Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Z 4386

  1. Dante spent some years of his exile in Verona, where he composed many cantos of the Divine Comedy.

  2. Leopardi quotes the last paragraph (§ 203) of Foscolo’s Discorso, vol. 2, pp. 281–83.

  Z 4387

  1. Leopardi is discussing cases where elision does not take place.

  Z 4388

  1. The Tuscanizing reworking of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato.

  Z 4389

  1. That is, Matteo Imbriani, a Neapolitan exile since 1821 and father of the more famous jurist and patriot, Paolo Emilio.

  Z 4390

  1. On the fascination of force, see Z 2155–56, 2258. On Achilles in particular cf. Z 3597. If heroes inspire love, it is also true that heroes are more inclined to love; see Z 3611.

  Z 4391

  1. Leopardi alludes to F.-W. Thiersch (see Z 4319).

  2. In English in the original.

  3. On various interpretations of laughter, see Z 87, 107, 188, 4138.

  Z 4392

  1. Leopardi consulted in Pisa Vico’s Principj di scienza nuova, Naples 1744 (here § 856). For this and the passages quoted below we use the Bergin/Fisch translation, with minor changes. On Hesiod cf. Z 3044. On Vico see note 2 to Z 143.

  Z 4394

  1. For Wolf’s text see Z 4343, note 2. The emphases are in the original.

  Z 4395

  1. A note in French in the hand of Louis de Sinner that is fastened to this page points out that when he read Vico after having written the Prolegomena, Wolf published an article on Vico and Homer in the journal Museum der Alterthumwissenschaft, tome 1 (1807). Sinner had clearly had the privilege of reading the Zibaldone in manuscript (Pacella).

  2. Vico, The New Science, § 850. See Z 4392, note 1.

  3. Ibid., § 819.

  4. Ibid., § 875.

  5. Ibid., § 876.

  Z 4396

  1. Ibid., §§ 877–78.

  2. Ibid., § 873.

  3. Ibid., § 880.

  4. Ibid., § 881.

  5. On the Sublime 9, 13. On this work see Z 4369–70.

  Z 4397

  1. Vico, The New Science, § 879.

  2. Ibid., § 853.

  3. Ibid., § 667. This passage supports Leopardi’s observations on Z 2759–70. See also Z 4406 on Constant.

  4. For Wolf’s text see Z 4343, note 2.

  Z 4399

  1. See Z 4337–38, 4361. This is not a review, only a bibliographical note in the section “new books” cited in the following entry.

  2. Certainly an interesting title for Leopardi; see Z 3643ff. and 4119, paragraph 2.

  3. From the Journal des Savans, a review of A. Poirson, Histoire romaine, depuis la fondation de Rome jusqu’à l’établissement de l’empire, Paris 1825–26. See Z 4153, 4213, and 4330.

  Z 4400

  1. This thought is at the origin of the “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia.” Note that the idea of improvisation had been emphasized by Leopardi on Z 4317. See also Z 4323.

  2. See Z 4345.

  Z 4403

  1. This precise reference to the page is interpolated by Leopardi. There follows Schweighaeuser’s quotation from Wesseling.

  Z 4404

  1. See Z 4343.

  Z 4405

  1. Schweighaeuser cites from Hermogenis Ars oratoria absolutissima et libri omnes, trans. and notes by Kaspar Laurentius, Geneva 1614, loc. cit., and from Wesseling’s Dissertatio Herodotea, Utrecht 1758.

  Z 4406

  1. Constant had been cited in this connection on Z 4322. On the archaic morality of the Iliad see Z 2759–70, 4397.

  Z 4407

  1. The Jangarchi (in Constant’s French spelling “Dschangarti”) are the singers of the epic poem Jangar. See The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 222–31.

  Z 4408

  1. Plato, Ion 535e.

  Z 4409

  1. Constant cites Arnold H. L. Heeren, Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker der alten Welt, but refers to the chapter on “The Greeks” in French, hence Leopardi’s “(sic).”

  2. That is, if the Greeks were different peoples.

  Z 4410

  1. Leopardi inserts the subject “The Gods” into the passage. From “A rather…” he cites from a note. The work quoted by Constant is F.-Ch.-H. Pouqueville, Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople et en Albanie, Paris 1805. On divine envy, see Z 197–98, 453–55, 2365–66, 2388–89, 4309.

