The Life and Writings of Giacomo Leopardi

A review from Open Letters Monthly

Giacomo Leopardi

From Luciano Mangiafico (Open letters Monthly):

Hard to imagine a bleaker prospect for the future: you are a writer of genius, but you are trapped in a small village in the retrograde 19th century Papal States. You are unable to leave the household that is run by a cold, fanatically religious mother and a father who, having been through the turbulence of the Napoleonic period, is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. As the son of a nobleman, it was not proper for you to attend public schools, so priests privately tutored you until you knew more than they did. You then read systematically through your father’s library, learning several classical and modern languages, and ruining both your eyesight and your already fragile health in the process. You are a hunchback, suffered from many real and imaginary maladies, were derided for your scholarly pretensions, and your hope of finding a soul of the opposite sex who would reciprocate your love was virtually nonexistent.

You were cut off by distance from the centers of European intellectual life, such as Paris and Weimar, your only means of communications was letters, and yet and yet…despite all odds, you became one of greatest Italian poets and philosophers, a living link between Rousseau and Nietzsche. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi
• James Campbell, The Library: A World History
• Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems (Paperback)
• The Waste Land Project
• Ginsberg's Cold Summer Borscht

Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi

Cynthia Haven on Farrar, Straus & Giroux's new 2,600 page edition

Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi

A review of Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi, from The Book Haven:

Poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is too little known in the U.S., so I read with pleasure about the Farrar, Straus & Giroux publication of Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi, the 2,600-page edition of his complete notebooks. It will be some time before I can get around to the work itself, so I have to content myself with Robert Pogue Harrison‘s review over at the Financial Times here. We’ve written about Robert, the radio host for Entitled Opinions, here and here, among other places. He’s one of the most interesting writers at Stanford.

In his words, Zibaldone “is as important as the Notebooks of Coleridge, the Journals of Emerson, the Diaries of Kierkegaard, and the posthumous notes of Friedrich Nietzsche, first made available to the public under the title The Will to Power.” [Read More]

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