Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  [MC]

  Philology, Archaeology of Language

  Leopardi’s interest in philology predates the first entries in the Zibaldone. It belongs to the poet’s childhood and early adolescence, and outlives the Zibaldone while still in some way feeding upon it. The philological notes in the Zibaldone develop in parallel with other philological works that Leopardi is attending to at the same time (for example, the Osservazioni sui Taumasiografi greci), with very few intersections between them, the contexts remaining separate from one another.

  Philology in the Zibaldone mirrors Leopardi’s intellectual formation, which turns on three cardinal elements: the library, his dialogue with antiquity, and his desire to experience other worlds beyond Recanati. This formation is enriched by two important components: Leopardi’s philosophical reflections and his interest in comparative linguistics. His heading in the 1827 Index—“Philology. Passages from the authors explained, corrected etc. etc.”—shows that Leopardi is very clear on the direction this discipline should take: it is, to all intents and purposes, textual criticism, suggestions for emendations (Z 592, 601, 2470, 2665), or defenses of received readings (Z 478), as well as interpretations of specific passages from Greek authors (Z 4223) and Latin authors (Z 472, 494, 4342), along with those of Italian authors (Z 683, Jacopo Nardi; Z 702, Camillo Porzio). The authors Leopardi especially focuses on are Homer, Cicero (Laelius, Cato Major, Orator), Velleius Paterculus, Florus, Diogenes Laertius, Sidonius; he comments as well on Plato, Horace, Apollonius Dyscolus, Phlegon of Tralles, and Antigonus of Carystus, among others. Most of the models that Leopardi follows are those found in his father’s library in Recanati, who were his privileged interlocutors: Fabricius, the compiler of the Bibliotheca graeca and the Bibliotheca latina; Meursius and his collections; Orelli and his Opuscula graecorum; the commentators Casaubon (Athenaeus) and Menagius (Diogenes Laertius); Forcellini’s Latin dictionary and Scapula’s Greek one; Du Cange on Middle and Late Greek and Latin; and antiquarian texts by Pontedera and Graevius.

  Leopardi develops his own conception of philology in the wake of these authors, in conditions of relative isolation and geographical distance from the important debates between the positions of Hermann and Böch that were rousing and dividing most of Europe. By the time Leopardi finally meets the disciples of these great thinkers in Rome in 1823—Thiersch, a student of Hermann, and Niebuhr, who was close to the position of Böch—his own conception of philology is fully mature and its originality is immediately recognized by both of these scholars. But it was Niebuhr especially who formulated a judgment about Leopardi that sounds almost like a prophecy: he considers Leopardi’s particular mode of conceptualizing philology to be “the true way” (la vera strada), one that, according to Niebuhr, is both misunderstood by Italians and highly valued by foreigners (and in fact we find Leopardian contributions in works edited by Westermann, Keller, Jacoby, and Wilamowitz). Unlike most of his contemporaries, Leopardi knew Greek, even if he learned it through inadequate means: The Polyglot Bible, Weller’s Grammatica graeca nova, Sisti’s Directions for Learning Greek Grammar in Less than One Month, and The Padua [Greek] Grammar. And despite the fact that he had only an approximate knowledge of Indo-European linguistics (he did not know Bopp or Schlegel), Leopardi intertwines and mixes philology and linguistics. This is a fundamental point that also determines the selection of the authors, words, and passages that excite Leopardi’s interest: for Leopardi, the primitive condition of language is precisely the fact that it is both living and creative, and because of this, words, expressions, meanings, orthography, and sounds are mutable because they remain subject to use. Therefore it is erroneous to think of ancient languages as if they were dead, for they are still feeding into modern languages, not only by means of writing and literature, but also by means of “living speech” (viva favella, Z 1297). To retain the anomalies, to assimilate the exceptions, to recognize the accidental forms generated by the impact of orality upon writing (Z 308), would be to conserve language with its essential characteristics. If words are the bodies of ideas (Z 2584), then philology and philosophy, polar opposites of each other, need to interpenetrate and to interact so as to avoid sterility and to succeed in reanimating the primitive—and true—essence of language (Z 1134). Leopardi’s excavation becomes fully archaeological: it both unearths and reconstitutes lexemes, but also results in the individuation of root stems, that is, of the archè. Books are the terrain of the excavation in which ancient culture lies buried in fragments; the library is the space in which it is possible to bring back to life the voices of silent interlocutors. Perhaps this is what Niebuhr had in mind when he referred to Leopardi’s methodology as “the true way” and what Leopardi grasps fully when he claims to find in Niebuhr’s Roman History “philosophy applied to philology and to the cognition of the world” (letter to Karl Bunsen, 5 September 1829).