  Z 4411

  1. This is Constant’s spelling of Wolf, hence Leopardi’s “(sic).”

  2. From a review by F.J.M. Raynouard of an edition of Petrus Alphonsi’s Disciplina clericalis, loc. cit., pp. 178–85. The second line is added by Leopardi, who takes it from another passage in the same review.

  Z 4412

  1. See Z 4364.

  2. In the ms. Leopardi has crossed out a reference to Schweighaeuser’s edition of Herodotus, (see Z 4400), tome 1, p. 391.

  Z 4414

  1. Leopardi alludes to Schubarth; cf. Z 4313–14 and 4405–406.

  2. See Z 3105, 4078–79.

  3. Leopardi had read Ossian in 1820, see Z 205.

  4. This work (seventh or sixth century BCE) has been attributed to Homer or Antimachus of Teos or Antimachus of Colophon.

  5. Constant, De la religion, vol. 3, bk. 8, ch. 3, p. 459.

  Z 4415

  1. Dante, Inferno 31, 41.

  2. See Wolf, Prolegomena, § 20, note 51.

  3. This is perhaps the only place where Leopardi labels his poetics of memory as romantic, a word normally associated by him with the modern, and thus colored with a negative value. The same ambivalence is found with the word mystical (Z 3913, note).

  Z 4416

  1. Here Leopardi quotes in French two passages that he has already rephrased in Italian on Z 2296. The first is from Montaigne (Essais, bk. 2, ch. 12, in Oeuvres complètes, eds. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat, Paris: Gallimard, 1962, p. 579), the second from Pascal (Pensées sur la religion, ch. 25, § 7, p. 128 = Pensées, § 82 ed. Brunschvicg). Both are cited through Charles Nodier, Questions de littérature légale, 2nd ed., Paris 1828, p. 212, cited below.

  2. Leopardi comes back to one of the themes of the early Zibaldone, see, e.g., Z 198–203.

  Z 4417

  1. Perticari, Degli scrittori del Trecento, pp. 114–15; 72–73.

  2. Leopardi had left Florence on 10 November 1828.

  Z 4418

  1. It is difficult to say if Leopardi is referring here to a particular stage of life (as on Z 76, recalled in “A Silvia,” ll. 15–18). The first emergence of this unrealized autobiographical project (i.e., “Memories of my life”) is on Z 4286.

  2. Leopardi had three younger brothers and one younger sister, Paolina. He records some of these games in his “Vita abbozzata di Silvio Sarno,” § 101, and on Z 106.

  3. This thought seems to echo a passage of Genovesi’s Logica per i giovanetti, bk. 4, ch. 6 (p. 178): “All the things of this World, their forces, actions, passions, aspects, become new and strange in the hands of a Poet, a Novelist, a wayward brain. You see there another race of men, another race of animals, and plants; everything seems an enchantment; everything is the opposite of the World.” Z 514–15 makes clear that the pleasure of imagination is only possible in childhood or as a memory of things past.

  Z 4419

  1. Leopardi had read Othello, Coriolanus, and Macbeth in Rome (1822–1823), in the French translation by Le Tourneur.

  2. In 1815 Leopardi had read Scipione Maffei’s works on magic.

  3. Alfonso Varano and his Visioni inspired the young Leopardi, who included some passages in his anthology of poetry published in Milan shortly before this thought was written.

  Z 4421

  1. This image (elaborated in the “Palinodia,” ll. 154–72) derives from Iliad 15, 362–64 (Pacella).

  Z 4422

  1. This e
ntry might lead us to think that “Il passero solitario,” which expresses in poetry these feelings, was composed in 1828 or 1829, or later. See however Z 4518, which undermines the possibility of experiencing actual pleasure, and justifies Leopardi’s “way to spend these years,” described on Z 76. Olimpia Basvecchi was the wife of Vito Leopardi, the younger brother of Giacomo’s father Monaldo.

  2. Margaret Mason had established herself in Pisa since 1820, hosting the Accademia dei Lunatici; she was a close friend of the Shelleys, Mary Wollstonecraft having been her governess. Antonio Guadagnoli, exactly the same age as Leopardi, won a modest notoriety as a comic and satirical poet; he also distinguished himself when in 1849, as gonfaloniere of Arezzo, he refused entry to Garibaldi.

