Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia
This Canzone entitled the Nocturnal canto of an errant Shepard from Asia was composed in Recanati between 22 October 1829 and 9 April 1830, and was published for the first time in the Florence 1831 edition (with the title Canto notturno d’un pastore vagante dell’Asia; then with the final title in the Canti published in Naples in 1835).
The Canto is based on an article in the “Journal des Savants” dated September 1826, concerning Baron Meyendorff, Voyage d’Orembourg à Boukhara, fait en 1820 (1826), partially transcribed in the Zibaldone of 3 October 1828, where we read: “Plusieurs d’entre eux (d’entre les Kirkis), dice M. de Meyendorff, ib., passent la nuit assis sur une pierre à regarder la lune, et à improviser des paroles assez tristes sur des airs qui ne le sont pas moins” (= “Many of them – among the Kirghiz- ... pass the night sitting on a rock looking at the moon, improvising sad words to melodies that are equally sad”, pp. 399-400).
Through the fiction of the song of the Kirghiz shepherd (in simple language, but with powerful elements drawn from Petrarch) Leopardi, having partially abandoned his autobiographical leanings and the “city” setting of his other Cantos (the three preceding and the two subsequent ones), reflects upon the meaning of life, death and pain, posing a series of universal interrogatives destined to remain unanswered (“What do you do, moon, in the sky?”, “If life is misadventure, / why do we suffer it?”, “What means this / immense solitude? And who am I?”, vv. 1, 55-6, 88-9).
The bitter certainty is that life is unhappy; not only the shepherd’s solitary life:
Questo io conosco e sento,
che degli eterni giri,
che dell’esser mio frale (= “fragile”),
qualche bene o contento
avrà fors’altri; a me la vita è male. (vv. 100-4);
But also the life of all men, and even of the whole of the world of animals:
O forse erra dal vero,
mirando all’altrui sorte, il mio pensiero;
forse in qual forma, in quale
stato che sia, dentro covile o cuna (= “culla”),
è funesto a chi nasce il dì natale. (vv. 139-43)
