Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Z 1793

  1. Leopardi had already introduced the concepts of “ultra-philosophy” and “half-philosophy” respectively on Z 114–15 and Z 520–22, 1078. The expression “the ultimate depths of the mind” speaks to a conception of the unconscious that lies between Descartes and Freud (cf. Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud [1962], London: Julian Friedmann, 1978, pp. 27–28). Leopardi’s continuous battle against Cartesian dualism, his radical rejection of the split between mind and matter, his recuperation of a “lost” unconscious particularly through the medium of memory, all point forward, in a broader cultural trajectory, to the reassessment of mental processes that will be pioneered by Freud at the end of the century.

  Z 1794

  1. King Agesilaus to Cotys, as cited in Xenophon, Hellenica 4, 1, 10.

  Z 1795

  1. Leopardi is certainly speaking of himself; see Z 2169 and note 1.

  Z 1798

  1. Rocca, Memorie, loc. cit., contrasts the Spanish bull, “having lived almost wild under the southern sun … [so that] a hot blood boils in his veins,” with the more docile animals to be seen in the fields of the north.

  2. Rocca, Memorie, loc. cit., writes about the “red flag” waved in front of the bull.

  Z 1802

  1. What follows is a marginal addition in the ms. When a young child Leopardi was fond of drawing, as some drawings that can still be seen in Recanati and the ornate frontispieces of his earliest poetical collections demonstrate. His younger brother Luigi (1804–28) was reckoned to be a skilled woodworker as well as a flautist. On the power of exercise see Z 1610–11, 1632–33, 1717.

  Z 1803

  1. Cf. Z 163–64. The reference, given in a later marginal addition, is to an article “Sulla fisica degenerazione dell’umana specie,” which appeared in Nuovo Ricoglitore, 3, July 1827, no. 31, pp. 481–83, and which ascribed the ever-increasing number of mental and nervous illnesses, all too readily transmitted from parents to children, to the neglect of gymnastics in modern education.

  Z 1804

  1. For a study of changing attitudes to odors, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant. Odor and the French Social Imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1986 (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982).

  Z 1808

  1. See Z 1249 and note.

  Z 1816

  1. See Z 55, note 1.

  Z 1818

  1. In his Essai sur les préjugés (Paris 1770), Holbach had ascribed to philosophy the courage and strength to fight for the triumph of truth. In his judgment, Enlightenment sprang from philosophical “passions,” and it was wholly unjust to accuse the philosophes of destroying without attempting to build (Damiani). Leopardi, in his challenge to such positions, seems to be echoing Petrarch: “Povera e nuda vai, Philosophia…” (Rime 7, l. 10): cf. Z 3384 and note.

  Z 1820

  1. Leopardi refers to Velleius, Historia romana 1, 16–18. A passage from ch. 16 features at the head of Algarotti’s Saggio sopra quella quistione perché i grandi ingegni a certi tempi sorgano tutti ad un tratto, e fioriscano insieme, in Opere, tome 4, p. 183.

  Z 1824

  1. Compassion, the only sentiment that, according to Rousseau, is extraneous to self-love, is in fact for Leopardi a refined product of it: see Z 108–109 and note, 3107–109.

  Z 1826

  1. Petrarch, Rime 302, ll. 10–11.

  2. Pindemonte, “Clizia,” l. 55 (Poesie, Pisa 1798, p. 132). Here Leopardi is quoting from memory a line which in fact reads: “Fermasi alfin quel cor, che balzò tanto” (“The heart stops at last, which pounded so”).

  3. On Leopardi’s attention to such words and the influence of Longinus, see Z 27 and note 3.

  Z 1827

  1. Cf. the quotation from Plato on Z 883 and Z 893.

  2. With his Eclogae piscatoriae (1526) Sannazaro introduced a new element into the bucolic genre, namely, the world of the fishermen from the Bay of Naples.

  Z 1829

  1. Zopyrus had discerned in the features of Socrates every indication of a vicious nature. See Cicero, De fato 5, 10–11 and Tusculanae disputationes 4, 37, also cited on Z 3201.

