{"product_id":"9780691016443-secondhand-leopardi-selected-poems","title":"Leopardi: Selected Poems","description":"These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never \"come over\" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets. By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), Leopardi: Selected Poems should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a \"criticism of life.\"The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti.","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49180920807643,"sku":"9780691016443-SECONDHAND","price":12.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/f92364b6-3b12-41c7-b6c9-fc11f78da4d1.jpg?v=1787656761","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/9780691016443-secondhand-leopardi-selected-poems","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}