In the Library
Canti
Giacomo Leopardi, 1835
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Frederick Townsend (1887)
- Original
- Original it
- Chapters
- Chapters 38
- Length
- Length 27k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
So my mind sinks in this immensity: and foundering is sweet in such a sea.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth climbs Snowdon by night and comes out above a sea of mist under the moon, a landscape that opens his mind onto the boundless much as Leopardi's hedge opens onto endless space.
£1.99
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Keats's Ode to a Nightingale does the same, letting one sensation draw the mind toward a longed-for dissolution, though his lure is birdsong and Leopardi's the silence beyond a hedge.
£1.99
The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens
Stevens's The Snow Man does the same, a mind emptied to behold the nothing that is, though his infinite is a cold blank and Leopardi's a sweet sea.
£1.99
About the book
A young poet climbs a lonely hill outside a small provincial town, and a hedge blocks his view of the horizon. That is all that happens. From that one obstruction Leopardi builds the most astonishing fifteen lines in Italian, because the hedge hides the world and the mind is suddenly free to imagine what lies past it: interminable spaces, superhuman silences, a depthless calm so vast the heart nearly recoils in fear. Then the wind stirs the branches, and the sound of this living moment rings against that imagined eternity, until the seasons, dead and present, come flooding in. L'infinito is not about a view. It is about the strange sweetness of being overwhelmed, the mind consenting to drown in something larger than itself. The poem carries you to the edge of thought and lets you go, and its final line has lived in the memory of Italian readers for two centuries: to founder, it says, is sweet in such a sea.