  Z 1831

  1. Like Recanati.

  Z 1832

  1. See Z 2186 and note 1, 2229–30.

  Z 1833

  1. This thought comes from Guicciardini’s Ricordi (in Fubini’s edition, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977, p. 198, it is reflection A 18), a collection of reflections and precepts to do with republican governance, but is cited from a work in Leopardi’s possession, namely, the Considerazioni civili sopra l’historie di M. Francesco Guicciardini e d’altri historici, by Remigio Nannini, called Fiorentino, Venice 1603, fol. 134v.

  Z 1835

  1. This small treatise on the power of imagination and feeling (Z 1833–39, which continues on Z 1848–60) goes well beyond the Condillacian idea that imagination, insofar as it discovers “relations” (Z 1650) adds beauty to the truth: “Nothing is beautiful except the truth: however, not everything that is true is beautiful. In order to make up this lack, the imagination associates with it the ideas that are most suited to embellish it” (Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, ch. 10, § 91, in Oeuvres, tome 1, p. 137), and might be influenced by Staël’s account of Kant’s philosophy in part 3, ch. 6 of De l’Allemagne, where both sensationalist and rationalist aesthetics are rejected, and where Kant’s theory of the sublime is summarized (see Z 1838 and note for a possible echo from that same chapter—but see Leopardi’s criticism of Kant on Z 1857; see also Henry Crabb Robinson, Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. by James Vigus, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010, p. 30 and especially p. 122, where he introduces some of these ideas to Staël). This is why the reader cannot fail to be reminded of Coleridge and his need to keep “alive the heart in the head” (Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, p. 152, ch. 9) in the context of his debt to Kant and other Germans. Cf. also Z 1852 and note 2, 1975–78, 2132–34, 3237–45, 3269–70.

  Z 1836

  1. The opening lines of Z 1836 are added in the margin.

  Z 1838

  1. Cf. Goethe, Faust, Part 1, ll. 1936–41, where Mephistopheles discusses chemistry, and the rational and scientific analysis of nature. Leopardi’s immediate source, however (see Z 4479 and note 2), is probably Staël, De l’Allemagne, for example part 3, ch. 2, or, more pertinently, ch. 6: “Doctors, in the physical study of man, recognize the principle which animates him, and yet no one knows what life is … Anatomy cannot be practiced on a living body without destroying it; analysis, when we try to apply it to indivisible truths, ruins them, because what it brings to bear on them damages their unity.” See note to Z 1835.

  Z 1840

  1. A letter in which Fronto refers to the discourses on love by Lysias and Socrates in the Phaedrus of Plato. Angelo Mai believed that the letter, translated by Leopardi into Italian (Opere inedite, vol. 1, pp. 473–76), was addressed to Marcus Aurelius. See Fronto (ed. Mai), tome 2, pp. 380–99 (ed. Van den Hout pp. 250–55).

  2. What follows, until “Aristetenus, etc.)” is a lengthy marginal addition from 1827. Leopardi had read Plato’s Phaedrus and the dialogue Amores (Affairs of the Heart), attributed to Lucian, which discusses the superiority of homosexual over heterosexual love, in March and May 1824 respectively. See Z 4047.

  3. That is, Sappho’s Fragment 31 (Voigt = 2 Page), which Catullus translated into Latin.

  Z 1841

  1. Virgil, Aeneid 9, 176ff.

  2. One might suspect that the sudden explosion of this topic in the Zibaldone may betoken a glimpse of self-awareness. What we can say is that, much later, “Leopardi’s letters to Antonio Ranieri, the companion with whom he spent most of the last seven years of his life, are the most personal … dramatic and fascinating documents of the Epistolario. Yet they are either passed over in embarrassed silence, or glossed with apologetic euphemism … Nowhere else is Leopardi so direct, so unguarded, so passionate. He dispenses entirely with his customary
reticence, and writes from the heart, obsessively repeating a single message: that he misses Ranieri and cannot live without him.” (Kathleen Baldwin, Ambivalence, Dissimulation and Self-Censorship in the Letters of Giacomo Leopardi, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2004, pp. 355–67.)

  Z 1842

  1. See Z 160–61 and 357–58. The “mythology of Reason” is a key concept of the “Oldest system-program of German idealism,” written by Schelling in collaboration with Hegel and Hölderlin (1796 or 1797).

