PINDEMONTE, IPPOLITO. - Poet, b. at Verona on 13 Nov. 1753, d. there on 18 Nov. 1828. He studied at Modena. When barely more than twenty, also for reasons of health, he undertook travels to Florence, Rome, where he was named an Arcadian academician, Naples, Sicily, and Malta, where he was made a knight of the Order. Having returned to his homeland, in the leisure of his villa at Avesa he wrote (besides the utterly forgotten tragedy Arminio) the two little volumes of Poesie and Prose campestri (1785). He then resumed traveling in Savoy, Switzerland, and France. From Paris he went on to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Marseille: the travels that Foscolo would affectionately recall to him (Sepolcri, vv. 213-14). Having returned to Verona, he alternated the works of sincere piety with literary works: Epistole, Sermoni, Viaggi (in verse), the Elogi of men of letters, and the translation of the Odyssey, a labor that lasted until his death.
It was of the Poesie campestri that Foscolo was thinking when he spoke of the « mesta armonia » that governs the song of P. (Sepolcri, vv. 8-9). A definition that revives him and almost creates him. But invocations of solitude, of melancholy, of the white sadness of fields lit by the moon return insistently in the Prose campestri, where it is legitimate to catch a foreboding of Romanticism. Romanticism and not Arcadia; a foretaste, therefore, not a late flowering. And, wishing to reduce P. to a formula, one will say that he is a Romantic in the guise of a classicist. P. lives in anthologies for a single poem: that Malinconia which is typical of his art and of his soul, with little five-syllable verses that seem to give us exactly the measure of his light and brief breath. In his own times, he was more celebrated than Foscolo and rivaled Monti. But one feels how far he is from the one and the other. Of the former he does not have the imaginative power, of the latter he lacks the lyrical intoxication. What remains is his labor as a translator; most noble, for, however many translations of the Odyssey there have been after him, his, despite an innate languor, is the one that still best preserves and communicates the spirituality of Homer's poem.
Bibliography8 works
Cesare Angelini