Occasionally, we have thought it right to refer to significant sources that Leopardi mentions rarely or not at all, or else to texts deemed essential to clarify what he is thinking, to which he may have had direct or indirect access. Authors belonging to this category include, for example, Rousseau, Condillac, Vico, and Pascal, and in these cases the relation between Leopardi and the author or text concerned is clarified in a relevant note. More rarely, and with great caution, reference is made to authors who were certainly unknown to Leopardi, or to later authors, who embody developments of major aspects of his thought, and to specific modern poets and thinkers who have garnered Leopardi’s heritage, often unawares. The works most frequently quoted form a List of Other Editions, which follows the List of Sources.
Two kinds of secondary work are cited in the Notes: essays (mostly in English), called on to illuminate the cultural background to a given problem, and specialist works on Leopardi, cited only where strictly necessary (on each subject, the list of potential references would be infinite). The titles of general interest, and more specifically those that are relevant to the Zibaldone, are listed in a separate Bibliography, subdivided into twelve sections, on pp. 2375–83 of this edition. When a work included in this Bibliography is cited in the Notes, it is referred to by an abbreviated title, followed by B and the section number. Readers specifically interested in linguistic and philological questions, and able to understand Greek and Latin, will find a useful supplement that gives decided preference to this area in the pioneering edition of Giuseppe Pacella.
In the course of compiling the Notes, we have benefited from the specialist advice of many colleagues and friends. Their names are to be found in the Acknowledgments to this volume.
Notes
Z 1
1. Palazzo Bello, near Recanati, was a small country house (still standing) where Giacomo would visit as a boy. It belonged to the Roberti family, members, like the Leopardis, to whom they were related, of the small aristocratic circle of the town; the marchesa Volunnia Roberti was a sympathetic figure in Giacomo’s childhood and adolescence. In the autobiographical notes entitled “Vita abbozzata di Silvio Sarno” (1819) the same palazzo is illuminated by the “luna nel cortile” (§ 69). The moon—as Jonathan Galassi has remarked (Canti, pp. XX–XXI)—is one of the crucial themes of Leopardi’s poetry, and is recalled in the poetic sketch that follows. The last four lines were reshaped in “La quiete dopo la tempesta” (1829), ll. 22–24. See also the short entry on Z 23.
2. Avianus, “Rustica et lupus,” ll. 11–16, in Phaedri Augusti liberti, et Avieni fabulae, Padua 1721, p. 191 (= LL). In a letter of 5 December 1817 to Pietro Giordani, Leopardi’s first mentor and confidant, we learn that this passage was to be inserted into a revised version of the Saggio sopra gli [or sugli] errori popolari degli antichi (an early essay from 1815, published posthumously), probably in ch. 8 (Prose, p. 727), where Leopardi cites the same story. On the difficult interpretation of this first page of the Zibaldone, see N. Bonifazi, “La libera traduzione leopardiana di una favola di Aviano nel proemio dello Zibaldone,” in La corrispondenza imperfetta, pp. 31–39 (B8); Felici, La luna nel cortile, pp. 24–28 (B11); D’Intino, L’immagine, pp. 203–207 (B11); Camilletti, “Urszenen” (B12). On the important theme of fear and terror see Z 262 and note 2, 531–32, 2803–804; on the symbolic meaning of the threat to the child see Z 3527 and note.
3. Pages 1–99 of the Zibaldone are not dated. Leopardi probably recalled and added this approximate dating in January 1820, when he started recording dates at the end of most entries.
4. This is a rendering of a pseudo-Virgilian couplet quoted in a biography of the poet attributed to Aelius Donatus and prefacing the Mannheim edition of Virgil’s Opera, vol. 1, p. 32.
5. Leopardi has in mind two parallel conceptual models of stylistic development: a quantitative one (nothing–little–right amount–excess), and a qualitative one (no style–poor style–beautiful style–corrupt style). On Z 4 he expounds his argument adding a biological model (childish–young–adult–old). See note 2 to Z 4. He speaks of “sixteenth-century writers in Italian” implying a contrast between writers in the vernacular and in Latin.
6. Leopardi’s position is distinct from that of the “purists” (in particular Antonio Cesari) who celebrated Florentine Tuscan of the fourteenth century as an ideal language. Cf. Z 1899, 2062. The three great writers alluded to here are Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch.