  Z 1847

  1. The parenthesis is a marginal addition. The theory of pleasure is argued on Z 165ff.

  Z 1848

  1. Aristotle, Poetics 1453a, a passage also cited on Z 225 and 662. In the ms. there follows, within parentheses, a marginal addition.

  Z 1849

  1. The Jewish philosopher Jesus of Sirach, who flourished in the second century BCE, the author of Ecclesiasticus (known also as the Wisdom of Ben Sira). A key passage from this work, bk. 17, ch. 18, reads “He who lives in eternity created everything at the same time.” Transmitted by St. Augustine, it continued to influence cosmogonic speculation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  2. The birthplace of Lactantius is unknown, but he did come from Africa.

  Z 1850

  1. See Z 106 and note 1.

  Z 1851

  1. The copy of De l’Allemagne read by Leopardi is no longer in the LL. We have not been able to find (either in France or in Italy) a third ed. dated 1815 (as Leopardi says on Z 1949); there are third editions dated 1814, but in all the volumes checked the pages do not correspond to Leopardi’s quotations.

  Z 1852

  1. The “recognition of errors,” to which Leopardi refers already in 1815, in ch. 1 of the Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (Prose, pp. 639–42), and again on Z 2705–709, is Bayle’s method (“la chasse des erreurs”). Bayle is, however, explicitly mentioned only on Z 4192–93 (see note).

  2. The colpo d’occhio, or the French coup d’oeil (translated here: “seeing … taking things in … at a glance”) is a technical term in Enlightenment and idéologue philosophy (Condillac, Cabanis), of which, however, Leopardi makes a different use in some thoughts, leaning toward ideas of enthusiasm, genius, inspiration, and the sublime of a Platonic and Longinian kind. Cf. Z 1833ff., 3245, 3269–71. For Condillac, only analysis—not the coup d’oeil—enables one to acquire the capacity to decompose and recompose things in order to attain the knowledge of them: “instead of encompassing everything with a coup d’oeil, one’s glances have to stop successively on each object in turn” (La logique, part 1, ch. 2, in Oeuvres, tome 22, p. 18). See also the note to Z 1835.

  Z 1855

  1. Here Leopardi shows some affinity with Coleridge, and with the notion of inner vision and philosophic imagination developed in Biographia Literaria, ch. 12, vol. 1, pp. 235–42. Cf. note 1 to Z 1650.

  Z 1857

  1. Leopardi’s hostility toward German philosophy was commented on a few years after his death by G. H. Lewes, “Life and Works of Leopardi,” p. 663 (B9). Leopardi’s knowledge, however, was superficial and almost entirely secondhand, being derived for the most part from Madame de Staël, and from articles in the Biblioteca Italiana and the Spettatore, which often contained dismissive judgments on Leibniz and Kant. There is thus no reason to suppose that Leopardi had (or ever would) read Kant, although he was certainly familiar with Staël’s account in De l’Allemagne (part 3, ch. 6ff.) where she depicted Kant as a “spiritualist” philosopher, at odds with the materialists (see, e.g., the review of Destutt de Tracy cited in the note to Z 1235, where Plato’s and Kant’s abstruse “delirium” is opposed to Aristotle, seen as a precursor of sensationalism). Later on, in 1825, he cited from the Italian translation (Storia della filosofia moderna, 12 vols., Milan 1821–1825) of J. G. Buhle’s Geschichte der neueren Philosophie. See Cellerino (B12). There is the same lack of sources with regard to the German Romantics. On a similar reception of German culture in England in the 1820s see Z 106, note 1, and the section on Staël in David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

  Z 1858

  1. In fact Polish. See Z 84 and note.

  2. That is, Nicholas of Cusa.

  Z 1862

  1. As Damiani notes, Schiller likewise characterized modern, i.e., “sentimental” poetry (cf. Z 1448) as the consciousness of a loss: “Our feeling for nature is like that of the sick man for health. Just as nature began gradually to vanish from human life as experience and as the (active and feeling) subjectivity, so we see it emerge in the world of the poet as an idea and as subject matter” (see Friedrich Schiller, On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature, Manchester: Carcanet, 1981, trans. H. Watanabe-O’Kelly, p. 34). On “melancholic” versus ancient poetry see Z 3976; on the pleasure of memory see Z 514–15 and the thoughts cited on Z 4426, note 2.

