Canti / Giacomo Leopardi ; translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 487-492) and index.

To Italy -- On the monument to Dante -- To Angelo Mai -- At the wedding of his sister Paolina -- To a champion at football -- Brutus -- To spring -- Hymn to the patriarchs -- Sappho's last song -- First love -- The solitary thrush -- Infinity -- The evening of the holiday -- To the moon -- The dream -- The solitary life -- Consalvo -- To his lady -- To Count Carlo Pepoli -- The reawakening -- To Silvia -- The recollections -- Night song of a wandering shepherd in Asia -- The calm after the storm -- Saturday night in the village -- The dominant idea -- Love and death -- To himself -- Aspasia -- On an ancient funeral relief -- On the portrait of a beautiful lady -- Palinode to Marchese Gino Capponi -- The setting of the moon -- Broom -- Imitation -- Scherzo -- Fragments: listen, Melisso; Lurking here around the threshold; The light of day had died out in the west; From the Greek of Simonides.

A towering figure among European Romantic poets and a national hero of Italian letters, the tormented, learned, sometimes hyperbolic Leopardi (1798-1837) has inspired other writers-and defied translators-since before his early death: the 41 elegies, odes, love poems, and meditations called Canti lie at the heart of his work. Leopardi wrote at the bloody start of the movements that brought Italy independence: early odes call on the nation's "glorious ancestors" to revive lost patriotic hopes. Yet his enduring sadness was not so much political as metaphysical, erotic, and nostalgic: "my heart is stricken," he writes, "to think how everything in this world passes/ and barely leaves a trace." Landscapes and villages, and indeed his own memory, yield fleeting joys that self-consciousness takes away: "If life is misery," one of his characters asks the moon, "why do we bear it?/ But we're not mortal,/ and what I say may matter little to you." Several canti lament the deaths of beautiful women. To Leopardi's elaborate stanzas Galassi (who has also translated Montale) brings a light touch and a feel for modern speech.