Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Z 1898

  1. In this thought beauty and truth coincide only in the Italian and in the Greek language, because they are both “of ancient character.” In modernity, beauty and truth are divorced (cf. Z 1521–22, 2653), except in poetic imagination and sensibility (Z 3243).

  Z 1899

  1. Leopardi alludes here to the “purists” (see Z 1, note 6).

  Z 1907

  1. Leopardi may have noticed Algarotti’s remark in his Saggio sopra la rima (Opere, tome 4, p. 73): “One verse is written for meaning … and another for benefit of the rhyme” (Pacella).

  Z 1908

  1. The target of this thought is Plato (as Z 1638 makes clear, but see also Z 1342, 1462–63, 1712–14); it is also useful to recall Z 1790, where Leopardi quotes St. Thomas (see note).

  Z 1910

  1. Even if there was a perfect state of man in a supernatural world, we would not be able to know it; the only perfection that Leopardi accepts at this stage is that of nature, which, as he will say in the following paragraph, is not “imaginary,” but one that man can “carry with him” and is “before his eyes.” A critique of Plato’s “ideas” is implied here: see Z 155 and note 1, 1340–41, 1462–63, 1714.

  Z 1913

  1. On Z 120 and 3470–71 Leopardi explains how political power has become more abstract and invisible. Leopardi’s interest in Tibet might have been stimulated by Antonio Agostino Giorgi’s Alphabetum Tibetanum, Rome 1762 (= LL).

  Z 1914

  1. In childhood Giacomo had known the gentle Don Vincenzo Ferri, recollected on Z 1751, whose face was of an exceptional ugliness, as Monaldo Leopardi recorded in his autobiography.

  Z 1917

  1. Petrarch, Rime 1, ll. 9–10 (trans. Robert Durling).

  Z 1922

  1. Cf. Z 947 and note, 1089–90.

  Z 1925

  1. Cf. Z 1452–53 and note.

  Z 1926

  1. Leopardi had expressed the same view in a lengthy and demanding erudite work, the Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (1815), in which he collected the popular “errors” or prejudices of the ancients. Later on he planned to rewrite his essay (cf. Z 4477 and note 4). The parenthesis is a marginal addition.

  Z 1927

  1. Although he never set foot out of Italy, Leopardi certainly had in mind French society: he writes here that “fashion changes people’s ways of dressing … in an instant, and universally”; exactly the same expression used a few days before apropos of the French language, in which “every novelty that is introduced … immediately becomes universal … and becomes a rule” (Z 1891; and cf. Z 1078). Cf. also Z 8 and note 3. Walter Benjamin chose to use a brief quotation from Leopardi’s operetta morale “Dialogo della Moda e della Morte” as one of the epigraphs to his Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard U.P., 1999, p. 8 and p. 18).

  2. This thought is an appendix to Z 1883–85.

  Z 1928

  1. See Leopardi, “La sera del dì di festa,” ll. 43–46. There follows a ms. marginal addition until “space.”

  2. In the ms. the last sentence is a marginal unattached addition. Through his poetics of distance Leopardi unwittingly reactivates a principle of Romanticism, earlier theorized, among others, by Novalis in 1798–1799: “Thus everything in the distance becomes Poetry–Poem. Actio in distans. Distant mountains, distant people, distant happenings, etc., everything becomes romantic … Poetry of night and twilight” (Das Allgemeine Brouillon. Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik 1798/99, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1993, p. 62, § 342). See also Z 4293.

  Z 1930

  1. Virgil’s passage, also cited in the “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica” (Prose, p. 393), describes Circe singing at her loom and lions roaring in the depths of the night. The night was of fundamental importance to many pre-Romantic and Romantic poets. Leopardi certainly read Young’s Night Thoughts (trans. by A. Loschi, Venice 1786), which had also inspired, for example, Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht (and cf. the note above).

  Z 1931

  1. That is, a minori ad maius: a syllogistic argument of an inductive type, namely, from the particular to the general, traditionally applied to physiognomy.

  Z 1933

  1. Cicero, De senectute 23, 82, a passage transcribed on Z 826.

  2. Thomas, Essai sur les éloges, ch. 10 (in Oeuvres, tome 1, pp. 130–31).

  3. Mme. de Staël had asserted in De l’Allemagne, part 1, ch. 2, that in France “everyone aspires to deserve what Montesquieu said of Voltaire: ‘More than anyone he has the same spirit that everyone has’” (Damiani).

