Finding a voice for reflection ...

... In the Wilds of Leopardi by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… two problems arise as far as establishing a voice for translation is concerned. First, the book is almost two hundred years old; second, even if Leopardi might have imagined its being published it was certainly not written or prepared for publication and is full of elisions, abbreviations, notes to himself, rewrites, and cross-references. In fact, on his death in 1837 the huge wad of pages was dumped in a trunk by his friend Antonio Ranieri and was not published in its entirety until 1900. So, do I write in modern prose, or in an early nineteenth-century pastiche? Do I tidy up the very personal and unedited aspect of the text, or do preserve those qualities, if I can?