Word: leopardi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHAT Ungaretti drew from the War was the peculiar knowledge of a "disabused modern consciousness," not d'Annunzio's heroic myth of the theatrical, but rather the awareness of anonymity and other sorrows. Influenced more by Giacomo Leopardi, the great Italian poet of the nineteenth century, and by Mallarmé, than by the aesthetic exigencies of his own age, Ungaretti shared with his close friends Apollinaire and the Fauvist Braque a profound despair over history's irrationality. But Apollinaire never survived the War, and those who did were so shattered and forlorn that their only response was that...
...culdesac, a newly successful English movie star named Annabel Chris topher. Though neither pretty ("a peaky face and mousey hair") nor clever ("a deep core of stupidity that thrives on the absence of a looking-glass"), she projects well-bred sexiness on the screen. In the hands of Luigi Leopardi, a chimerical Roman director, she becomes "the English Lady-Tiger." The public image is painstakingly built up by the movie company, and inevitably it begins to seep into Annabel's psyche. Her husband Frederick, an intelligent, surly man, is a much-photographed adjunct of the image, and when...
...have taken on his vacation: all of Henry James, Proust, Chekhov and Henri Michaux; three volumes of Sartre's Situations; Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky, in three volumes; four F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and two by Hemingway; six art books; Nan Hoa Tchen King by Tchouang Tzeu; Leopardi's Zibaldone; and Alice in Wonderland...
...occasionally repeats an effect needlessly. His talent lies in choosing witty, nimble metaphors to give life to the clash of values between his two protagonists. When Tognazzi starts rolling his own cigarettes, expropriating for the purpose a page from the professor's miniature volume of poems by Leopardi, the professor watches a classic poem burn, then resignedly selects for his own smoke "a minor work." Both men understate their roles in virtuoso style, whether locked in ideological combat or coping with a nubile vagrant (Stefania Sandrelli) who tramps the countryside like a one-girl emporium-stealing clothes, swapping souvenirs...
...Homer and the Sappho are routine, and the randy-romantic Villon ploddingly pedestrian ("Oh where is last year's snow?"). The quiet golden glow of Leopardi's L'infinito, one of the supreme sonnets in all literature, is messily extinguished; the wild-strawberry innocence of Hebel's Sic Transit acquires a chemical tang of quick-frozen fruitiness; and the fine dandiacal glitter of the Baudelaires is spotted with phraseological mudballs-"this obscene beast," for instance, is scarcely a felicitous rendition of "ce monstre délicat...