  Z 1936

  1. For the difference between “tone” and “sound,” and more in general on Leopardi’s idea of musical “harmony” see Z 1871–72 and notes. On the relation between music and colors see Z 155, 1747. Rousseau had devoted ch. 16 of his Essai sur l’origine des langues to the “false analogy between colors and sounds.” (Oeuvres, vol. 5, pp. 419–22).

  Z 1937

  1. This parenthesis is an interlinear addition, as is the one below, and the sentence preceding it. The cross-reference concerns a passage from De l’Allemagne on Z 1965.

  Z 1944

  1. See Z 1747–48 (note 2), for the music of colors in eighteenth-century theory and practice, and cf. note to Z 1936, above. Paolo Costa, in Della elocuzione (see Z 63 and note), pp. 41–42, wrote about metaphors, noting the particular efficacy of visual ones. Leopardi’s use of multiple suspension dots after “etc.” here is a unique occurrence in the Zibaldone.

  Z 1945

  1. This is a marginal unattached addition from 1827, referring to one of Magalotti’s Lettere scientifiche ed erudite, Venice 1740, namely, “Donde possa avvenire che nel giudicare degli Odori, così sovente si prenda abbaglio” [“How it can happen that in judging Odors, one can so frequently be mistaken”], p. 81.

  Z 1949

  1. Johann Heinrich Voss was a poet and Greek scholar, responsible for translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In a note dated March 1875 (Werke, eds. G. Colli and M. Montinari, vol. 4/1, Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1967, p. 98), Nietzsche contrasted Leopardi with Voss: “Leopardi is the modern ideal of what a philologist should be; the German philologists don’t know how to do anything (study Voss in this regard).”

  Z 1951

  1. Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 1, chs. 11–12, on the esprit de conversation and its relationship to the German language.

  Z 1955

  1. Algarotti (Saggio sopra la lingua francese, in Opere, tome 4, p. 56) had himself deplored the “excessively severe grammatical rules” of the French language, and its “very narrow bounds” (Damiani).

  Z 1956

  1. See Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War, Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2009.

  Z 1957

  1. One possible source for Leopardi’s knowledge of Tahiti is an article originally in the National Register and published in Italian translation in Il Raccoglitore, ossia Archivj di viaggi, di filosofia ecc., 1819, vol. 5, pp. 197–99. The Hottentots, Buffon had observed (Histoire naturelle, tome 3, “Variétés dans l’espèce humaine,” p. 471), “are nomads, independent, and extremely jealous of their liberty” (LL = Storia naturale dell’uomo, tome 3, p. 131).

  Z 1961

  1. In this chapter Andrés, Dell’origine, loc. cit., discusses the poetic language and prosody of the Icelandic sagas.

  Z 1965

  1. This is a transcription of the penultimate paragraph from De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 9.

  2. Lady Morgan, La France, vol. 2, bk. 6, p. 104, contrasts the speech patterns and pronunciation of the Irish lower classes with those of the English.

  Z 1967

  1. Here, as on Z 1659, we have substituted English phonetic spelling for Leopardi’s Italian-sounding an; a similar case occurs on Z 1969.

  Z 1973

  1. That is, the Renaissance. Cf. also Z 2210–11. On the arrival of Gr
eek scholarship and its contribution to Italian humanism in the fifteenth century see note to Z 1025.

  Z 1980

  1. Celsus, De medicina, introduction.

  Z 1982

  1. For this discussion of suicide cf. Rousseau, Nouvelle Héloïse, part 3, letter 21, where Saint-Preux claims that suicide is a “droit de la nature,” against Plato’s objections in Phaedo, 61dff. See Z 223, 484–85, 1978–82, 2549–55, 3784.

  Z 1988

  1. Cf. St. Augustine, Confessions 10, 14, 21, who observes that memory, being the “stomach” of the mind, can preserve a sorrow without tasting its bitterness. But it is probable that Leopardi’s source here was Gravina, Della ragion poetica, bk. 1, ch. 11, p. 20, who had written that “when by means of reminiscence … [images] stir up in us feelings which correspond to the impressions of things, and with words the traces of objects are awakened, then the same passions are renewed, that were previously aroused by the real objects … But the stirring of even painful emotions is always mingled with pleasure.” Cf. Leopardi, “Alla luna,” ll. 10–16.

