Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

1. Lucretius, De rerum natura 1, 136–39 (cf. also 830–31), where the poet comments on the difficulty of recording the discoveries of the Greeks in Latin verse, given rerum novitatem, the newness of the things, and egestatem linguae, the poverty of the language. See also Z 54. It is difficult to say whether (and when) Leopardi read Lucretius. A detailed analysis (which, however, does not lead to any certainty) is in Timpanaro, “Epicuro, Lucrezio e Leopardi” (B12). On the knowledge of Epicurus see Z 317, note 4.

  2. Cicero, Orator, 62, 211.

  Z 751

  1. Note that “and in his works … kings” is an interlinear addition from the fall of 1823, when Leopardi began to read the works of Frederick the Great.

  2. Horace, Ars poetica 46–62.

  Z 752

  1. That is, at the time of Catherine de Medici, as described by Algarotti, Saggio sopra la lingua francese, in Opere, tome 4, pp. 34–35, 54. See Z 242.

  Z 753

  1. The Epistulae of Marcus Cornelius Fronto were discovered on palimpsests in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan by Angelo Mai, in 1815 (see Fronto, Opera inedita). They were translated by Leopardi in 1816.

  Z 756

  1. Mai had attributed the Exempla elocutionum to Fronto but in reality the work was by Messius Arusianus, as Johann Friedrich Lindemann established in his Corpus grammaticorum latinorum veterum, Leipzig 1831 (Pacella). Z 54 throws some light on the reasons for Leopardi’s preference for Virgil over Ennius and Lucretius.

  Z 757

  1. While the young Leopardi had, like Mai, lavished praise on Fronto in his philological works (1816 and 1818) on the newly discovered texts (see Z 753 and note), others—including Niebuhr—were profoundly disappointed. Leopardi’s own enthusiasm was itself soon to cool, as the present passage shows. The passage from “His fault” is a later marginal addition.

  Z 758

  1. Leopardi often echoes organicistic theories of language, which circulated widely in Europe, especially in Germany (Herder, Friedrich Schlegel). See Anna Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics (vol. 4 in History of Linguistics, ed. Giulio Lepschy, London and New York: Longman, 1998), ch. 4. The study of Sanskrit had enhanced the debate on “roots.”

  Z 759

  1. See Z 48, 740ff., 2078–79, 2876–79.

  2. At such festivals images of the gods, lying on pillows, were placed in the streets and food was set before them.

  3. Modern editions read clamyde clupeat brachium, “with his mantle he shields his arm,” see Varro, De lingua latina 5, 7. The fifteenth-century ed. consulted by Leopardi (see Z 1070, note 2) must have run the three words together (Pacella).

  Z 761

  1. Monti, Proposta, vol. 3, part 1, p. 175. On the importance of this work, frequently cited by Leopardi, see M. M. Lombardi, “‘Distruggere gli errori’: la ‘Proposta’ di Monti,” in Lombardi, ed., Gli strumenti di Leopardi, pp. 125–43 (B8).

  Z 762

  1. Indiare, “to participate in God’s being” (Dante, Paradiso 4, 28); intuare, “to become a single thing with thee” (ibid., 9, 81); immiare, “to become a single thing with me” (ibid.). Despite Leopardi’s claim, there is no trace of disguardare in Dante, or in any dictionaries.

  Z 764

  1. Leopardi refers polemically to the compilers of the Dictionary, and, more in general, to the “purists.”

  Z 774

  1. Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger wrote La fiera, a comedy containing many Florentine words and phrases, in order to enrich the Crusca, as Leopardi claims. The latest official (fourth) edition of the Vocabolario had been published in Florence in 1729–38 in six volumes. Leopardi owned an unofficial edition (Verona 1804–1806) in seven volumes, edited by Antonio Cesari, an advocate of purism.

  Z 784

  1. Cf. Annibal Caro’s translation of Aeneid 2, 289–93, Venice 1796 (= LL), p. 71, corresponding to Virgil’s 2, 172–73.

  Z 789

  1. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 11, 7.

  Z 793

  1. From the Constitution of the Athenians 2, 7, a text attributed at the time to Xenophon.

  Z 803

  1. Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime 9, 11–14.

  2. Leopardi returned to the question of Homer in July and August 1828, when he was able to read Wolf’s Prolegomena, from which he quotes extensively on Z 4343ff.

  Z 805

  1. Through the study of Sanskrit linguists had become aware that languages in their beginnings were more complex and sophisticated, as William Jones wrote in an essay quoted by Leopardi three weeks later (Z 929 and notes).

