O man,
Dear to the gods, count thyself fortunate
If now and then relief
Thou hast from pain, and blest
When death shall come to heal thee of all pain!
"The bodily deformities which humiliated Leopardi, and the cruel
infirmities that agonized him his whole life long, wrought in his
heart an invincible disgust, which made him invoke death as the sole
relief. His songs, while they express discontent, the discord of the
world, the conviction of the nullity of human things, are exquisite in
style; they breathe a perpetual melancholy, which is often sublime,
and they relax and pain your soul like the music of a single chord,
while their strange sweetness wins you to them again and again." This
is the language of an Italian critic who wrote after Leopardi's death,
when already it had begun to be doubted whether he was the greatest
Italian poet since Dante. A still later critic finds Leopardi's style,
"without relief, without lyric flight, without the great art of
contrasts, without poetic leaven," hard to read. "Despoil those verses
of their masterly polish," he says, "reduce those thoughts to prose,
and you will see how little they are akin to poetry."
I have a feeling that my versions apply some such test to Leopardi's
work, and that the reader sees it in them at much of the disadvantage
which this critic desires for it.
Pages:
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287