Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  There is no doubt that a considerable role in this affair was played by the suspicion surrounding Leopardi the thinker during the dominance of idealism in Italy, over many decades; nor did things improve with a “materialist” discourse that was no less ideological and factional, incapable of looking toward new horizons. It is only in the past few years that the landscape has begun to change, and new studies, oriented in different directions, are reconceptualizing Leopardi as one of the key thinkers of modernity. This is why, so we believe, the moment has come for the Zibaldone to go out and find its true audience among those readers who, from different countries, languages, and cultures, will read it without prejudice, like a manuscript found in a bottle.

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  The only complete translation of the Zibaldone to have appeared to date, in French, was published in 2004, a little over a century after the first Italian edition. An immensely long time for one of the true geniuses of humanity. A gap that is justified in part by the cultural context in Italy, and in part by the difficulty of the task of translating 4,526 pages in which Leopardi expresses himself in Greek, Latin, French, and (occasionally) English as well as Italian, enters into dialogue with at least seven classical and modern languages, and works into his own argument quotations that may be long or short from the most disparate texts. But there is something else, and it concerns the peculiar form of a text that, though conceived in the nineteenth century, really required a reader who, as Benjamin said of Baudelaire, would be “provided by posterity.” A reader who is capable of understanding the reticular structure of Leopardi’s thought, constantly in tension between “particulars” and “system,” going so far as to arrive at the paradox of a system “that consists in the exclusion of all systems” (Z 949); that is, in essence, the specific and individual form in which Leopardi brings together all the fields of knowledge in a kind of modern, fluid, questioning encyclopedism, marked by time and circumstance (the date at the end of each entry, the continual additions and corrections). From this point of view Leopardi’s modernity consists, once again, in a return to the ancient. It is his voice that truly fascinates and educates us, because it is never a “specialist” who is talking, but an ancient teacher who thinks poetically: “The sciences would have much less need for the living voice of the teacher if writers of treatises had a more poetic mind” (Z 58).

  Leopardi does not teach a specific doctrine, but seeks, like Socrates, to communicate the very method of thought, that is, himself: he is one of those good teachers who “are capable of retracing in detail, and holding accurately in their minds the origins, progress, mode of development, in short, the history of their own notions and thoughts, their knowledge and their intellect” (Z 1376). His thought concerns the relationship between natural, historical, and social objects and the cognitive and expressive processes that represent them.

  To translate a text of this sort is to make a translation of a translation, since every mind, that of the author like that of every reader, behaves in the manner of a camera obscura, inside which, as Leopardi says of translations, external objects are reproduced in different ways (see Z 963). It is pointless, therefore, to pretend to oneself that one is being faithful to Leopardi. The important thing, as he has taught us, is to battle strenuously against the limit, oblivion, nothingness.

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  To help readers find their way in the Zibaldone, the next section enters into more detail about the structure and internal mechanism of the notebook. Following a concise biography of the author, the remainder of the introduction is devoted to ten short essays that sketch out possible pathways through the forest: we have selected thematic areas that seem to us particularly important, but are well aware that others could have been chosen, and also that many other connections could be made within the themes that we have chosen. Our selection is meant as encouragement for those readers who want to follow pathways of their own, pursuing their own lines of inquiry, with the aid also of three additional tools: the multitude of internal cross-references in the text, supplied either by Leopardi himself or by the editors (see Editorial Criteria § 10); the further suggestions that are given in the editors’ notes; and the Editorial Index (which complements the indexes compiled by Leopardi in 1827). But there are no obligatory routes: one of the joys of the Zibaldone, in addition to the intellectual rigor that subtends and sustains it, is that every reader, if they are only curious enough, can construct a Zibaldone of their own.

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  The Genesis of the Zibaldone

  The first page of the Zibaldone is extremely untidy, written in a labored, almost childish hand. It contains some poetic images, a comment on a fable of Avianus, an anecdote told in dialogue, some verses, and, finally, the beginning of a small essay on aesthetics. There is a date, “July or August 1817,” but it was added much later, probably in January 1820. Only then, when he had written a hundred pages, Leopardi must have realized that his notes were becoming something: what, he perhaps still didn’t know. Thus the knowledge of a new organism that was growing slowly in the silence and isolation of Recanati goes back to January 1820. From then on, Leopardi almost always recorded, with scrupulous care, the time and place at the end of every note: time is the primary matrix of this text, which speaks of the loss of the past and of its possible recovery in memory and language.

