Poetry

To His Lady

by Giacomo Leopardi

Beloved beauty who inspires

love in me from afar, your face obscured

except when your celestial image

stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields

where light and nature's laughter shine more lovely—

was it maybe you who blessed

the innocent age called golden,

and do you now, blithe spirit,

fly among men? Or does that miser fate

who hides you from us save you for the future?

No hope of seeing you alive

remains for me now,

except when, naked and alone,

my soul will go down a new street

to its unknown home. Already at the dawn

of my dark, uncertain day

I imagined you a fellow traveler

on this arid ground. But there's no thing

that resembles you on earth. And if someone

had a face like yours, in act and word she'd be,

though something like you, far less beautiful.

In spite of all the suffering

fate decreed for human time,

if there were anyone on earth

who truly loved you as my thought depicts you,

this life for him would be a blessing.

And I see clearly how your love

would lead me still to strive for praise and virtue,

as I used to in my early years.

Though heaven gave no comfort for our troubles,

yet with you mortal life would be

like what in heaven leads to divinity.

In the valleys, where the song

of the weary farmer sounds,

and when I sit and mourn

the illusions of youth fading,

and on the hills where I recall

and grieve for my lost desires

and my life's lost hope, I think of you

and start to shake. If only I, in this

sad age and unhealthy atmosphere,

could keep hold of your noble look; for since the real thing's

missing I must make do with the image.

Whether you are the only one

of the eternal ideas eternal wisdom

refuses to see arrayed in sensible form

to know the pains of mortal life

in transitory spoils,

or if in the supernal spheres another earth

from among unnumbered worlds receives you

and a near star lovelier than the Sun

warms you and you breathe benigner ether,

from here, where years are both ill-starred and brief,

accept this hymn from your unnoticed lover.

Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi

Translator Notes:
Leopardi's canzone "To His Lady" was written in 1823, as the twenty-five-year-old poet was about to embark on the philosophical essays and dialogues of the Operette morali. As he later wrote:

The lady, who is the beloved of the author, is one of those images, one of those celestial and ineffable phantoms of beauty and virtue, which often come to our imagination during sleep or sleeplessness, when we are little more than children, and then on rare occasions in sleep, or in a sort of alienation of the mind, when we are young. Finally, she is the woman who can't be found. The author doesn't know whether his lady (and in calling her this, he shows he loves only her) has been born until now, or ever will be born: he knows that now she does not live on earth, and that we are not her contemporaries; he looks for her among the ideas of Plato, he looks for her in the moon, in the planets of the solar system, in the constellations. If this canzone wants to be called amorous, it is nevertheless true that love such as this can neither arouse nor suffer jealousy, because apart from the author no tender lover wants to make love with a telescope.

In this unusually abstract poem, Leopardi seeks to distill his notion of woman and beauty, much as he will analyze the idea of love in a later canzone, "Il pensiero dominante" (The dominant idea). As he would write in Aspasia (1834):

the wounded mortal dreams
the daughter of his mind, the amorous idea,
this high thing he keeps largely to himself,
in face, in habits, and expression fully
like the one whom the confused, enraptured
lover likes to dream about and love.
Yet it's not she whom he reveres and loves
even while he holds her, but this other.
Finally, seeing the error of his misplaced
feelings, he becomes enraged, and often
wrongly blames the woman.

The absent beloved is a defining feature of the Italian lyric tradition from Dante's Beatrice to Petrarch's Laura all the way to Montale's Clizia. In Leopardi, we can see, her absence is existential—and essential. Here he imagines and describes the idea that is embodied in the representative characters—Silvia and Nerina and Elvira and Aspasia—who populate his work. The great challenge for the translator is to try to make his abstract music musical somehow without the benefit of rhyme.—JG