Alla sua Donna or To his woman
Last of the Canzoni, “opera di 6 giorni” composed at Recanati in September 1823 (after over a year without writing poetry), it was first published in the Bologna 1824 edition. In the Florence 1831 edition and on it appeared as separate from the Canzoni, after the Idilli, by way of conclusion to the “first part” of Leopardi’s poetic activity.
In the Announcement that premised the reprinting of the Annotations to the ten Canzoni in “Nuovo Ricoglitore” in Milan in September 1825, Leopardi wrote ironically about the all the themes of the Canzone:
La donna, cioè l’innamorata, dell’autore, è una di quelle immagini, uno di quei fantasmi di bellezza e virtù celeste e ineffabile, che ci occorrono spesso alla fantasia, nel sonno e nella veglia, quando siamo poco più che fanciulli, e poi qualche rara volta nel sonno, o in una quasi alienazione di mente, quando siamo giovani. Infine è la donna che non si trova. L’autore non sa se la sua donna (e così chiamandola, mostra di non amare altra che questa) sia mai nata finora, o debba mai nascere; sa che ora non vive in terra, e che noi non siamo suoi contemporanei; la cerca tra le idee di Platone, la cerca nella luna, nei pianeti del sistema solare, in quei de’ sistemi delle stelle. Se questa Canzone si vorrà chiamare amorosa, sarà pur certo che questo tale amore non può né dare né patir gelosia, perché fuor dell’autore, nessun amante terreno vorrà fare all’amore col telescopio.
The woman, that is to say the author’s beloved, is one of those images, one of those phantoms of beauty and celestial virtue and infallible, which our fantasy often needs, both in sleep and when awake, when we are little more than children, and then a few rare times in sleep, or in a state of virtual mental alienation, when we are young. Lastly she is the woman that it is impossible to find. The author does not know if his woman (and calling her thus he demonstrates how he loves none other than her) has ever been born as yet, or that she ever could be born; he knows she is now not of this earth, and that we are not her contemporaries; he looks for her among Plato’s ideas, he seeks her on the moon, in the planets of the solar system, in those of other stars. If we wish to call this Canzone amorous it will certainly be that this same love cannot give or suffer jealousy, because the author apart, no earthly lover will want to make love with a telescope.
It is to be noted that the Canto contains pessimistic references to the hardness of the present (“Fra cotanto dolore / quanto all’umana età propose il fato”, “io seggo e mi lagno / del giovanile error che m’abbandona”, “nel secol tetro e in questo aer nefando/In such pain which to life fate gave, I sit and lament of the youthful erring that abandons me”, vv. 23-4, 36-7, 42), yet toned done with tasteful irony. And it should also be noted that the irony does not hide the evident and true transport that Leopardi felt for the image of “his” beautiful Woman in the dream (“and of the image, / as what is real is denied to me, I take great pleasure”, vv. 43-4).
