Canzoni rifiutate

The canzoni Per una donna inferma di malattia lunga e mortale (about a woman the victim of a long and mortal illness) and Nella morte di una donna fatta trucidare col suo portato dal corruttore per mano ed arte di un chirurgo (about a pregnant woman killed by a surgeon) were composed in Recanati in March-April 1819; and based, the first perhaps but the second for sure, on true contemporary episodes.

Leopardi wanted to publish them in 1820, together with the Canzone Ad Angelo Mai, but he was blocked by his father Monaldo; after this unsuccessful attempt, the two canzoni were never included in any of Leopardi’s books (and it is thus that they are termed “rifiutate” or refused).

The canzoni are worthy of note for the experimentation of a  literary register unusual for Leopardi, extremely realistic and “pathetic”, close to the “romantic” by him stigmatised only a year earlier in the Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica:

Misera, invan le braccia

spasimate stendesti, ed ambe invano

sanguinasti le palme a stringer volte,

come il dolor le caccia,

gli smaniosi squarci e l’empia mano.

Or io te non appello,

carnefice nefando, uso ne’ putri

corpi affondar l’acciaro (Nella morte di una donna, vv. 43-50)

Together with the “pathetic” we also find a meditation upon society and more generally mankind; and the canzoni are rich in linguistic elements and contents which are to be found again in subsequent works, from the theme of death and young woman to that of suicide, pain for the destiny of mankind and the corruption of the world, not to mention his protestations against the malice of nature:

Poveri noi mortali

che incontro al fato non abbiam valore.

...

... natura

n’ha fatti a la sciaura

tutti quanti siam nati. ...

...

e chi diritto guata,

nostra famiglia a la natura è gioco.

Ma questo ti conforti

sopra ogni cosa, ch’innocente mori,

né ’l mondo ti spirò suo puzzo in viso. (Per una donna inferma, vv. 79-80, 97-9, 116-20)