It took seven years and a team of translators from Italy and the U.K. to produce the first complete English translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s famous notebook, the Zibaldone.
A collection of the 19th-century Italian poet's ideas, observations and analyses gathered between 1817 and 1832 for a total of more than 4,000 pages, the Zibaldone di pensieri (a title that could be translated as “jumble of thoughts”) was published in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, more than 60 years after Leopardi's premature death due to illness in 1837.
Up until now only parts of it had been translated into English. The new edition, produced by the Leopardi Centre at Birmingham University, is the full version, published for the first time this summer in the U.K. and the U.S.
"It has been very, very challenging because it's a very long text – huge, full of quotations in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English," said Franco D'Intino, professor of modern Italian literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, and director of the translation project. "One cannot master all that Leopardi mastered – that's the point. There is so much that he could understand that you cannot because you are not an encyclopaedic man of the 18th or 19th century. He was a genius, and I am not!"
Born in 1798 in Recanati in the Marche region of central Italy, Leopardi is considered by many one of Italy's finest lyric poets, second only to Dante. However, unlike Dante, he remains largely unknown in the anglophone world.
Michael Caesar, emeritus professor of Italian Studies at Birmingham and co-director of the Zibaldone translation project, said he hoped the book would inspire Anglo readers to get to know one of Europe’s lesser-known great writers.
"Leopardi is surprisingly modern, in the way in which he reasons, in his alertness to what is going on in the world around him, but also in the way in which he's in many ways implicitly or explicitly predicting how things will go in the future," said Caesar.
Published by Penguin in the U.K., the edition was released in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
