After thoughts

Giacomo Leopardi was the perfect selection in my opinion. He is not originally English and I can understand some of the references and allusions due to my experiences as an Italian student. His name popped up in my Italian class after I chose him while the Italian exchange was gone and I had a substitute teacher. I am glad I chose him as my poet to study also because I felt that he has some fantastic work. Read and spoken in both languages. I was capable of writing a majority of my paper in only a few short hours. A few revisions required the most of my time but I felt I understand the poems fairly well. They were very well written which helped determine the appropriate meanings behind the words. I wish to one day travel tonItaly and possibly study, and thanks to this paper I can say I know quite a bit about one of the greatest Italian poets of the nineteenth century.

My conquest continues...

I needed to annotate my other three poems and read them in both languages too. I chose Scherzo, To Himself, and L'infinto. More and more I began to realize how much pain and suffering the man went through emotionally and physically. To Himself is about him talking to himself about dying because he has done all he needs to do. To me that is very sad. As I read the poems and annotated them I started to realize making the focus of my paper about how the languages work together to make the poems great poems would have been too complicated and very short. The poems are how they are interpreted and it seems that they will be interpreted about the same way in different languages. Most translations seem more literal and lose some meaning which is true, but the difference of the poems in the two languages seemed too minuscule to talk about, partially because my thought process is in English so even as I read in Italian, I understand in English. I had to take a different direction with my paper and just wrote as if the poet were an English writing poet for meaning and structure but I wanted to make it clear that the sound is completely different and usually better in the original Italian. My written paper did not take that long.

First poem encounters

Giacomo's most popular poems are combined in I Canti which is Italian for the songs. I scrolled through all the poems that were listed on one particular website in a random order. I decided to choose two fairly short ones and I knew I needed a longer one. I looked for my final one by cross referencing for one of the important ones or more well analyzed compared to the rest. L'italia was the long poem which I read in Italian first. I surprised myself with how much I initially understood and I looked up the meaning for some of the more intricate vocabulary in the Italian language. Then I read it in English. I realized that things in your own language seem less original or appealing. It's may be common with most people as we are stimulated by things that are new or different. That may just be human nature working with my thought processes. I learned a lot about Giacomo as a person from this poem. He lived a lonely life, yet he was very patriotic because the love for his country was the only love he could ever encounter during his life. His parents were cruel and practically neglects him and his siblings in patently ways. He was at war every day with his health and he would not let that bother him. He would die for his country if he needed to. This poem also show boated his classical knowledge as he mastered Latin, Greek, and somewhat Hebrew as a young adult. I admired L'Italia and the symbolism and passion behind Giacomo.

My Poet

When the list of poets came out for who we could choose to write about for our quarter three essay, I was probably one of few people that didn't have the slightest clue who to pick before looking at the list. As I scanned through the long list of names I had never heard, I came across Giacomo Leopardi. I was sold. I had not heard about him until then, but the Italian name was more than enough to grab my interest. AP Italian is one of my courses this year so I thought that choosing Giacomo Leopardi would teach me a lot of things that benefit me in both classes. I figured he must be very important in Italy since he was on the list so it would be possible that I would come across his name learning about culture. I also assumed his original poems would have been in Italian and translated into English. Good news is... I was right. I couldn't wait to read his poems in both languages and compare them which I originally thought would be the main focus for my paper. The first thing I did when I chose him was just google his name to see what would come up. I saw he lived during the late 1700s and early 1800s and had a declining health as he got older which fascinated me. It was certainly unfortunate, but because of his health decline he had a different perspective on life and accomplished great feats in his work. I'm not usually excited to write papers even though I like to write, but I didn't think this one would cause any issues for me. His poems were something I didn't mind reading when I got to them.