ABSTRACT
Giacomo Leopardi and Percy Bysshe Shelley crossed paths during their lifetimes, but never met. In Britain, the first and most renowned critic considering the two poets together was William Michael Rossetti, who delivered the lecture 'Shelley and Leopardi' twice in 1892, after also successfully addressing Leopardi's life and work in his Taylorian lecture the year before. The construction of the two poets' reception history through translation reflects the instability of meaning inherent in the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, amplified further by the transposition from one language to another, and considers the ultimate demystification of the signifying systems as products of cultural and historical conventions. The textual analysis of the translations, to this end, complements and expands comparisons of the cultural and literary canons of the source and target cultures, and problematizes the theoretical discourse in the realm of literary adaptations both diachronically and synchronically.