  2. Leopardi mentions some Spanish compounds, like, e.g., sinrazon (from sin, “without” and razón, “justice”), etc.

  Z 807

  1. Leopardi refers here, in a later marginal addition, to a passage by Francesco Soave that confirms his views (in the first essay, “Formazione e analisi delle lingue,” appended to Soave’s translation of Wynne’s Abridgment of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding); and to an essay by Johann Georg Sulzer, “Osservazioni” (see Z 1053 and note 2), a “weak version of Condillac, seeming rather to follow some of the more doctrinaire articles in the Encyclopédie” (H. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure. Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p. 193). On Leopardi’s views see Gensini, pp. 61–65 (B11).

  Z 813

  1. Franciosini, Vocabolario, vol. 2, p. 555.

  2. This is how Pacella interprets the somewhat obscure original “dei latini e de’ latini.”

  Z 814

  1. Leopardi is referring to the pronunciation of the names of the letters f and l.

  Z 818

  1. A characteristically Pascalian argument; see Pensées sur la religion, ch. 7, “That it is more advantageous to believe than not to believe what Christian Religion teaches” (Pacella).

  Z 827

  1. Leopardi is adapting Cicero, Cato Maior seu de senectute 23, 82.

  Z 830

  1. This comment, added in the margin without an insertion mark, is placed here in a note because it refers to what has been said on Z 371–73. The parenthesis which follows (“also in fact … voluntarily”) is also added in the margin, in different ink, with an insertion mark.

  Z 831

  1. See Z 402 and note.

  Z 832

  1. “Reading your book makes me want to go about on all fours,” Voltaire had quipped in a letter of 30 August 1755 to Rousseau, upon receiving his second discourse. From then on the phrase became very celebrated. An Italian translation is in Voltaire, Opere scelte, tome 3, p. 84.

  Z 836

  1. Leopardi may have had in mind a passage on scientific discoveries and chance by Algarotti, who mentions Galileo and Columbus (Pensieri diversi, in Opere, tome 8, pp. 192–93). The role of chance is also stressed by Dutens, Origine, tome 1, p. 29. See also Z 1086, 1737–40. See Z 56 and note 5.

  Z 845

  1. Leopardi intended to translate works by Xenophon and by Isocrates and Isaeus, two of the ten Attic orators: these projects were only partially realized. See Volgarizzamenti (B2).

  Z 848

  1. Leopardi had translated a letter by Theophylactus of Ohrid into Latin, and written some “Observationes” (in Latin) on it. Both texts are published in Leopardi, Opere inedite, ed. Cugnoni, pp. 135–36 and 153–56 (B2).

  Z 850

  1. See Z 4345.

  2. This sentence is not clear in the original, and we have slightly modified it in order to clarify its meaning.

  Z 856

  1. Leopardi’s argument is that the Italian language derives not from the literary Latin of the classical period but from Vulgar Latin. Among the writers who preserved features of archaic and spoken Latin Leopardi had mentioned Lucilius, Ennius, and Gnaeus Naevius (Z 42, and note 3) and later mentions Caesar, Cornelius Nepos, and above all Celsus (Z 861), on whom see his thoughts on Z 32–35. On the project of a treatise on Vulgar Latin see Z 1013, 1020–21, and 4521. Cf. also Z 2649 and note. “Vulgar Latin” is also
the heading for one of the separate slips not referred to in the 1827 Index.

  Z 865

  1. Leopardi is probably thinking of his friend and mentor Pietro Giordani. In what follows, however, he endorses what Mme. de Staël had written in her 1816 article “Sulla maniera e la utilità delle traduzioni,” which triggered the literary debate on Romanticism in Italy.

  Z 866

  1. Alfieri, Vita, Epoch 4, ch. 13 (vol. 2, p. 104).

  Z 867

  1. Here Leopardi seems to refer to the medieval concept of translatio imperii (transfer of rule), which he might have taken, as Giovanna Minardi Zincone suggests (B12), from Paulus Orosius (his work Adversus paganos, Leiden 1732 ed., is held in the LL), notwithstanding the severe judgment on Z 2732. Other traces of this concept, with noteworthy variations (see note 2 below), are on Z 926–28, 1027, 1029, and especially 2331–35; they betray, more generally, an idea of history as a sequence of cycles (cf. Z 403 and note). The argument that follows, however, regarding the triumph of barbarian over civilized peoples, recalls Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts. The sentence “It means that doing … drives them” is a marginal addition.

  2. All Europe had been impressed, and not a little disturbed, by the spectacle of Cossacks bivouacking in the Champs-Elysées in 1814. On civilization heading from what Leopardi calls South (not East) to North see Z 1026–27, 1848–49, 4256 (and see also Z 2086, 3676–82).

