This is Rusty Reno here at First Things for another episode of the editor's desk where we talk to authors in contributed articles and recent issues of First Things magazine.

And I'm delighted to have with us today Algeus Valianas, who is the author of an essay on Guacamot

Laopardi, the great Italian poet, the title of the essay, Nialism for the Iron Hearted.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much for having me.

You describe Leopardy as the greatest writer least known to English speakers.

Very few people read Italian, or if they do read Italian, they read Italian to read Dante,

and they never get around to lay a party. I'm not sure just why it is he's so out of favor.

I mean, he has standing in the Italian, you know, so if you're an Italian high school student,

do you read Leop Party?

Yes, you read him.

So he's the wordsworth of Italian letters.

It's that fair?

I mean, not in terms of substance, but rather he's one of these

great figures of modern Italian letters. He is a great figure. He's the great, the great

Italian romantic, and yet he's not entirely a romantic. He has a lot, a lot to him of the classical world, the world that

Sophocles, Homer and Pinder saw as George Santayana wrote. And you, you note that as a,

as a young man, he was something of a, of a linguistic genius, it seems, you know, translating classical texts

and writing books at age 14 and things like that. What was he doing? I guess he was, it sounds

like his parents wouldn't let him out of the house and

he spent an awful lot of time in his father's library.

His father had a great library, 25,000 volumes.

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