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Zibaldone

Launch of the second English edition of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone

Published in the USA and UK – after seven years of work – the first complete translation in English of the Zibaldone, the personal notebook written by Giacomo Leopardi between 1817 and 1832. A team of English and American professional translators collaborated to the project lead by Franco D’Intino (University of Rome “La Sapienza”) and Michael Caesar (University of Birmingham), under the auspices of the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani. The work is not only a translation, but an actual English “edition” featuring critical and philological apparatuses, notes, indexes and an extensive introduction. This essential book will change our understanding of the origins of modern culture. It is an extraordinary, epochal publication.Although all things great and beautiful and alive have been extinguished from the world, our inclination toward them remains.  Though we may be denied these things, nothing has or ever could stop us from wanting them.  Young people have not lost that longing which drives them to seek a life for themselves and to scorn nothingness and monotony. (Zib. 195-196)Presentation by Michael CaesarReadings by Ann Hallamore CaesarGiacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers, from Nietzsche to Beckett, as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or ‘hodgepodge,’ as Harold Bloom has called it, in which he put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. Published at the turn of the twentieth century, it has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture, and its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now. Franco D’Intino is Professor of Modern Italian Literature at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where he graduated in Italian literature and where he also completed his doctoral research on Leopardi in the context of European Romanticism. His main areas of research are theory and history of the genre “autobiography” and the work of Giacomo Leopardi. He is Director of the Leopardi Centre, based in the Italian Department at the University of Birmingham, and Director of the Laboratorio Leopardi, based in the School for Advanced Studies (SSSAS) at “La Sapienza.” Michael Caesar is Emeritus Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Birmingham (UK). He has published widely on poetic improvisation and performance and its interaction with orality and literacy in 18th-19th century Italy, on literary theory (Gaetano Della Volpe, Eco and Joyce, the neo-avantgarde, Franco Moretti), and on key modern Italian authors, among them Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Gianni Celati. His most recent essay on Leopardi, ‘Voice, Speaking, Silence in Leopardi’s Verse’, is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford University Press).Ann Hallamore Caesar is Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Warwick where she holds a Chair in Italian Studies. She began her professional career as an extramural lecturer before taking up a university lectureship in Italian at Cambridge where she was Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She moved to Warwick in 1999. She publishes widely on nineteenth and twentieth century literature.

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