Il volgarizzamento leopardiano di "Impia mors" (Petrarca, "Epyst." II 14). Problemi tecnici di traduzione?

The essay aims to contribute to a better understanding of Giacomo Leopardi’s unfinished translation into Italian of Petrarch’s epistle Impia mors, which Leopardi begun and interrupted in 1827, and is one of his least studied works. Leopardi’s ambiguous translating practice, whose peculiar feature is the mixture between literal fidelity and creative freedom, is explained by the influence of inter- and intratextual memory (Dante, Sannazaro, the poetry of Arcadia, but also Leopardi’s previous poems such as La sera del dì di festa, Il primo amore). The article also proposes an explanation of the reason why Leopardi interrupted the work : this happened not only, as Michele Feo has pointed out, for philological reasons (Rossetti had sent to Leopardi an unreliable Latin text), and not only for Leopardi’s shift away from philosophical stoicism in a period when he was going back to poetical activity (as argued by Giulia Corsalini), but also because Leopardi didn’t establish a sympathetic relationship, and, as it were, a correct ‘proxemics’ with Petrarch’s source text.