It follows that we are best off when we understand things least, because “a tiny confused idea is always greater than a vast one which is clear.” In an individual life, the time of happy illusion is childhood; in historical terms, the happiest people were Leopardi’s beloved Greeks, who still believed in the gods and in eternal glory. On the other hand, a modern, educated European, who sees the world through the cold lens of reason, is the unhappiest person imaginable. “This is the terrible human condition and the barbarous teaching of reason,” he wrote when he was just twenty-one years old. “Since human pleasures and pains are mere illusions, the anguish deriving from the certainty of the nothingness of things is always the only true reality.”

In this way, Leopardi constructs a metaphysical prison, from which escape is impossible; and reading him sometimes feels like being locked in a cell with him. It is not an experience for the fainthearted. Anyone acquainted with depression will find Leopardi dreadfully plausible: another name for his “reason” could be depressive lucidity, and his works communicate an apathy and an anhedonia that are almost contagious. He himself was certainly prey to what would now be called acute depression, as is clear from his letters to Giordani: “If in this moment I were to go mad, my madness would consist of sitting always with my eyes staring, my mouth open, and my hands between my knees, without laughing or crying, or even moving except for sheer necessity. . . . I no longer see any difference between death and this my life.”

If Leopardi’s poetry was merely the expression in verse of this state of mind, however, it could hardly have become so beloved. Leopardi was not often moved to write verse—the “Canti” includes only thirty-six finished poems, along with a handful of shorter or fragmentary pieces—and there were periods of years when he wrote no poetry at all. But, when he did write, it was usually because something had temporarily broken up his misery—not to the extent of producing actual happiness but enough to permit him to contemplate the dreadful facts of existence in a creative light. In his very earliest poems, this factor is patriotism, which allows him to imagine that the fallenness of mankind is merely the fallenness of an Italy subjugated by French and Austrian occupiers. “O my country,” Leopardi begins in “To Italy,” “I can see the walls / and arches and the columns and the statues / and lonely towers of our ancestors, / but I don’t see the glory.” He is still young enough to believe that the glory can be restored, by acts of heroism like those of the Greeks at Thermopylae.

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These first poems brought Leopardi the fame of a patriotic poet, the bard of the Risorgimento, but he quickly lost faith in politics. Seeing human nature as he did, he could hardly help disdaining the progressive, activist certainty of so many Italian literary men as a shallow delusion. One of his last poems, “Recantation for Marchese Gino Capponi,” is a mock apology for his quietism, which turns into a blunt satire on the nineteenth-century belief in progress, the age of “universal love, / railroads, expanded commerce, steam, / typography and cholera.” The reasons for human suffering were innate and individual, not accidental and social, and it was absurd to hope to make “a joyful, happy race” from “many wretched and unhappy persons.”

In his great “idylls,” a series of six poems written from 1819 to 1821 (around the time Keats was producing his Odes), Leopardi finds a source of pleasure, instead, in the very voluptuousness of his suffering. This is the period of “Infinity,” perhaps the archetypal Romantic poem in any language, with its closing embrace of death: “So my mind sinks in this immensity: / and foundering is sweet in such a sea.” In “To the Moon,” Leopardi again achieves an apotheosis of the vague, bittersweet longing of adolescence:

Yet it helps me, thinking back, reliving the time of my unhappiness. Oh in youth, when hope has a long road ahead and the way of memory is short, how sweet it is remembering what happened, though it was sad, and though the pain endures!

This is a Romantic’s revision of Dante, who wrote that the worst suffering is to recall happy times when you are miserable. To Leopardi, remembering the miserable times is its own kind of happiness. It is lines like these that George Santayana must have been thinking of when he wrote that “long passages” of his verse “are fit to repeat in lieu of prayers through all the watches of the night.”

Because the bitterness of the thoughts in Leopardi’s poems is redeemed primarily by the sweetness and purity of the language—what Galassi calls his “impenetrably perfect, sonorous expressiveness”—he presents an unusual challenge for the translator. He is one of those poets who are often said to be untranslatable, and it is remarkable how little he figures in the consciousness of English readers, compared with, say, Baudelaire or Hölderlin. (The standard English-language biography of Leopardi, by Iris Origo, appeared in 1935.) In the face of this challenge, Galassi—who, in addition to being a poet and a translator, is the head of Farrar, Straus & Giroux—has taken the tactful and intelligent approach of translating primarily for sense, “a close approximation of the poem’s literal thrust,” rather than trying to re-create Leopardi’s metres and rhymes. By using unaffected words and a natural movement in his English versions, Galassi loses the acoustic density of the Italian (which appears in the edition as a parallel text) but, by the same token, preserves Leopardi’s classical directness—what one Italian critic has referred to as the “sublime poverty” of his style. The effect is evident throughout his work, as in “To Silvia”:

Silvia, do you remember still that moment in your mortal life when beauty shimmered in your smiling, startled eyes as, bright and pensive, you arrived at the threshold of youth?

Between 1823 and 1828, as Leopardi moved from Milan to Bologna to Florence to Pisa in search of an affordable city with a tolerable climate, he wrote almost no verse. It says something about the nature of his genius that it was only when he returned to his loathed Recanati, and to the family home that suffocated him, that he was inspired to return to poetry. Once again, his theme was the way “youth’s beloved moment flies, more dear / than fame and laurel, dearer than the simple / light of day and breath.” But now youth was receding into memory, and his reflections become more impersonal and elegiac. Nothing could be more characteristic than the way Leopardi compares the period of youth not, as we might expect, to the rising sun but to “The Setting of the Moon,” the title of one of his last poems. Even at the age Leopardi believes to be the prime of life, there is no real sunlight, only the “thousand lovely / insubstantial images and phantoms” cast by the moonlight. When this moon sets, all that is left is the pitch-blackness of adulthood, when “life is forlorn, lightless.”