The Magic of Leopardi   by Giacomo Leopardi, translated from the
Italian and annotated by Jonathan Galassi Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 498 pp., $35.00 Giacomo Leopardi; drawing by Tullio
Pericoli  Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) suffered from many
ailments during his unhappy life—asthma, scoliosis, ophthalmia,
constipation, dropsy, and spleen, to mention a few—yet insomnia
is the one most closely associated with his genius. While
everyone else in his provincial hometown of Recanati slept,
Leopardi stayed awake reading, writing, translating, or moon-
dreaming. As the firstborn son of a count, he could expect the
household servants, despite their rage, to serve him breakfast
in the afternoon and lunch at midnight. Always out of sync with
the diurnal rhythms of the rest of the world, he was, in the
best Nietzschean sense of the word, “untimely.”  He spent his
youth among the ancients in one the largest private libraries in
Europe—his father’s. When children his age were still reciting
verb tenses, he had already mast