Now that Italian valor lies uprooted, one huge ruin - Leopardi, Belli, Manzoni, Nievo

I went to a different Leopardi poem, Canto VI, “Bruto Minore, ” p. 57 in Galassi.  Giacomo Leopardi is the great poet and essayist of pessimism.  I am tempted to go on and on about him, but I should save that for a longer treatment.

One inspiration for turning to Italian literature was to take a crack at the 2010 Jonathan Galassi translation of Leopardi’s Canti (1818-35), which is proving to be ideal as a study guide.  The translation is on the literal side, and not so poetic.  The J. G. Nichols translations from 1994 are more poetic.  Nichols matches each poem to a prose selection from elsewhere in Leopardi’s gigantic corpus, from his brilliantly ironic essays and dialogues or his enormous ragbag book Zibaldone.

The latter appeared in English last year, almost 2,600 pages by a team of translators, quite a feat.  A sane reader will want to start with the selections assembled by Leopardi in the (short) book Pensieri, and to the Canti, and the Moral Essays, and then will want to return to them again and again, until he decides to write a monograph on Leopardi, and only then will he want to read Zibaldone, although in Italian, obviously.

You give Zibaldone a try and tell me how it goes.  I’m not going to read it.

Giuseppe Belli was a contemporary of Leopardi’s, but otherwise a polar opposite.  He wrote satirical sonnets, most profane, obscene, or both, in Romanish, the Roman dialect.  You may have noticed that every writer I have mentioned so far has been from northern Italy.  Belli stretches Italian literature to Rome for me.  The rough, crackly Harold Norse translation is a great treat – he moves the dialect into Brooklynese to good effect – but these five poems recently done up by Charles Martin give the flavor of Belli.

Two early novels, both candidates for Greatest Italian Novel.  I have read Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827 / 1842) twice and do not plan to revisit it now – someday, I hope – but I recommend it highly.  It is a strange book, a mix of sentimentalism and grit, Catholic apologetics and action.  It’s structure is odd, its characterization is odd.  It is a historical novel, set during a 17th century Austrian invasion of northern Italy.  The plague scenes are horrifying.  With Decameron, this means two of the greatest prose fictions in Italian are about plague epidemics.

The other novel.  I was poking around on the internet trying to find a novel I had looked through in a library.  Success!  The Castle of Fratta by Ippolito Nievo, which I was surprised to discover was only an abridgment of a much longer novel, Confessions of an Italian (1867), which I was even more surprised to see will be published in a complete 928 page translation in the United States in three weeks.  Which I took as a sign that I should take a swing at it.  No idea what I am getting into.  The novel has maps and a timeline and a list of characters.  The list of characters includes a dog.  Is it an Italian War and Peace?  Or an Italian The Count of Monte Cristo?  Or, like The Betrothed, something unique.  Italo Calvino loves the book, but he is not to be trusted, since he, like me, likes everything.

Aside from writing a thousand page novel when he was 27, Nievo was a revolutionary and follower of Garibaldi, a real adventurer, who sadly drowned in a shipwreck, age 29, before he had found a publisher.  There’s some Italian valor.