Giacomo 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.

First published in 1831, and here presented in a dual-language edition with annotations and additional reading material, Leopardi's poetical masterpiece is an unsurpassed anatomy of man's unhappiness on earth.

These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition.