To Himself By Giacomo Leopardi

Now be for ever still,

Weary my heart. For the last cheat is dead,

I thought eternal. Dead. For us, I know

Not only the dear hope

of being deluded gone, but the desire.

Rests still forever. You

Have beaten long enough. And to no purpose

Were all your stirrings; earth not worth your sighs.

Boredom and bitterness

Is life; and the rest, nothing; the world is dirt.

Lie quiet now. Despair

For the last time. Fate granted to our kind

Only to die. And now you may despise

Yourself, nature, the brute

Power which, hidden, ordains the common doom,

And all the immeasurable emptiness of things.

-- TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN

BY JOHN HEATH-STUBBS

From “99 Poems in Translation,” selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury and Geoffrey Godbert (Grove: 150 pp., $11 paper)