  2. Leopardi was thus not aware, as Z 2592 also testifies, of the much earlier work of the Sanskrit grammarians between the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, with a series of supporting disciplines around the Veda in the traditional number of six, of which no less than four are concerned with linguistic matters.

  Z 1869

  1. In the ms. this reference was added in September 1824. Leopardi quotes Guicciardini’s text (in Fubini’s edition, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977, p. 200, it is reflection A 24), as given in Remigio Fiorentino’s Considerazioni civili sopra l’Historie di M. Francesco Guicciardini (cf. Z 1833 and note), p. 135. On the whole paragraph see Z 1387, 1436–37, 2523–24, and 4525–26, the very last entry.

  Z 1870

  1. On “general rule” and “exceptions” cf. Z 1387, 1527, and 4525–26, the last entry of the Zibaldone.

  Z 1871

  1. Leopardi uses the terms “harmony” and “melody” sometimes as synonyms and sometimes as alternatives, but without much coherence, as was common in Italian writing about music between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see G. Martini, Storia della musica, vol. 1, p. 175 = LL). He often uses “harmony” to mean the symmetrical proportion between linear melodic elements, by analogy with the harmony of a line of poetry. This is at odds with the modern understanding of the term, which became widespread at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the so-called Harmonienlehre (“Theory of Harmony”). Here “harmony” is understood as a syntax of concatenations of chords, that is, of simultaneous aggregates of different sounds.

  2. The ambiguous word “tones” has different meanings in theoretical writing about music of the time. These are listed by Leopardi’s source, G. Martini, Storia della musica, vol. 1, p. 500. In general, sound becomes tone, or harmonized sound, only when it is used in a conventional system (this distinction derives from Rousseau). “Tone” may be understood as a harmonized sound, that is, a sound that is not natural, and is placed in a system of pitches selected as “notes”; or as the distance separating one pitch from the next in the diatonic scale; or, finally, as a more generic “tonality,” that is to say, the tonal color or ambience in which a melody unfolds. Here and in the other passages on music, we shall generally keep to Leopardi’s own ambiguous terminology, except in those cases where tono clearly has its modern meaning of “note” or “pitch.”

  Z 1872

  1. “Cadence” for Leopardi does not have the same meaning as it has today, that is, the ending of an ordered musical period by means of its full harmonic “resolution,” but rather the recurrence of a concluding clause at regular and symmetrical intervals which also allows the listener to perceive the symmetry instinctively: it behaves, in a certain sense, as the equivalent of rhyme in poetry. See Peter Lichtenthal, Dizionario e Bibliografia della musica, Milan 1826, vol. 1, pp. 109–10.

  Z 1887

  1. Eighteenth-century novels concerned with the theme of outraged virtue by, for example, Richardson or Laclos or Sade, may have informed Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, but Leopardi would appear to have had little or no kno
wledge of this subgenre, or even of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni. Yet, with this sketch of a libertine plot, he seems to set the starting point of some of the greatest novels of the following decades, by Stendhal (his sister Paolina’s favorite writer), or Balzac.

  Z 1888

  1. The Académie Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, reformed the language by publishing a dictionary and establishing a set of rules for orthography and grammar. On the difference between the Académie and the Florentine Accademia della Crusca (1583, first edition of the Dictionary: 1612), see Z 1892.

  Z 1890

  1. Cf. Z 1955 and note.

  Z 1891

  1. Leopardi seems to be contradicting himself here, in that he first says that the French are always introducing novelties, and then observes that they are opposed to them, but the interpolation “especially pertaining to the spirit of the language” clarifies his meaning. The French, in his judgment, are opposed to novelties that stem from the spirit of the language, from the trunk of the tradition, and they therefore love, instead, radical novelties, which corrupt the language. See also Z 1896, below; and 1927 and note 1 on the modern mechanism of fashion.

  Z 1892

  1. On the theme of acceleration, see Z 1732 and note 1, 1896.

  2. See Z 1888 and note.

  Z 1895

  1. Observations on the culture and literature of both Russia and Sweden may be found in Mme. de Staël’s Dix années d’exil, Brussels: Wahlen, 1821 (= LL, but with the signature of Leopardi’s youngest brother Pierfrancesco on the flyleaf).