  One of the crucial hinges on which Leopardi’s philological and etymological thinking hangs is the reconstruction of the voice of antiquity, a focal point that attracts the various problems tied to the pronunciation of aspirates, diphthongs, and hiatuses in some letters. This conception of voice inspires the comprehensive investigation in which Leopardi interrogates the inscriptions that he finds in Amati (Z 4466), Gruter (Z 1127), Pontedera (Z 1276–77), and especially Ennio Quirino Visconti (Z 1159, 2786–89); in the great dictionaries (Forcellini and Scapula, but also Hofmann, Isidore, and Regia Parnassi), in grammars and treatises on language, on antique monuments, and in the Encyclopédie. Reconstructed sound represents an incursion of the past into the present, the permeable border between that which has been and that which can continue to be, not just as memory, but also as action. Leopardi is interested in action, even in languages: the dynamics of diminutives; the theory of continuative verbs, which finds its point of maximum intensity in his reflections on the difference between actus and actio (Z 1160). These linguistic aspects reveal to Leopardi that while the ancients allowed thought to reach its perfect form in the word, for modern man this form of “propriety” needs to be unearthed, recognized, or demystified (cf. Z 1504–507 on the dangers of synonymy: not a founding principle, and one that corrupts language systems).

  In his philological onslaughts, Leopardi never loses sight of that side of humanity that is still “ancient”: children, who conserve the psychological processes of the formation of language and art (Z 1450), and the common people, who are the direct heirs of ancient linguistic dynamics (Z 1296). On the one side, the fixity of rules, on the other, the variety of nature. This accounts for Leopardi’s love for the preliterate authors, such as Homer, who cannot be grammatically constrained, and for Leopardi’s interest in authors such as Celsus, Xenophon, Velleius, Florus, whose writing preserves the authenticity, the precision, and above all the simplicity of the word as commonly spoken (Z 32ff.) and which can still be found in the language of the people, despite all efforts toward the homogenization of the writing-literary system (cf. Z 2301). Leopardi’s observation of nature orients certain avenues of the investigation, as for example those expressions and maxims from ancient languages that survive up to the present time (e.g., Z 2865, 4004 for the use of recte; Z 4135 for πλείονα χρόνον; Z 4124 for ἀρχή). It also accounts for Leopardi’s interest in those verbal forms that reveal traces of anthropological processes (for example, the study of the radical and phonetic connections between rapio and ἅρπω, and the relationship of this same lexeme with the myth of the Harpies, Z 2792).

  The philological material therefore is both revived and dissolved in a primal selva (forest): and in the close examination of the root word silva-ὕλη (Z 1276), in fact, materiality is the central point of a web of distant threads that come together and then later branch out (Z 3621, 3762, 3897, 3940, 4160). The never-ending examination of language that runs through the Zibaldone obscures to a large extent the actual desire to return to that originary state that belongs, at one and the same time, to language, humanity, and individual interiority. Using an arc
haeological methodology, Leopardi excavates in search of the ancient vitality and action crystallized in the word itself, and in the process he creates his own poetic voice, one both modern and ancient at the same time. It is a voice that is uniquely capable of reactivating the dialogue with one’s own past self (our/his childhood) and of bringing to light the relics of the childhood of humankind itself (Z 4302). Far from wanting to recirculate dead and devitalized forms—either in language or in existence—Leopardi uses the metaphor of fresh fruit preserved in winter, under the protective seal of wax, to describe “words and expressions, whose antiquity may be known, but is in no way felt” (Z 1099) and the youthful illusions (l’inganno giovanile) that survive into old age (Z 3841).