  Z 868

  1. There is in this thought an echo of a cyclical conception of the movement of societies between barbarism and civilization, and in particular of Vico’s contrast between “first barbarism” and the “barbarism of corruption” (see Z 314 and note). Note, however, that Leopardi uses a scientific image rooted in traditional agrarian cultures (see the essay by Stabile cited in the note to Z 2900). On the “spiral” form see note to Z 416. The two references to the “nation” are both marginal additions.

  Z 870

  1. Lamennais, Saggio, ch. 10, tome 1, part 3, pp. 213ff.

  Z 871

  1. Only in later years will Leopardi give a definite answer to this question; see, e.g., Z 4175–77, 4188–89, 4204–205.

  Z 873

  1. In his Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité Rousseau introduces the distinction between “amour de soi-même” and “amour propre.” The former is thought of as a natural, and ultimately a virtuous sentiment, inspired by the spirit of survival, whereas the latter “is no more than a relative sentiment, invented and born in society, which leads each individual to take more account of himself than of any other” (Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 219, note XV). Leopardi sometimes calls the former “amor proprio” and the latter “egoismo” (cf., e.g., Z 3291ff.) For him self-love manifests itself from the state of nature onward and prejudices social formation from the outset. Only in the primordial, ahistorical, minimal, and loose-knit society now irremediably lost, could it be turned to the common good.

  Z 875

  1. That is, the Holy Alliance and the Congress system.

  Z 879

  1. The lengthy meditation that follows is the first of many thoughts on “national hatred” (see Z 1078–79, 1083–84, 1422, 2677–79, 2759–70, 3115–17, 4423–24).

  Z 882

  1. Leopardi quotes from Zanolini, Lexicon Hebraicum, p. 72: “ita hodie Judæis vocant per contemptum Christianos quasi gentem abominatione dignam.” On Leopardi’s knowledge of Hebrew see note to Z 1288.

  Z 883

  1. As Plutarch attests in his Life of Alexander 47.

  2. Montesquieu, Considérations, ch. 6, p. 80.

  3. These lines—a very loose paraphrase of Plato, Republic 471a–b—are Leopardi’s faithful rendering of a passage in Lamennais, Saggio, ch. 10, tome 1, part 3, p. 164 (Pacella).

  4. Isocrates, Panegyric 157–59. The passage from “Particularly noteworthy” is a marginal addition, which certainly dates from a later period, 1822 to 1825 (perhaps August 1823: see Z 3129–30), when Leopardi at various stages read Isocrates’s works, which he partially translated in 1824–1825.

  Z 884

  1. Themistius was a fourth-century pagan philosopher, resident in Constantinople. To this oration, published by Mai in 1816, Leopardi had devoted some philological notes in 1817 or 1818 (Scritti filologici, pp. 111ff. [B2]).

  Z 885

  1. The edition cited by Mai is Themistii orationes XXXIII, Paris 1684, Denis Petau and Jean Hardouin, eds.

  Z 886

  1. The Emperor Titus Vespasian quelled the Jewish revolt and captured Jerusalem in 70 CE.

  Z 888

  1. Lamennais, Saggio, ch. 10, tome 1, part 3, pp. 161–69. Incedo per ignes (“I march through fires”) is a Latin tag derived from Horace, ode 2, 1, 7, and was used in this form by, for example, Rousseau. The original text—“Incedis per ignes / Suppositos cineri doloso”—may be rendered “You walk through fires / hidden under deceitful ash.”

  2. That is, a scorched-earth tactic, of the sort employed by Louis XIV in 1688, in the Palatinate.

  Z 889

  1. Lamennais, Saggio, ch. 10, tome 1, part 3, pp. 165–66, who does not, however, explicitly mention England.

  Z 894

  1. Leopardi possibly means the secret societies prominent during the Restoration, such as the Carboneria, which were active in the revolutions of 1820 and 1821.

  Z 896

  1. There were many liberal publicists who, after 1814–1815, advocated the idea of a single European patria, among them Augustin Thierry and Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, alongside writers featuring in, for example, the Revue Encyclopédique.

  2. Among the possible sources for this argument, see Lamennais, Saggio, ch. 10, tome 1, part 3, p. 163 (“People fought for their possessions, their liberty, their lives; since everything belonged to the victor”), or Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, bk. 10, ch. 3.

  Z 897

  1. In Phaedrus’s fable 1, 15 a donkey driver urges his donkey to flee, because the enemy is at hand. The donkey asks his master whether the enemy will burden him with double the number of pack saddles. When the man answers “No,” the donkey asks: “What care I whether you are my master or someone else?”