  Z 1992

  1. Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae are quoted from Forcellini. See Z 1126, note 2.

  Z 1993

  1. See Perticari, Degli scrittori del Trecento, chs. 5–8, pp. 21–44.

  Z 1994

  1. Perticari, Degli scrittori del Trecento, in Monti, Proposta, loc. cit., pp. 14–15. The first quotation is from Brunetto Latini, the second (slightly adapted) from Dante’s Convivio.

  Z 1997

  1. The spelling here and on two other occasions is “Montagne.” Only in the final reference to the French author, dated 23 October 1828, does Leopardi write “Montaigne.” Cf. note 1 to Z 2296.

  Z 1999

  1. Alfieri, Vita, Epoch 2, ch. 1, vol. 1, pp. 28–29.

  Z 2000

  1. The image of the thermometer recalls the recent past when, during the Jacobin triennio, the impact of modern French culture was embodied in journals such as Il termometro politico della Lombardia, published in Milan between 1796 and 1799.

  Z 2004

  1. See Z 686.

  Z 2009

  1. This is a mystery. Does Leopardi refer to a page written on this topic a month later (Z 2176–77)? Perhaps he is thinking that he is going to write something more extensive, obviously without yet knowing when. Note that Z 2176–77 does not refer back to this page; in between are the reflections on German sparked by De l’Allemagne on Z 2080ff.

  Z 2010

  1. Lucretius, De rerum natura 3, 189.

  2. See Z 2786–87.

  Z 2011

  1. That is, Forcellini.

  Z 2012

  1. Leopardi refers here to two editions by Mai: Samuel of Ani’s Temporum usque ad suam aetatem ratio, Milan 1818 (cf. Z 2735), and Philo Judaeus’s De virtute eiusque partibus, Milan 1816.

  2. The author of this work is François-Emmanuel de Guignard, Comte de Saint-Priest.

  Z 2016

  1. Annibale Caro in his Apologia had defended the language and style of his own “Canzone in lode de la Casa di Francia,” which had been criticized by Lodovico Castelvetro for not being sufficiently faithful to the Petrarchan model. See Z 2540.

  Z 2018

  1. This sentence (from “And not only…”) is a ms. marginal addition.

  Z 2021

  1. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 10, 6, 2.

  Z 2026

  1. The last three sentences are added in the margin.

  Z 2028

  1. This is the chapter on German universities, where Leopardi found a description of what was his own method of study, based on constant exercise and painful effort.

  Z 2035

  1. The suffix re is the ending of any Latin infinitive, combined here by Leopardi with the adverb penitus [thoroughly] in order to suggest that his view about continuatives can be applied to any verb.

  Z 2041

  1. The verb chosen by Leopardi in the construction “fanno ondeggiar” is related metaphorically to the last two lines of “L’infinito,” where “my mind sinks in this immensity” and “foundering is sweet in such a sea” (trans. Galassi).

  Z 2043

  1. See Leopardi, “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica” (Prose, pp. 398–99).

  Z 2047

  1. See Z 208 and note 3, 1254–55.

  Z 2051

  1. Horace, Odes 1, 22, 17–20.

  Z 2052

  1. S. Bettinelli, Tutte le opere, Venice 1799 (= LL), vol. 6, p. 243, wrote that the French language “is perhaps the one most resistant to poetry.” Cf. also the quotation from Mme. de Staël on Z 962, and Z 3864.

  Z 2054

  1. The pleasures of vastness, as Leopardi calls them, had been linked by Montesquieu to the “progression of surprise.” In his Essai sur le Goût, p. 399, he cited the example of St. Peter’s in Rome and that of the Pyrenees, “where the eye, which at the start believes itself to be able to judge their dimensions, discovers behind the mountains yet other mountains, and becomes increasingly lost” (Damiani). See also the chapter on “Vastness” in Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, part 2, ch. 7, p. 127: “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime.” (Ricerca, part 2, ch. 8, p. 84.) Cf. also Z 2257–58.

  Z 2061

  1. See Z 741, where Leopardi cites the Constitution of the Athenians 2, 7, in his day a text attributed to Xenophon (see note).