  [EB]

  Poetry, Voice, Music

  The Zibaldone begins to take shape, from its very first entries, as a fragmentary treatise on aesthetic theory, oriented primarily toward literature and much less toward the figurative arts, in which Leopardi did not show much interest (with the exception of Canova, see Z 2860–61). And here we immediately encounter the first cornerstone of his poetic theory: the object of art is not the “beautiful,” but the “true or rather the imitation of nature” (Z 2). However, the term “true” refers here to what we can see, what we can perceive with the senses. Refuting the classical aesthetic of “ideal beauty” (in fact, opening the door to an aesthetic of the “ugly,” see Z 2–3, 8, and passim), Leopardi points out that the true danger for art lies in intellectualism and “affectation,” both of which are marked by an excess of awareness and artificiality. As man develops his faculty of reason, he distances himself from nature, and in so doing loses the capacity to live, even to breathe. “Try to breathe artificially or carry out consciously one of those many actions that are done naturally—you will not succeed, or only with difficulty and not so well. In the same way too much art harms us, and what Homer naturally said so well we are able consciously and with infinite artifice to say only moderately well, and in such a way that the effort is almost always more or less apparent” (Z 8).

  The essential foundations of Leopardi’s thought already appear here: the return to nature, on the one hand, and the return to antiquity, on the other. The goal of both of these movements, and indeed the absolute irradiating center of all of Leopardi’s aesthetic considerations in the entire Zibaldone, is Homer: the poet who sees the things of this world as they are, without altering them, without allowing the “effort” of the act of representation to become apparent. The artist should imitate nature “naturally” (Z 20–21), that is to say, without being aware of it, with non-reflection and “nonchalance” (Z 9–10, 3051), leaving room for chance (Z 25–26), for imperfection, for error (Z 9–10); that is to say, without any of that descriptive precision of the picturesque kind which Leopardi considers to be the characteristic defect of Ovid and therefore diametrically opposed to the “negligence” of Dante (Z 21). But what came easily to Homer (and to Xenophon, in prose) was no longer easily available to the moderns, who introduced the presence of the representing subject into representation itself (Byron being a prime example in the Zibaldone). The only solution left to the moderns, according to Leopardi (who claims this was already the case, in fact, from the time of Virgil) was “to conceal art,” making artifice play against itself.

  Leopardi anticipates here the problem of the self-reflexivity of modern art, the issue at the very heart of the aesthetic theorizations of German and English Romanticism. But his knowledge of these writings and debates was limited to the few references that were transmitted by Italian journals, even if in his unpublished Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (“Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry,” 1818) he accused the Romantics of having corrupted the material nature of poetry, turning art into an intellectual operation. Leopardi takes up again the specific terms of that essay in the first pages of the Zibaldone, reinforcing them with observations from literary history, especially from Greek, Latin, and Italian literature. Although Leopardi was strongly influenced by Pseudo-Longinus’s treatise on the Sublime, which he considered a theory of the emotions, he admits the impossibility of a return to the naïveté of Homer’s vision; nevertheless, he recognizes at the same time that sensibility, the emotions, and subjective affective states have achieved supremacy in poetry. “Sentimental poetry belongs uniquely and exclusively to the present time, just as true and simple (by which I mean unmixed) imaginative poetry belonged uniquely and exclusively to the Homeric age, or similar ages in other nations. From which we might well conclude that poetry is scarcely proper to our times” (Z 734). While for Schiller (whose works were not in the family library, and who is never cited by Leopardi) the category of “sentimental poetry” as distinct from “naive poetry” (or, as Leopardi says, poetry “of the imagination”) is useful for the establishment of a modern poetic project (so, too, for the concept of the “Romantic” in Schlegel and Novalis), for Leopardi the concept of sentimental poetry is undercut by the suspicion that poetry itself cannot exist in an egotistical and metaphysical period (Z 2945–46; see also 4479, 4497). If it is true that sometimes the poetic expression of affects can still move the soul (“Melancholic and sentimental poetry is a breath of the soul” [Z 136]), it is also true that the disillusionment caused by Reason diminishes the energy and vitality necessary for the poetic perception of the world: “But while it is true that those who have not suffered understand nothing, it is certain that the melancholic imagination and sensibility, too, are powerless without some breath of well-being, and without a mental vigor that cannot exist if there is not a half light, a ray, a glimmer of gladness” (Z 136; cf. Z 259).

