A few poems from Carducci's youthful period, in which he indulges in the meaningless melancholy, the passion and despair, incident to that stage of the poet's growth, I have introduced, as showing that he too had his sentimental side. In these he describes his emotions. They are the sonnets from the Juvenilia, beginning respectively with the following lines:
O questi di prima io la vidi. Uscia. [XXXVI]
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Non son quell'io che già d'amiche cene. [XXXVII]
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Passa la nave mia, sola, tra il pianto. [XXI]
As such they are beautiful, but they lack that objectivity and realistic power which is felt in those poems where, as in life, the emotion tells itself, and does not need to be described.
In the Odi Barbare, for which title I am unable to find a better rendering than “Barbaric Odes,” foreign as it may seem to the character of these exquisitely finished verses, I have followed the poet's choice in omitting to capitalize the initial words of the lines. Many of these poems are without rhyme, and, for the sake of greater faithfulness in translating them, I have sometimes discarded both the rhyme and the strict rhythmical form.
F. S.