Z 2
1. Parini, Discorso II sopra la poesia, in Opere, Milan 1801–1804, vol. 4, p. 57.
2. Carlo Roberto Dati (Vite dei pittori antichi, ed. G. Della Valle, Siena 1795, p. 66) quotes Plutarch, How a Young Man Should Study Poetry (Moralia 18a, trans. by Marcello Adriani), to the effect that artistic beauty is in the imitation, not in the object imitated. The reference to this work (not held by the LL), is a later addition.
3. The kind of poetry called Bernesque (after Francesco Berni) blends satire, wit, mockery, and serious thought, as in, e.g., Byron.
Z 3
1. A poetic sketch that is perhaps an example of what he is saying here. On the poetic sketches scattered throughout the Zibaldone (cf., e.g., Z 256, 280) see Felici, La luna nel cortile, pp. 17–38.
2. A play (1714) by Scipione Maffei.
Z 4
1. Although Ariosto, Tasso, and Caro were all sixteenth-century authors, the implication here is that they display certain seventeenth-century characteristics, which Leopardi calls seicentisterie.
2. Leopardi here adopts a biological model (see note 5 to Z 1): once corrupted, the arts cannot recover and return to being young; they can only revive in another organism (i.e., another language and literature), provided that it retains the vigor of its ancestors. Hence Leopardi’s “classicist” aesthetics.
Z 5
1. Ariosto, Orlando furioso 10, 27–33; Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata 7, 20–22.
2. A loose version of a fragment from Philemon’s play Sardios (quoted by Plutarch, Moralia 105f), probably taken indirectly from a Latin version by the humanist Marc-Antoine de Muret (Pacella).
Z 6
1. In Italian Creta means both “Crete” and “terracotta.”
2. Cf. Z 183–85, 1733–37.
Z 7
1. This paragraph is indebted to Giordani’s writings on the fine arts, and constitutes a sketch for an abandoned treatise Del bello e dell’utile.
2. See Z 2, note 3.
3. Leopardi refers here to Pietro Borsieri’s review of Ignazio Martignoni, Del bello e del sublime, Milan 1810, in Annali di scienze e lettere, September 1810, vol. 3, no. 8, pp. 236–55. On the importance of this journal for Leopardi’s education see Christian Genetelli, Incursioni leopardiane. Nei dintorni della conversione letteraria, Rome-Padua: Antenore, 2003, pp. 3–97.
Z 8
1. See Gravina, Dell’arte poetica, bk. 1, ch. 4, pp. 7–9. See Z 16 and note 1.
2. Quintilian, Institutiones 10, 2, 10–11.
3. Leopardi comes back to the idea of a beauty that is not absolute on Z 3984, 3988, 4113, 4119, 4020. The theme of “fashion” (see Z 1926–27) is addressed in the operetta morale “Dialogo della Moda e della Morte.”
4. See Borsieri, p. 245 of the review cited on Z 7, note 2, where he challenges Martignoni’s views on the universality of beauty in music.
5. Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique … sur les différences réelles que présentent les traits du visage, Utrecht 1791.
6. Nencia da Barberino, by Lorenzo de’ Medici, and its imitation, Beca da Dicomano, by Luigi Pulci.
Z 9
1. Leopardi owes the idea that “ideal beauty” is relative to Montesquieu’s Essai sur le goût, quoted many times from Z 51 (1819) until August 1820.
2. It is unlikely that Leopardi knew, at this time, the works of all these authors (most of whom were, however, well represented in his library). Later he will quote from Bossuet and Voltaire (see on Z 373–75 another list of French authors).
Z 10
1. Horace, A
rs poetica 265–74 (a text translated by Leopardi at the age of thirteen).
2. The above passage in Horace refers, disparagingly, to Plautus and his followers.
3. See Suetonius, “Life of Terence” 5, quoting Julius Caesar’s judgment.
Z 11
1. Plautus, Bacchides 1190–200, and Rudens 1212–26.
Z 12
1. The word we have translated as “dross” is capomorti in Italian. The parenthesis, added at a later stage, serves to justify the choice of capo rather than capi in the plural form of the word he has just used.
2. It is in this same later addition that the reader first encounters Leopardi referring to his notebook as a whole as pensieri (thoughts). The first chronological use of the expression occurs on Z 20, followed by 45, 47, 64, 79, 95, 96, 100, 107, etc., and in a letter of 19 February 1819 to Giordani (cf. also note 1 to Z 59). See Peruzzi, vol. 1, pp. XXXVI–VII (B1) and Giorgio Panizza, “Perchè lo Zibaldone non si intitolava Zibaldone,” in Lo Zibaldone cento anni dopo, pp. 359–69 (B7). The first reference to a specific “thought” in the singular comes on Z 17.
