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A groundbreaking translation of the epic work of one of the great minds of the nineteenth centuryGiacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. (Jonathan Galassi's translation of Leopardi's "Canti" was published by FSG in 2010. ) He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the "Zibaldone, " or "hodge-podge, " as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading.