes of any woman he might come to love. Yet his poetic world is often as enchanting and full of health as a convalescent's, for whom all things come alive, and "roofs and meadows and little hills / Are shining in the sun." Leopardi celebrates such moments of renewal and delight, though his self-forgetful pleasures always return him to a lonely prison. But this is the human condition, not just the poet's. Nature "drives all things to their destruction," the "feast-day is over in a flash, / The work-day comes on, and time takes away / All we are and do." So, he asks, why not love one another? Why turn cold or quarrel, when death sweeps everyone into darkness?

Cosi` tra questa immensita` s'annega il pensier mio..........2000-05-07

Introducing a poet who divulged the voice of exclusion seems a bit of a paradox, yet it is precisely what his valiant translator seems to suggest to be doing given the relative want of interest that presently he has been receiving in the U.S. The translation is successfully carried out to the extent that the mood is respected and the melancholy distance is imparted rather faithfully. The resulting exposition of Leopardi's inestimable poetry bears the stamp of a poet who is in tune with his subject and displays considerable lyrical dexterity. However for all the agility that is here employed - so as to reproduce a work akin with the original - as always it inevitably does not do justice to the tremor that transpires through the Italian undulating and langorous resonance. The syntax is also essential to understanding the reach of this poet that only Holderlin, Rilke and Trakl may be said to have deployed a similar structural approach. Giorgio Agamben's book "Language and Death," would be a good source for English readers to "get a feel" of the poet's startling implosion of loss; the subtle fragility of his theory of noia (tedium); the whole of it punctuated with and surging, tentalizing strokes that emerge in the illuminations of village damsels, of frolicsome lads or of the naively insouciant Silvia. The poems herein abound with familiar illustrations of pastoral life and of the sublime that most all Romantic poets resorted to; The fashion in which Leopardi was able to express such aloofness and despair is tragic, brilliant and engagingly dispassionate. In the words of Oliver Goldsmith: "We cannot hesitate to say that in almost every branch of mental exertion, this extraordinary man seems to have had the capacity of attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest exellence. Whatever he does, he does in manner that makes it his own; not with a forced or affected, but a true originality. stamping on his work, like other masters, a type that defies all counterfeit." Amoungst others Nietzsche had the daring to translate Leopardi's poetry. These poets shared much more than simply a common profession in Philology...they were far too profound for anyone to fathom the abyss which they ceaselessly foundered within so as to dolcify the excesses of our tragic sense of life.

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The Moral Essays
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0231057075

Book Description

Newly awakened interest in Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), arguably the greatest Italian poet since the Renaissance, has resulted in this project to translate a major portion of his works. This volume is the first of four which will encompass the great Canti (in bilingual text), selections from the poet's correspondence, a substantial portion of his enormous intellectual journal, the Zibaldone, and the focus of the present volume, the Operette morali.

Originally planned as a set of dialogues in the manner of Lucian, the Operette is a compilation of brief, interrelated works on questions of moral philosphy. By means of numerous characters, and by means of a range of styles, Leopardi grapples with a theory of pleasure, the concepts of fame, the infinite, human happiness, the function of poetry, and other topics. In the poet's own opinion, the Operette represented his major philosophical speculation and ranked just below his Canti.

Giacomo Leopardi: Poems Translated With an Introduction by Arturo Vivante

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Giacomo Leopardi: Poems Translated With an Introduction by Arturo Vivante
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: Delphinium Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Pensieri: A Bilingual Edition (Gb768)
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195034961

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Operette Morali (Biblioteca Italiana)
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: Univ of California Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Italian | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0520047044

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Neglected classic of pessimism now available in English

Thoughts (Hesperus Classics)
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: Hesperus Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Book Description

Still unfinished at the time of his death, <B>Thoughts,</B> now in its first English translation, represents Giacomo Leopardi’s urgent desire to organize his lifetime’s observations of mankind, life, and the world.

Written by the greatest Italian poet and thinker of the 19th century, these timeless musings contain immense philosophical and psychological insight. Ranging from mankind to nature, social order to the individual soul, they reveal a man of brilliance struggling to reconcile all that he sees around him. Foreword by Edoardo Albinati.

Customer Reviews:

Neglected classic of pessimism now available in English.......2004-06-07

Leopardi's _Thoughts_ (Pensieri) combines the aphoristic style of Pascal and other French moralists with the pessimistic world-view that inspired Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and other 19th century readers of his work. Leopardi in Italy occupies a place equivalent to Emerson in the US: read by every schoolchild and understood by almost none of them, yet still taken as emblematic of the national spirit. His pessimism may be absolute but it is also intensely spirited and does point towards resignation but rather towards exhiliartion. Everyone should read this book, along with his other work of prose, the _Moral Essays_.

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Canti
Giacomo Leopardi , and J. H. Whitfield
Manufacturer: Manchester Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0719002907

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Leopardi - Los Cantos
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: Ediciones 29
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Canti 1
Giacomo Leopardi
Manufacturer: GIULIO EINAUDI
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000PVPELE

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