The Infinite

L’infinito – Giacomo Leopardi

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quiete
io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
infinito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.

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And here is my attempt at a translation:

Always precious to me was this solitary hill
as was also this hedge, which many parts
of the horizon’s end does from view exclude.
But sitting and gazing here, limitless
spaces beyond, and superhuman
silences, and the deepest quiet
in my mind do I feign; where unto the verge
of fear my heart all but reaches. And as the wind
I hear rustling through these bushes, I, that
infinite silence to this voice
start comparing: and I sense the eternal,
and the dead seasons, and the present,
and the living one, and how she sounds. So within this
immensity themselves my thoughts drown:
and the foundering to me seems sweet in this sea.

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Notes:

My translation is rather conservative. What I wanted to do was maintain the syntax of the original poem. But of course, doing so was a real challenge. After all, Italian words are stressed differently from English ones – e.g. when one pronounces ‘siepe’  (see-air-pay), one hangs onto the second syllable for slightly longer than for the other two, which are pronounced for an equally long duration of time; whereas in English, the equivalent word ‘hedge’ is monosyllabic and flat. As a result, in order to keep the rhythm of the original, I tried to surround the word ‘hedge’ with words that can make up for the two syllables which ‘hedge’ lacks. I used this approach throughout my translation whenever the syllable discrepancy came up.  

Equally difficult to translate were Leopardi’s adjectives: words like ‘interminati’ (which I think he made up), sovrumani, and profondissima, have equivalents in English – but these equivalents sound inadequate given the context. The problem with translating ‘interminati’ is, first of all, the fact that there are no equivalent words in English which I know of that contain five syllables. And although words like ‘unconcluding’, ‘boundless’, ‘unending’, and ‘limitless’, bear a similar meaning (‘interminati’ = unterminated), they do not begin with the prefix ‘in-‘ which the word ‘interminati’ shares with ‘infinito’. Although one could argue that finding a word that has such a prefix is not necessary, I believe it is important to the meaning of the poem, which discusses limits and being within and without them. When the prefix ‘in-‘ is added before an adjective, the the word takes on the meaning of its opposite – e.g. ‘indeterminate’ means the opposite of ‘determinate’ (although ‘infamous’ is not the opposite of ‘famous’). But as is also the case with English, ‘in’ is a preposition that means ‘in’. So when one reads words like ‘interminati’ and ‘infinito’, one may subconsciously think of the word ‘in’  in its prepositional sense, and thus consider what is meant by finite and infinite space.

To be perfectly honest, I should also mention that my translation borrows generously from the one I found on Wikipedia. It is not that I had any intentions of copying it, but I wanted to keep Leopardi’s structure intact, and that translation had done a remarkably good job at that. When I did branch away from it, it was because I was not satisfied with its rhythm.