Poetry Daily Response

“The Setting of the Moon” by Giacomo Leopardi, translated by Jonathan Galassi

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14930

It is probably best to start by explaining why I chose this poem, which, in its origins, is so much older and differs so greatly from the others. The element that initially caught my attention was the fact that the poem was a translation of a poem of a poet whom I knew. Leopardi wrote at the very beginning of the nineteenth century in what were then the Papal States in Italy. His language is, therefore, that of the dialect spoken in the Marche at that time. Considering the very unusual language, I thought that a translation was a very curious idea. Having read the poem, it greatly reminded me of “La Quiete Dopo la Tempesta”, another poem by Leopardi, which also carries the same structure of departing from something seemingly beautiful to find the sorrow present within the scene and, by extension, within life. The final thing that caught my attention was the metaphor of night as life. Existence is usually (perhaps too often) compared to the day; Leopardi, however, compares it to nighttime, thus further emphasizing the sense of gloom and desperation that he attributes to life.

Leopardi starts with a beautiful description of a “solitary night … silvered” by the moon. He depicts all aspects of the landscape as entirely illuminated by this light from above, until the volta in the twelfth line. The moon sets and the landscape is plunged into darkness as all of its features disappear, and the “carter… singing a mournful melody … [and] salutes the last ray” of that heavenly sphere that “led him on before”. The moon is portrayed very similarly to the way that the sun is often described: as a guide and provider of light (with all of the figurative meanings attached to this). Therefore, with the moon’s vanishing, all hope and guidance is lost, which leads in to the second stanza.

In the first verse, Leopardi introduces the simile that he will extend throughout the entire stanza: he compares the vanishing moon to youth. He declares that “it leaves mortal life behind [and] the shapes of grand illusions flee” together will all of those things that had previously made life beautiful. He then returns to the traveler who now “searches unavailingly” for a goal in life. The author writes that without the light of youth, “life is forlorn”, thereby introducing the principal theme of the poem: life’s wretchedness caused by the rapid extinguishment of youth.

It is precisely this grievance that Leopardi puts forth in the third stanza; he asserts that the mortality of life was too little a punishment and so the second half of life had to be turned into a living hell with the onset of old age. He calls death something “too lenient” and so people were “given a half-life far more cruel than death itself”: senility. He calls it a state in which “desire is unfulfilled and hope extinguished” and “with no more joy”. Leopardi’s view of life, however, extends well beyond youth. It is a general pessimism in regard to the entirety of life, since youth is but a small part of the existence that people are given.

The fourth and final stanza simply confirms the desperation presented in the previous stanzas. Giacomo Leopardi compares the cyclic day with mortal life. In the first, the dawn will soon appear and light will return, while the second “remains a widow all the way”. Thus, night is the only life that one is given, and only the moon in its first half will give any hope or pleasant thoughts; when it vanishes, only that which is dark remains to torture the living until death, which comes about without ever letting one see the sun rise.

Although the poem does not carry any complex structure or figurative language, it is very beautiful in its simplicity and in the beauty of the images that Leopardi illustrates. Even after having read the poem many times, the metaphor of life as a primarily moonless night still seems very original and alluring. I must, however, remark that the endless pessimism of the poem does render it somewhat absurd. To display all of life as a night of darkness and desperation with only a small glimmer of hope in the beginning seems excessive, even for Leopardi’s usually oppressive style. Regarding the translation itself, the lack of a regular rhythm and rhyme in the poem greatly facilitates the task of translating it, and so the only topic of discussion could be the translator’s word choice and the different sound of the language, the last of which is inevitable. The translation of the words seems to mostly be accurate (although I readily admit that I poorly qualified to make the judgment), but the sound of the poem and its irregular, yet conspicuous rhythm vanish in the English version. All in all, however, it is a very beautiful poem and the translation eliminates little of its effect.