3. Alfieri, Vita, part 1, epoch 4, ch. 6, vol. 2, p. 47.
4. Lucian, “Hercules and Diogenes,” 16, 2. In fact, modern dictionaries cite only this passage for the Greek word and Liddell and Scott render it “instead of a man, a substitute.”
Z 13
1. Iliad 1, 529–30; 13, 16–20; 5, 859–63.
2. Leopardi alludes here to the two poems (“cantiche”) of Vincenzo Monti, “In morte di Ugo di Bassville” (1793) and “In morte di Lorenzo Mascheroni” (1802).
Z 15
1. Lodovico di Breme’s observations are in his review of Pellegrino Rossi’s translation (1818) of Byron’s “Il Giaurro, Frammento di novella turca,” in Spettatore italiano, tome 10, January 1818, no. 11 (91), pp. 46–58 and no. 12 (93), pp. 113–44. The following notes of the Zibaldone are therefore from 1818: they represent a first sketch of the “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica” (see Z 32, and note 3), a version of which was submitted by Leopardi to the Milanese review in March of the same year. However, the editor and publisher, Antonio Fortunato Stella, turned down the article, which was not published until after Leopardi’s death.
2. Chateaubriand was perhaps the foremost representative in the early nineteenth century of a Christian-Romantic sensibility, exemplified by Le génie du Christianisme (1802); he was greatly preoccupied by the distinction between a Christian and a pagan “marvelous,” both in that work and in Les martyrs (1809).
Z 16
1. Gravina, Della ragion poetica, bk. 1, ch. 2, p. 6 and ch. 11, pp. 18–19. The influence of this book, with its flavor of Vico, which celebrates Homer as “the most powerful enchanter” (p. 7), is far-reaching in the early Leopardi. See, e.g., Z 2940–41 and note.
2. Aristotle, Poetics 1460a.
Z 17
1. For this expression, see note 2 to Z 12.
Z 19
1. Byron, The Giaour (1813), ll. 26–33, a passage originally translated by Pellegrino Rossi and then reproduced by Ludovico di Breme in the article listed on Z 15, note 1, see loc. cit., p. 57.
2. “There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted … Hence the frequency and the beauty of prosopopoeia in poetry; where trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiments and passion” (David Hume, “Natural history of religion,” in Philosophical Essays, Philadelphia 1817, vol. 2, p. 376).
3. On Xenophanes see Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5, 14, in Opera, vol. 2, p. 715, ll. 3–9 of the Latin margin, quoted also on Z 1469. Leopardi will develop a relativistic view of God on Z 1339–42, 1613–23, 1625–27, 1637–46.
Z 20
1. Horace, Ars poetica 386–89.
Z 21
1. Leopardi had planned to incorporate this fragment into an “Elegia di un innamorato,” probably drafted in June 1819, but ten years later he wrote, on this same theme, his canto “La quiete dopo la tempesta.”
2. Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime 44.
Z 22
1. Leopardi here questions Staël’s thesis about “perfectibility” in society and in the arts, expounded in De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800) and fiercely opposed by Chateaubriand and his circle (cf. Z 2563–64 and note). In general, Leopardi was deeply influenced by Staël’s ideas; he became a philosopher—he will write on Z 1742—only after having read her works. In particular, he quotes extensively from two of them: Corinne (1807) from Z 73–74, and De l’Allemagne (1810) from Z 1851 (but see already Z 1693). In this passage, however, he seems to echo—against Staël—the main thesis of Rousseau’s first Discourse. See Z 252, 314–15.
2. Cicero, a deeply influential figure in Leopardi’s education, features in these first pages as the last of the ancients (cf. also Z 161, 424, 459–60) and the “advocate” of illusions, a crucial concept in Leopardi, who did not know at this time the great texts of classical republicanism (Montesquieu, Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts). Cicero appears as a character in Pietro Verri’s philosophical novel Le notti romane, in a chapter cited on Z 40 (see note 2).
Z 23
1. See Z 1 and note 1.
2. Lodovico di Breme, “Il Giaurro, Frammento di novella turca,” in Spettatore italiano, tome 10, no. 11 (91), January 1818, p. 47. See Z 15, note 1.
3. In this paragraph Leopardi is quoting from the following canzoni by Petrarch: Rime 28, 53, 128 (first lines); 28, l. 91; 53, l. 85; 128, ll. 44–45 and 51; 53, l. 14.
