William Michaelian

Poems, Notes, and Drawings

Tag Archive for ‘Leopardi’

Blessed in the Language

I gave up on Leopardi’s Zibaldone long ago. I’ve read thousands upon thousands of pages of other things since, so it was not because of its length, which I still regard as one of its saving graces. I stopped because I found it too generally negative in tone. My friend and fictional alter-ego, Stephen Monroe, was also negative, but his negativity was leavened with humor; also, he knew he was […]

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Desk, Bench, Zibaldone

For a good long stretch, I had been chipping away at Leopardi’s Zibaldone, a few lines here, a paragraph there, careful not to wrinkle the bible-thin pages. Since it is made to lie flat, I had been keeping the book open here on my mother’s desk. But the time came recently that I needed the space to accommodate more books: a complete six-volume set of Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage […]

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