A groundbreaking translation of the epic work of one of the great minds of the nineteenth century. (Jonathan Galassi's translation of Leopardi's Canti was published by FSG in 2010.) Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many he is the finest Italian poet. He was a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career he kept an immense notebook known as the Zibaldone or "hodge-podge " as Harold Bloom has called it in which Leopardi put down his original wide-ranging radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion philosophy language history anthropology astronomy literature poetry and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness and the Zibaldone which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4 500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham England have spent years producing a lively accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary epochal publication.
