The Heroic Frenzies (Translated) (Annotated) - With notes and commentary by Giovanni Gentile #1013359

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction
• 45 editor's notes

Some books inform you. This one sets you alight. Giordano Bruno's The Heroic Frenzies is philosophy that behaves like poetry and poetry that argues: sonnets and songs woven through with prose dialogues, in which a restless mind turns its whole strength toward an object it can never finish grasping — and calls that unfinished reach the highest happiness there is.

At the centre is the hunt. A young hunter slips into the woods with his dogs, tracks what few ever track, and in the moment of seeing is himself transformed, the pursuer becoming the pursued. Around that image Bruno builds two parts of five dialogues each, in which his own verses are glossed and argued over by a cast of interlocutors and a whole psychology of desire unfolds: its jealousy and its constancy, its blindness, its quarrels between heart and eyes, its hunger that is fed precisely because it is never filled. The frenzies he means are heroic — not the small fevers of ordinary passion, but the intellect and the will straining toward the divine and the infinite, in a pursuit Bruno follows through images, emblems and songs rather than through dry argument alone.

This edition presents Bruno's Italian dialogues in a literary translation made to be read now: natural, living English that carries his images, his wit and the momentum of his prose, while staying faithful to his substance, his voice and his tone. The volume opens with a critical introduction, placed before Bruno's own text, that gives you the shape of the work — its mixed form of verse and dialogue — so that you can enter it with your bearings.

Add it to your library and read it the way it asks to be read: slowly, and more than once.