4. Fulvio Testi, Poesie liriche, Venice 1693 (= LL), p. 34, ll. 104–106.
Z 24
1. Petrarch, Rime 53, l. 63.
2. “Le corde d’oro elette” is the incipit of canzone 2, “Per la vittoria degl’Imperiali, e de’ Polacchi sopra l’esercito Turchesco” in Vincenzo Filicaia, Poesie toscane, Parma 1726, p. 18. The lines quoted are from canzone 1, “Sopra l’assedio di Vienna,” stanza 7, l. 14, p. 16; and from canzone 2, stanza 6, l. 14, p. 20.
3. Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime 10, 1.
4. Chiabrera, Opere, vol. 1, p. 133, ll. 18–19; p. 198, l. 48; p. 44, ll. 29–30; p. 71, l. 19.
Z 25
1. Chiabrera, Opere, vol. 1, p. 27, ll. 31–34; p. 72, l. 36
2. Gravina, “De poesi, Ad Scipionem Maffeium epistola,” in Della ragion poetica, p. 120. Leopardi here quotes from, but slightly modifies Gravina’s text.
Z 26
1. Chiabrera, Opere, vol. 1, p. 223.
2. This is the first, early formulation of Leopardi’s poetics of the vago or indefinito (the vague or indefinite). See Z 61, 75, 79–80, 100, 165–72, 472–73, 679–83, 1744–47, 1927–30, 2053–54, 3441–43, 3909ff., 4426. The archetype is Homer (see Z 3975–76).
3. Francesco Redi, Opere, Venice 1728, vol. 4, p. 184. Redi speaks, more precisely, of “lira di David” (“David’s lyre”).
Z 27
1. Carlo Alessandro Guidi, Poesie, with his Vita by G. M. Crescimbeni, Venice 1730, p. XVIIII [sic]. The “certain book” alluded to here is a discourse by Scipione Maffei, “Dei migliori poeti italiani,” collected in his Rime e prose, Venice 1719, while Alessandro Guidi’s homilies were addressed to Pope Clement XI (Pacella).
2. Anonymous, “Poesie di Alessandro Guidi,” in Biblioteca Italiana, tome 3, no. 8, August 1816, p. 374. On this important journal, in fact one of Leopardi’s main sources of contemporary culture, see Roberto Bizzocchi, La ‘Biblioteca Italiana’ e la cultura della Restaurazione (1816–1825), Milan: Franco Angeli, 1979.
3. Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime 11, 3. From the very first pages of the Zibaldone Leopardi’s literary criticism is influenced by the model of Longinus. In his dissection of the literary canon Leopardi calls attention to the most poetic ideas and words, and to the connections between them, that are able to produce the effects of the sublime, or
the vague and indefinite (see the textual analyses on Z 1789 and 1826), which both produce confusion in the reader.
Z 28
1. That is, the Academy of Arcadia.
2. Giambattista Zappi, Rime, Venice 1757 (= LL), vol. 1, pp. 35, 40, 43, 85–89.
3. The comment by Andrea Rubbi was in a short biographical note included in Canzonieri di Alessandro Guidi e de’ due Zappi, Venice 1789, vol. 42 of the series “Parnaso italiano,” p. 343, of which Rubbi was the general editor. Leopardi relies largely on Rubbi for his canon of poets, and for the definition of Guidi as “Pindaric” and of Zappi as “Anacreontic.” This reference is an interlinear addition.
4. In this paragraph references are to poems by Eustachio Manfredi: “Il mese di febbraio. Nei fasti del Magno Re Lodovico XIV,” in Rime, Bologna 1732, p. 99; “Canti del Paradiso,” ibid., pp. 87 and 93; an imitation of a celebrated ode by Petrarch, ibid., p. 46, ll. 81–82.
Z 29
1. This date probably marks the end of the pages written in 1818, that is 15–29. The other dates below show that in the space left blank on the right of the ms. Leopardi later added other songs to the first one, with the clear intention of forming a small collection, or popular songbook.
2. The first quatrain is the beginning of a folk song from the Marche (see A. Gianandrea, Canti popolari marchigiani, Turin 1875, p. 133). The second couplet is a popular saying. The last four couplets belong to folk songs to be found, in the same order, in a ms. collection from the Marche entitled Canti contadineschi osimani, by Leonello Spada (G. Crocioni, Leopardi e le tradizioni popolari [1849], Ancona: Transeuropa, 1991, pp. 158–59).
Zibaldone Page 350
