'So my mind sinks in this immensity: and foundering is sweet in such a sea' Revisited and reorganized over his lifetime, this extraordinary work was described by Leopardi as a 'reliquary' for his ideas, feelings and deepest preoccupations. It encompasses drastic shifts in tone and material, and includes early personal elegies and idylls; radical public poems on history and politics; philosophical satires; his great, dark, despairing odes such as 'To Silvia'; and later masterworks such as 'The Setting of the Moon', written not long before Leopardi's death. Infused with classical allusion and nostalgia, yet disarmingly modern in their spare, meditative style and their sense of alienation and scepticism, the Canti influenced the following two centuries of Western lyric poetry, and inspired thinkers and writers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Beckett and Lowell. Jonathan Galassi's direct new translation sensitively responds to the musicality of the Canti, while his introduction discusses the paradoxes of Leopardi's life and work.

Leopardi's rejection of the Catholicism of his childhood and Enlightenment optimism gives his work a contemporary feel. In J.G. Nichols's translations we grasp the consistent strain of thought in writing, including a biography woven of Leopardi's own words.

There is a sense in which one might say, as Leopardi did say about poetry, that his poems are born of illusion, yet what they register is a lament over its loss and a persistent rejection of all deception. The Canti are conspicuously influenced by illusion, but paradoxically dominated by a continual taking the measure, as it were, of truth, of a human and cosmic reality which simply is what it is. In generalising his convictions the poet does make a certain claim on our belief and he challenges us to take what he says seriously. However, the merit of the poems themselves is the full expression of those convictions; it is this aspect that this Introduction addresses, and not whether we should agree or disagree with Leopardi. Its aim is to explain in order to help appreciate what is found on the page. It is an analysis of the poems and an attempt to create a coherent and comprehensive structure for students in which nearly all the Canti can be considered from several points of view.

This new translation brings to English-speaking readers an intense and brooding work by the greatest poet of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto. Begun as a sequel to his epic masterpiece Orlando Furioso (1516), the unfinished Cinque Canti are a powerful poem in their own right. Tragic in tone,they depict the disintegration of the chivalric world of Charlemagne and his knights and give poetic expression to a sense of cultural, political, and religious crisis felt in Ariosto's Italy and in early sixteenth-century Europe more generally. David Quint's introduction freshly examines the literary sources and models of the Cinque Canti and discusses the cultural contexts and historical occasions of the poem. Printed with facing Italian text, this volume allows the modern reader to experience a work of Renaissance literature whose savage beauty still has the power to chill and fascinate. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996. This new translation brings to English-speaking readers an intense and brooding work by the greatest poet of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto. Begun as a sequel to his epic masterpiece Orlando Furioso (1516), the unfinished Cinque Canti ar

First published in 1937, this book presents a selection of poems from Leopardi's Canti in the original Italian. Created primarily for university students, the selection was made with the idea of representing as fully as possible all stages of Leopardi's poetic career. The text also contains a detailed introduction, notes and bibliography, all in English. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Leopardi's poetry and Italian literature.

Sublime poetic masterpiece recounting the poet's allegorical journey through the afterlife follows Dante through the infernal regions of Hell, where punishment is determined by gravity of sinner's transgressions, through Purgatory where souls are atoning for their misdeeds and to the entrance to Paradise, where he meets his beloved Beatrice.