  Z 903

  1. That is, the overthrow of the Italian republics in the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

  Z 904

  1. Leopardi refers here to the representative assemblies, or parliaments, of late medieval and early modern Europe.

  Z 905

  1. As Voltaire observed in the Histoire du siècle de Louis XIV, The Hague 1752, tome 2, pp. 110–11, a work kept in the prohibited section of the LL at Recanati (Damiani).

  Z 906

  1. Frederick II of Prussia. See Z 270 and note, 2295 and note.

  Z 907

  1. In his later years Leopardi will be even more scathing about the Congress of Vienna; see the satirical poem Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, 2, 32–35 (Poesie, pp. 228–29), inspired in part by the failure of liberal movements in Naples between 1820 and 1821 and the defeated insurrections of 1830–31 in northern and central Italy.

  Z 910

  1. Lamennais, Saggio, ch. 10, tome 1, part 3, pp. 166–68.

  Z 912

  1. Simon-Nicholas-Henri Linguet, Annales politiques, civiles et littéraires du dix-huitième siècle, London 1777–1778, vol. 1, art. “De la société en général,” pp. 100–105; Rousseau, Du contrat social, bk. 3, ch. 15 (in Oeuvres, vol. 3, pp. 428–31 = Del contratto sociale, p. 138); Lamennais, Saggio, ch. 10, tome 1, part 3, pp. 143–44, where the passage by Rousseau mentioned above is cited in French in a footnote.

  Z 913

  1. Here, and in the following lines, the influence of Rousseau’s Du contrat social and Émile is evident, though mediated by Lamennais. See Z 56, note 3.

  Z 915

  1. Strabo, The Geography 8, 3, 25, quoted in Keller, Notitia, vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 8, p. 967. This passage refers to the Messenians, known after their subjugation by the Spartans as Helots; to Ithomi, the city on the Pelo
ponnese around which Messenian resistance to the Spartans was based; and to the existence or otherwise of a place in Messenia by the name of Helos. Pliny had used the term oppidum, town, to refer to Ithomi, and locus to describe Helos, with the implication that the former was still walled—as it is even today—and fortified, the latter in ruins. Encyclopédie méthodique. Antiquité, tome 3, p. 223; Keller, Notitia, vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 13, p. 973, refers to a place called Helos, and to its inhabitants, the Helots, the slaves of the Spartans, though this derivation is disputed.

  Z 916

  1. Montesquieu, Considérations, ch. 17, p. 198.

  2. Florus, Epitome 2, 7, 1–4 (Mannheim ed., p. 139); the emphases are Leopardi’s own.

  3. In this letter by Fronto, his seventh letter to Appian, there is a reference to a (male) “Syrian guard,” in Angelo Mai’s reading, see Opera inedita, vol. 2, p. 434. Recent editions, however, have “porter” or “doorkeeper” (see Van Den Hout p. 244).

  4. Lorenzo Pignoria (Laurentius Pignorius), De Servis et eorum apud veteres ministeriis commentarius, a work also incorporated, not exactly, as Leopardi says, into J. G. Graevius’s Thesaurus antiquitatum Romanarum, Venice 1732–1737 (= LL), but in an appendix to this work, Utriusque thesauri antiquitatum romanarum graecarumque nova supplementa, ed. Giovanni Poleni, vol. 3, Venice 1737, pp. 1137–308 (= LL). Leopardi, however, takes the information from Hager’s article (“Esame di un articolo della Biblioteca Italiana”) in the Spettatore italiano, tome 10, April 1818, no. 14 (97), pp. 240–46.

  5. Moretum, ll. 31–35. A poem ascribed to, but not in fact by Virgil. Other English spellings of Cybale’s name (Cybalen in the original Latin) include Cibale, Scybale, Scyphale.

  6. Florus, Epitome 2, 8, 1 (Mannheim ed., p. 141).

  Z 918

  1. Quotations from Arrian, 11, 1–8, 9–10, 11; 12, 1, 2–4. In this passage Leopardi sometimes gives the Latin translation of these classes, taken from the 1757 edition (we give them in English, in quotation marks).

  Z 920

  1. The note is a marginal addition from July 1827, as is plain from Z 4286. Leopardi is referring here to “The Hindu Pantheon,” an article by Edward Moor, a member of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta and of the Bombay Society, which appears on pp. 307–33 of the Monthly Repertory (= LL), “taken literally” from the Edinburgh Review, tome 17, pp. 311–30.