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PARTISAN REVIEW
crat by birth, unable to assume aristocratic privileges, an unfrocked
priest and a scholar without a chair at a university. These are some few
of the reasons his position has its parallels to the position of the poet
today-and none are more significant than his failures at practical
politics, his split between clericalism and the will not to dress as a priest,
between scholarly research and the actual writing of poetry. All the con–
temporary conflicts of his position are
in
the facts of his biography–
and the only optimistic conclusion that can be drawn from them is that
they inspired poems that are alive today. The best of his poems are as
untranslatable into English as the best of Keats's and the early Words–
worth's are into Italian ; he
is
like neither, but if one speaks of poetry
that is unquestionably poetry and
is
unstrained in its utterance, such is
the poetry that Leopardi wrote. In other words, in another language
(which makes all the difference in the world) and with an undertone
of irony inappropriate to Wordsworth, he expressed something that can
be
called in English "the still sad music of humanity." The tenuous na–
ture of being on earth, the continued duel between life and death are
among his themes. His poems to the moon recall (to English readers )
"Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art," but his vicarious
images of love-girls seen from the study windows of the Palazzo Re–
canati- these are completely unlike anything in English.
The nearest approach in English to Leopardi's Italian is Ezra
Pound's translation of his
Sopra il Ritratto di una Bella Donna: Scolpito
nel Monumento Sepolcrale Della Medesima.
The undercurrents of Leo–
pardi's irony which seem so modern are distinctly heard:
Such wast thou,
Who art now
But buried dust and rusted skeleton.
Above the bones and mire,
Motionless, placed in 'vain,
Mute mirror of the flight of speeding years,
Sole guard of grief
Sole guard of memory
Standeth this image of the beauty sped.
o
glance, when thou wast still as thou art now,
How hast thou set the fir,e
A-tremble in men's veins;
0
lip curved high
To mind me of some urn of full delight,
o
throat girt round of old with swift desire,
o
palms
()f
Love, that in your wonted ways
Not once but many a day