  From 1817 to 4 December 1832, the day when, on page 4,526, the last word was written, the Zibaldone covers a period of about sixteen years, taking the author from youth to full maturity. Yet the dates are deceptive. By the end of 1823, Leopardi, at the age of twenty-five, had already written 4,006 pages, that is, in essence, almost the whole diary. In addition, of those thousands of pages, some 3,197 (around two-thirds of the total) were written in just two years, 1821 and 1823. After a slow, uncertain start the pace accelerated rapidly; then, in the course of ten more years, it decreased and came to a stop. If we consider the extraordinary intellectual and philosophical range of the Zibaldone, it’s hard to remember, reading it, that it is the work of a very young man, even if one who was a genius.

  The second significant fact has to do with place: Leopardi remained at Recanati until July 1825, with a short Roman interlude of several months, from November 1822 to April 1823, during which he wrote barely forty-one pages. Between 1825 and 1830, he left on two further occasions, staying away from home for months at a time, at irregular intervals (July 1825–November 1826, April 1827–November 1828) until his final departure for Florence in 1830. So when he was away from Recanati he wrote, in all, barely 262 pages. The end of isolation first altered the rhythm of the writing, then broke it for good. The last entry written in Recanati is on page 4,524: after that, a leap into the void, as he went first to Florence, then Rome, and, finally, Naples, where he died. The enormous manuscript accompanied him everywhere on that last journey, but he added only a few more lines.

  The library of the house where Leopardi grew up was therefore the birthplace—and also the deathbed—of the Zibaldone: the only place where this fragile organism could grow. If in Recanati the young Giacomo was cut off from the world, the richly endowed library protected him from both modernity and isolation, offering him, as if on a three-dimensional interactive screen of the future, the illusion of a faraway space and time, the company of virtual persons, the sonority of voices that, though dead, came alive in the thousands of volumes that filled the rooms of the second floor of the palazzo. The Zibaldone came into being so that Leopardi could have a dialogue with those voices, participate in that second life: he was the ancestor of those adolescents who today construct an identity in front of the screen, and it shouldn’t surprise us if the result of this psychic attitude is the first modern philosophical hypertext.

  There has been a great deal of discussion about the sources of the Zibaldone and its possible models (the word, of uncertain etymology, means “miscellany” or “notebook” or “collection of occasional thoughts and notes” or even, less grandly, “a hodgepodge”). The influence of Joseph Anton Voge
l, one of Leopardi’s teachers, has been rightly appreciated: Vogel embodied the tradition of the ars excerpendi, that is, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century techniques of filing and rationally organizing knowledge in catalogues and indexes. These methods were used extensively by Leopardi from early youth for his philological and scholarly works: tiny cards that assemble quotations, lists, page numbers, key words, verses that link concepts—a real workshop of the art of memory. It was not so much the ancient ars memoriae, however, which was useful for oral communication, but, rather, a more modern derivation, connected to the world of writing and printing. Leopardi’s voracity as a reader is proverbial; but if we observe his laboratory from up close we can see that he was schooled above all in what today would be called data banks: anthologies, dictionaries, archives of texts, encyclopedias, commentaries, indexes. He kept open on his worktable the Latin and Greek lexicons, Du Cange, Forcellini, and Scapula; the great collection of Fabricius, inspired by the Polyhistor of Morhof; the collections of Meursius and Graevius, which led to inexhaustible bibliographical pathways and opened the doors of hidden treasuries of quotations. The real library thus became a virtual library, similar to the Internet, and it’s not always clear if the reference is to texts read at first or second or third hand. Nor is it clear—the critics continue to argue—whether the writing of the diary was immediate, or if it was preceded by drafts or preparatory notes. It’s likely that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: different methodologies according to the nature of the subject and the circumstances. Certainly Leopardi used file cards, some of which have come down to us.

  Thus in the scholarly works that preceded the Zibaldone (in particular Storia dell’Astronomia and Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi) Leopardi learned to record, as if on tape, fragments of voices, so that he could bring them to life again in his mind. The private writing that he started doing in 1817 is a more radical and freer response to this need, with a paradoxical result: the Zibaldone is a work of absolute writerliness, produced in the silence of a library, yet it has a profound oral and dialogic tension—one has only to read the first page, which is so rich in sounds, voices, stories, anecdotes, and dialogues, and observe how colloquial forms mimic a real discussion (Z 4252). Over the years, the manuscript became the secret place where Leopardi could summon authors at will to question them (this is one of the original meanings, in the law, of the word citation); it is reminiscent of the oral matrix and the dialectical forms in which intellectual exchange took place among the ancients. One thinks of the symposiums, of the almost physical tension that emerges in some of Plato’s dialogues; and also of the works of a later period that Leopardi loved, full of voices, anecdotes, polemics, and stories—Plutarch, Clement of Alexandria, Diogenes Laertius, or the Athenaeus of The Deipnosophists, with a commentary by Casaubon, annotated in turn by Giacomo.

