Alone

Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude

Robert Galassi (translator), Canti

He lived under conditions of "unbearable oppression," in a Catholic household of such strictness that he felt himself always alone in his sinfulness; bereft of love, incapable of spontaneity, ill in body, sick at heart. (39-40). His father, Conte Monaldo, a banal reactionary and minor grandee,  belonged to an ancient, if fading family; he was, after a fashion, the master of Recanati a small hill town in the Marches, fifteen miles from the Adriatic. (Leopardi could smell the sea on his walks). The poet's mother, Countess Adelaide, a woman of narrow and fanatical piety, was the true master of Recanati, a domineering woman whom the Count deferred to in all matters relating to both his household and his children.  As a child, Leopardi was dressed as an abbot and surrounded by priests. To say he was cloistered is an understatement--he lived as a monk lives, secluded, repressed, fearful, and guilt-ridden. Yet he would become the greatest Italian poet since Dante, one of the finest philologists of the 19th century, and a philosopher of great depth and originality. He died, aged thirty-eight, in 1837.

"Everything that will follow in two centuries of Western lyric poetry is here [in Leopardi]: 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." (Jonathan Glassi, from the Introduction to the Canti).

Iris Origo, Leopardi's fine biographer, evokes the fruits of the poet's melancholy solitude in the pages of her engaging and empathetic Study in Solitude--how, for example, after an idyllic spring wandering the "fields and lanes" of Pisa, and experiencing--as was the norm with Leopardi--the pangs of unrequited love--he returned to his solitary study at Recanti to write the beautiful song "Silvia":

Silvia, rimembri ancora
Quel tempo della tua vita mortale, 
Quando belta splendea
Negli occhi tuoi ridenti e fuggitivi,
E tu, lieta e pensosa, il limitare
Di gioventu salivi?  

(Silvia, do you still recall
the time during your mortal life,
when beauty shone
in your laughing and startled eyes 
And you, lively and thoughtful, 
arrived at the threshold of youth?)
[my translation]

Origo provides readings of many of the Idylls and Canti, as well as ongoing psychological insights into the poet's state of mind as he wrote his verses and the great, unclassifiable text we know as Zibaldone. In terms of the reach of his interests, his erudition and clarity of mind, no one rivals Leopardi among early nineteenth century poets aside from Coleridge--indeed, the two poets, different in so many respects, were remarkably alike in their engagement with poetic expression as a form of world-making. For Leopardi, words were real--more real than anything else--and from them one could, as he did, craft a reality more accommodating, more habitable, than the one in which he lived.

Anyone new to Leopardi, or wishing to extend his or her grasp of this great poet's work, could do no better than to read Origo along with Galassi's accurate and poetic renditions of Leopardi's finest work. At some level, I believe that Leopardi is like Rilke--untranslateable for the simple reason that his language is so uniquely his own--but Galassi has done a remarkable job of bringing these great lyrics to English readers.

Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, is published by Books and Co./Helen Marx Books' Galassi's versions of the Canti, with an excellent introduction by FSG.

George Ovitt (7/17/17)