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Poems and translations

Chapter 45: LEOPARDI SILVIA
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About This Book

The collection gathers lyric and ballad-like poems that portray rural landscapes, local speech, and vivid characters through dark humor, elegy, and plainspoken lyricism; many pieces are concise narratives or monologues about love, death, loss, and social life, while others register mythic or meditative moods. A substantial section offers translations and adaptations from Petrarch, Villon, Leopardi, and medieval lyricists, varying between literal and free renderings. A prefatory essay frames the poet's interest in mixing exalted feeling with the material of ordinary life. The sequence balances songful rhythms with austere images and an abrupt, colloquial voice.

LEOPARDI

SILVIA

Are you bearing in mind that time when there was a fine look out of your eyes, and yourself, pleased and thoughtful, were going up the boundaries that are set to childhood? That time the quiet rooms, and the lanes about the house, would be noisy with your songs that were never tired out; the time you’d be sitting down with some work that is right for women, and well pleased with the hazy coming times you were looking out at in your own mind.

May was sweet that year, and it was pleasantly you’d pass the day.

Then I’d leave my pleasant studies, and the paper I had smudged with ink where I would be spending the better part of the day, and cock my ears from the sill of my father’s house, till I’d hear the sound of your voice, or of your loom when your hands moved quickly. It’s then I would set store of the quiet sky and the lanes and little places, and the sea was far away in one place and the high hills in another.

There is no tongue will tell till the judgment what I feel in myself those times.