  The dialogic tension takes very diverse forms. In the periods when other libraries were available to him (for example, in Bologna or Florence), Leopardi, eager for texts he didn’t own, concentrated on taking notes on his reading. But here, too, the perspective is that of a dialogue: Leopardi had a profound respect for the texts he cited—always in the original language—and copied them with extreme care, giving all the facts with the greatest precision. He almost never paraphrases, he never replaces his interlocutor, but he often interrupts him to say what he thinks: the Zibaldone is sprinkled with parentheses in which Leopardi translates (himself or in the voice of another translator), explains, annotates, offers alternative solutions, clarifies, comments.

  When he has more time, that is, in general, at Recanati, the words of others produce an immediate, more substantive reaction: comments and arguments, often followed by new quotations and new comments, in many cases addressed to an imaginary public. The outline of such discussions (real hand-to-hand contests) can vary: with some texts he has a brief, intense, and definitive encounter; with others there is a prolonged battle, preceded by an introduction or followed by further skirmishes, at a distance of months or years; and in certain periods all or nearly all the notes are secretly guided by a reading that comes to the surface only in part (for example, the Politics of Aristotle, in the fall of 1823). Leopardi’s temperament was both heroic and neurotic-obsessive. He would never leave the adversary master of the field out of weariness, inertia, or distraction but goes forward implacably until he feels satisfied, at least provisionally, until the next duel. And the more obscure the struggle, the more violent; if the adversary is hidden, it usually means that the stakes are higher. The authors he confronted most intensely are specters who surface apparently by chance, obliquely, but they are, like Hamlet’s father, all the more crucial for the action. Think of Plato among the ancients, or Foscolo among the moderns. That makes it difficult to know if the voices whose timbre the reader seems to perceive most intensely were ones he had read at first hand—and when and to what extent—or not. Montaigne is one such, and so, above all, are Vico and Rousseau, who are never quoted directly, except in the final years. Of course, it helps to examine the library, for it has remained essentially as it was. His correspondence and the many lists preserved in Naples (the so-called reading lists) provide other precious data. But abundance can be as misleading as absence; Leopardi was more playful and mischievous than is generally thought, and he keeps his most important cards covered; he likes to play as much as to converse, to conceal as much as to display, and often both at the same time. It’s surprising to find passages of Voltaire or Plato, of crucial importance in his thinking, cited only for a linguistic detail (Z 4177, 4273, 4298–99). But one can’t help admiring the ironic nonchalance of that modesty.

  The many quotations are, however, only a small part of the text, in which, day by day, what has been called, felicitously, “thought in movement” takes shape. The truth is that the library only minimally explains the Zibaldone, which is not simply the place where he assembles, and discusses, tradition but also, on the contrary, the place where a radically new thought is advanced, a new, modern subject in search of itself.

  The impact that the Zibaldone had on readers of the twentieth century (and, we hope, of the centuries to come) is due precisely to this deviation from a known horizon. Such readers are also the only ones who could and did read it, because the manuscript remained unpublished—by a strange fate that was perhaps not blind—until 1898, becoming, not without reason, a contemporary of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887), Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and The Education of Henry Adams (1907). The Zibaldone is a text of astonishing modernity, which interrogates the future, like the letter that Leopardi would have liked to write “to a young man of the twentieth century” (Z 4280). His status as an amateur, his isolation and belatedness with regard to both the Enlightenment and German idealism and to Romanticism, the mastery of six or seven languages, ancient and modern, the very long perspective that gave him an infinite knowledge of the classical sources, the unresolved conflict between religiosity and rationality, between a methodical spirit and an acute sensibility with ascetic and almost mystical features: all these elements, mixed with genius, allowed Leopardi to speak to posterity, to become an unclassifiable “solitary philosopher” (as he described himself), unique on the European scene.

  When he began to take the notes that became the Zibaldone, the extremely erudite, melancholy, and provincial nineteen-year-old had all the requirements necessary to become the morally inert scholar whom Nietzsche depicts in the second of the Untimely Meditations, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874). But instead this extraordinary text, which, not coincidentally, opens in the name of Leopardi, and with an image taken from the “Canto notturno,” gives us the key to understanding the unprecedented novelty of the Zibaldone. Leopardi turns to the past to get from it his building materials, to nourish a lively, original, powerful mind. Nothing is more alien to him than impassive, static scientific or scholarly reconstruction; his archaeology is critical and dynamic, courageous and passionate (one might sa
y heroic). His investigations, which at times seem like those of a detective, and his close arguments are a challenge, a constant effort to understand the complexity and dynamism of the world without succumbing to the sirens of logic and history (and its dominant tendencies). It’s too bad that another “genealogist,” Michel Foucault, didn’t come across his work, but the same could be said of many thinkers and writers who have been prevented from knowing him by the dearth of translations.