Chorus of the Dead By Giacomo Leopardi

Only immortal in the world,

Terminus of all things living,

Our nature--naked as it is--

Comes, Death, to rest in you;

Happy, no, but safe

From that sorrow

Old as time. Deep night keeps

The dark thought of you

From the rambling mind;

Spent, the spirit feels

Its springs of hope and of desire

Dry up: fears and sorrows slip away

And it passes with no pain

Through the long slow vacant

Ages of eternity.

Once we were alive:

As the infant at the breast

Remembers in a kind of mist

Its spectral frights and nightsweats,

We remember, but free from fear,

Our own lives. What were we?

What was that bitter instant

We called life? Life to us now

Seems a strange astonishment,

As death, all unknown,

Seems mysterious to the living.

And as in life our naked

Unaccommodated nature

Sought shelter from death,

So now it flies life’s quickening flame:

Happy, no, but safe--since fate

Forbids the state of bliss

Both to the living and the dead.

From “Leopardi: Selected Poems,” translated from the Italian by Eamon Grennan (Princeton University Press: 104 pp., $9.95 paper)