  Leopardi did accept, therefore, the romantic identification of modern poetry with abstract thought and philosophy (Z 1650); this means, on the one side, accepting the melancholy, the intimate vibrations of sensibility, the drive toward the infinite (this is the attraction of, for example, Chateaubriand); but it also means, on the other hand, accepting the need for a conscious and methodical elaboration, one of an intellectual and formal nature. Importantly, however, Leopardi denies that poetry could ever be dissociated from the realms of the senses, of pleasure and élan vital. We find both of these aspects present in some early Zibaldone pages (Z 258–59); and later Leopardi will identify poetry with an impulsion or drive (Z 4356). But rather than being a hedonistic conception, his is an anthropological one (according to a schema that seems to be derived from Vico): poetry is the expression of a primitive, inaugural phase of the history of mankind, in which knowledge and pleasure, truth and illusion developed in tandem. The first sages were also poets, and “truths” presented themselves to them “in dress worked by the imagination, and in large part were discovered by imagination rather than by reason” (Z 2940–41). Thus the “true,” which from the very first pages of the Zibaldone is posited as the proper object of poetry, as we have seen, is in effect an imaginary truth, and therefore real, precisely because it is rooted in the minds and bodies of human beings, in their desires, in their passions, illusions, and beliefs; in the very traditions that unite them together in a civilization (Z 51, 168). It is for this very reason that for Leopardi poetry cannot not be of the people; and there can never be a poetry of the few and for the few alone: “poets today have no other readers but persons who are educated and informed,” but unfortunately “[t]oday every educated and informed man is unfailingly egoistic and philosophical, deprived of every noteworthy illusion, devoid of intense passions, and every woman likewise” (Z 2944–45).

  The poetic is that which surges forth from the roots of our being, and thus is something that is deeply familiar to us. But modernity has repudiated nature and broken the thread of continuity of tradition, separating the individual from the family, from the nation, from the very cosmos itself. The individual subject, isolated within its own thoughts (Z 1019) and having to reconstruct itself from the bottom up, has severed its relationship with its origin. This is why the recognizable and familiar material of poetry comes to us
from such infinite distances, from another time and another place (Z 1861); poetry returns to us from the depths of a wounded psyche, no longer in harmony with the world—and following this road we will meet up with Baudelaire and much of modern poetry. The poet’s view is doubled, split between reality and imagination (Z 4418), between present and past: “So that the present sensation does not derive directly from things, it is not an image of objects, but an image of the childhood image, a recollection, a repetition, a reechoing or reflection of the old image” (Z 515). Leopardi’s poetics of the “vague” or of the “indefinite”—which has so much in common with European Romantic theories, and which also anticipates later poetic theories—is born from this continuous oscillation, or vibration, in which the gaze of the poet (and of the reader as well) is unable to focus on or to encompass completely the object; yet the object, for this very reason, emanates a hidden and mysterious light. The poetic is necessarily that which hides itself from sight (Z 171) or is constituted by a sound that derives from an invisible source (Z 1928).