  Z 2062

  1. On the “purists” see Z 1, note 6, and 1899.

  Z 2063

  1. The comparison between German and Greek was prompted by Staël; see Z 2085–89, 2176–77.

  Z 2069

  1. The verse from Poliziano’s Stanze is cited from Poemetti del secolo XV, XVI, Venice: Zatta, 1785 (= LL), p. 18.

  2. Corticelli, Regole, pp. 162 and 149.

  Z 2076

  1. See Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2, 6, 5.

  Z 2077

  1. See Festus, De verborum significatione, p. CCCXXIV.

  Z 2081

  1. See Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 9, loc. cit. on Z 2079.

  Z 2085

  1. See Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 9.

  Z 2086

  1. See Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 9, where she brilliantly summarizes what Rousseau says in his Essai sur l’origine des langues, for example ch. 9 (in Oeuvres, vol. 5, p. 407): “The first languages, daughters of pleasure and not of need, for a long time bore the mark of their father. Their seductive accent was only effaced by the sentiments which produced their birth, when new needs introduced among men forced each to dream of nothing but himself and to withdraw into his own heart” (cf. also ibid., p. 409). On the distinction between northern and southern languages in this essay see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, ch. 3, section 2, trans. G. Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1976, pp. 223–26. The resemblance between German and Greek (discussed by Leopardi at various places: see, e.g., Z 2009, 2176–77), especially promoted by Wilhelm von Humboldt, was common currency in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany with the rebirth of philological studies.

  Z 2088

  1. See Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 1, ch. 13, where the characteristic of being eminently capable of dealing with abstract studies is noted in the context of their behavior in relation to trade.

  Z 2098

  1. That is, Queen Anne, also mentioned on Z 1519, and whose reign (1702–14) marked the high point of the influence of French literature on English. In the manuscript this sentence is an unattached marginal addition.

  Z 2100

  1. Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) and Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), of Polish and Russian nationality respectively, were both Leopardi’s contemporaries.

  Z 2101

  1. See Z 2087.

  Z 2104

  1. Velleius Paterculus, Historia Romana 1, 18. See also Z 1819–20.

  Z 2113

  1. That is, the Nibelungenlied, or The Song of the Nibelungs. See Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 3
.

  2. This sentence, a marginal addition, is continued in a further addition on Z 2153.

  Z 2115

  1. Leopardi refers here to Z 393–451, where he seeks a reconciliation between his own “system” and Christianity.

  Z 2118

  1. Cf. “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” ll. 16–18. This passage reminds us of the opening lines of book 2 of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, which Hans Blumenberg takes as a starting point in his essay on the “metaphor,” Shipwreck with Spectator (trans. S. Rendall, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). Lucretius was included in the Collectio Pisauriensis, ed. Amatus Paschalis, Pesaro 1766 (= LL); the beginning of book 2 in vol. 1, p. 344.

  Z 2122

  1. Concerning Spain, Leopardi first writes Madrid, the capital city, then adds Castile, the region where supposedly the purest Spanish language is spoken.

  Z 2124

  1. The following paragraph is an unattached marginal addition, written on Z 2123, perhaps from 1824 (Pacella). For Venice and Naples one has to understand the whole region of which these cities are the capitals.

  2. Interest in Provençal, and the troubadours, had been enhanced by Sismondi, De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813), cited on Z 1672.

  Z 2126

  1. This sentence is an unattached marginal addition from 1827, which might allude to Manzoni, who in that year published the Promessi sposi. The two writers met in the Gabinetto Vieusseux (Florence) in early September 1827. Against the preeminence assigned by Manzoni to the Florentine dialect on the basis of the prestige it had acquired in the fourteenth century, Leopardi anticipates the position of Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, the father of Italian linguistics, who thought that a “common national language” (as Leopardi names it here) would only emerge out of the contribution of all Italian regions, fostered by educational improvements and growing social interaction (see Ascoli’s Scritti sulla questione della lingua, 1873), i.e., in Leopardian terms, conversazione.

  Z 2128

  1. A translation by Charles-Louis de Sevelinges of Carlo Botta’s history of the American War of Independence, originally published in 1809, had appeared in Paris in 1812–13. Sevelinges’s preface to that edition had then been reproduced in Italian in Storia della guerra dell’indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d’America, third edition, Milan 1819, which Leopardi may have borrowed.