286
PARTISAN REVIEW
Felt hands turn ice a-sudden, touching rye,
That ye were once! of all the grace rye had
That which remaineth now
Shameful, most sad
Finds 'neath this rock tit mould, fit resting place!
It
is to be regretted that Pound did not translate a number of Leo–
pardi's poems; had he done so the impossible would have been almost
achieved.
The illness that Leopardi suffered was scoliosis, a curvature of the
spine, a disease which made its first appearance during
his
adolescence,
and the disease was allowed to run its course through the peculiarities
of parental neglect and indulgence. Conte Monaldo Leopardi, the boy's
father, a provincial nobleman in command of the Papal city of Re–
canati, nearly lost a fortune which was narrowly retrieved by his wife
who was as miserly as she was pious, so pious that she believed her
children, soon after birth, would be better off in heaven. Conte Monaldo
found refuge from his wife by collecting indiscriminately a large library
into which he led the small Giacomo, dressed as an infant abbe in a
cloak that swept the ground, a costume which he wore until his nine–
teenth year; it cloaked his deformity, and the boy, locked up in his
father's library, being precocious read beyond his years and seemed to
prepare himself for the priesthood. Actually the father wished to hold
the boy as his companion, to have him read the books which neither
his own gentle mind nor intimidated spirit could understand. When
the imprisoned boy heard the name of Giordani dropped by a visitor
to his father's library, he wrote letters at once to the one writer
in
Italy whom Byron respected. This action began Leopardi's career;
Giordani visited him at Recanati and inspired him to write in the
cause of a united Italy. Although the elder writer helped Leopardi pub–
lish poems he could not free
him
from attachments at home; nor could
he, spirited orator that he was, reform the miserly habits of the boy's
parents, nor could he create more than a fog of horror in the mind of
Conte Monaldo. Leopardi's escape from Recanati became in his short
life a long series of indecisive, and at last, bitterly won battles. A five–
month visit to Rome in the care of an uncle ended in failure; his hope
was a clerkship in philology at the Papal Court; but he could not bend
his pride to wear the short cape of a Papal servant, nor could the
hunchback, grown conscious of his deformity, force himself to smile at
those who patronized him. He returned home for two years, then drifted
by means of ill-paying tutoring assignments to Bologna and Milan, to
Florence and Pisa, and on a return to Florence met Ranieri, his savior,
his "liberator," a handsome young Neapolitan of liberal persuasion, who
