TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The following selections from Letteratura inglese are for the most part fragments of longer, more continuous discussions. Eschewing of necessity any attempt to represent the text as it stands in the original, I have chosen above all those passages where Lampedusa digresses from the more standard literary-historical material of his lectures. Since this often involved removing passages from their contexts, here and there I was forced to add a word or two for reference, or to elide irrelevant references. Yet rather than burden the present text with brackets around my editorial additions or subtractions (which are in any case minimal and purely functional), I have chosen to incorporate them directly into Lampedusa’s text. Likewise the breaks between sections and the extra spacing between paragraphs, as well as the section titles, are almost always my own.—Stephen Sartarelli
These notes are nothing more than the residue, the precipitate of thirty years of disorganized reading filtered through a brain notorious for its forgetfulness.
Therefore you have little to hope for.
It is said that Beowulf is a work with passages of great beauty, full of barbaric pride and pervaded, despite its Christian veneer, by that sense of fatalism and ineluctable universal ruin typical of primitive Germanic literatures.
I haven’t read it.
In The Ruined Burg, to my mind, three important themes of English poetry are prefigured: the sea, whose waters and winds permeate all English poetry (Raleigh, Shakespeare, Coleridge,