  Z 4424

  1. Leopardi alludes to the passages from Aristotle quoted on Z 3420. On this topic see Z 879 and note.

  2. See Courier, Oeuvres complètes, Paris 1839, p. 19. Courier speaks of “5 sous parisis.”

  3. The reference to Niebuhr is a marginal addition.

  Z 4426

  1. Passage copied from an article by N. Tommaseo on Monti.

  2. On the poetics of memory (rimembranza, or ricordanza) see Z 514–15, 1521–22, 1860–62, 4286–87, 4302, 4415, 4427, 4471, 4492, 4513. Note that in August–September 1829 Leopardi will compose “Le ricordanze.”

  3. On the poetics of the indefinito see Z 26, note 2.

  4. This passage refers in fact to Charles Le Beau’s brother. See Encyclopédie méthodique. Histoire, loc cit., tome 1, part 2, p. 571 (Damiani).

  Z 4427

  1. On the poetics of memory and of the indefinito, or vago (the indefinite or the vague), see Z 4426 and notes. Cf. also Z 57 on childish imagination compared by Goethe with that of the ancients.

  2. A lengthy thought on the theme of fire is on Z 3643–63.

  Z 4428

  1. Leopardi alludes here to some negative reactions to his Operette morali, published in 1827.

  2. There follows an interlinear addition. Many critics have seen in this passage a prelude to “La ginestra,” ll. 122–35, where Leopardi contradicts the teaching of Epictetus’s Handbook 5, a work he had translated in 1825: “to blame neither another nor his own self is the part of one whose education is already complete” (see Natale, Il canto delle idee, pp. 146–47 [B11]).

  3. Unlike Niebuhr, Leopardi thinks that all languages have a common origin; see Z 1270–72, 3811–13, 4485 (1st and 8th paragraphs).

  Z 4429

  1. The following passage, until the date, was written after the one that follows, but placed here with a sign.

  Z 4430

  1. Leopardi quotes the Zurich 1559 ed. of Stobaeus, p. 618, from Orelli.

  Z 4431

  1. Quoted from Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, vol. 1, pp. 695–96, note (c) and (i). Leopardi comes back to the problem discussed on Z 4402–404.

  Z 4432

  1. The article “the” is inserted mistakenly by Leopardi.

  2. In English in the original. Leopardi indicates with his “note” the original footnotes, integrated into the text. Leopardi’s interpolation is in Italian.

  Z 4433

  1. In English in the original. Leopardi slightly adapts the English text and the note, and interpolates a reference to Keller, Notitia. Niebuhr cites from the edition of Aristotle by Friedrich Sylburg.

  2. In English in the original.

  Z 4434

  1. In English in the original. Leopardi’s interpolation translates the English “prevailed.”

  2. In English in the original.

  3. This quotation from the Spanish poet Manuel J. Quintana is most probably secondhand.

  Z 4435

  1. See Z 4343 and note 2.

  2. Bormus, or Borimus, was a handsome Bithynian youth who disappeared during harvest time while fetching the reapers a drink of water. They called him in plaintive strains, which they continued to chant at harvest ever afterward with the accompaniment of their flutes. In similar stories the name of the youth was Mariandynus, a hunter. On rituals and dirges connected with the harvest see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion, part 5: Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, I, London 1912, pp. 214–69. Leopardi’s poetry often takes the form of a mournful song on the premature death of a beautiful youth, not without memory of ancient rituals and myths connected with the harvest; see the reading of “A Silvia” and “Le ricordanze” by F. D’Intino, “I misteri di Silvia. Motivo persefoneo e mistica eleusina in Leopardi,” Filologia e critica, 19, 2 (1994), pp. 211–71.

  3. Bibliotheca Graeca, vol. 1, p. 697.

  4. These works are cited by Orelli, vol. 1, p. 519.

  5. See above, and Z 4343 and note 2.

  Z 4436

  1. On Ricordano see Z 4124. The Florentines Giovanni, Matteo, and Filippo Villani (fourteenth century) chronicled in their Nuova cronica current events and recounted the city’s history.

  2. Leopardi gives two variants of the same term in Italian, the second being a Latinism from anacolutiae, that is non sequiturs both from a logical and syntactic point of view.

  Z 4437

  1. The writings of Philodemus of Gradara—an Epicurean philosopher and poet (first century BCE)—were discovered among the charred papyrus scrolls at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.

  Z 4438

  1. Cleobulus’s passage, from Stobaeus’s sermon 3 “De prudentia,” Zurich 1559 ed., p. 45, is quoted by Orelli, vol. 1, p. 138, in the chapter devoted to Demetrius of Phalerum’s Septem sapientum sententiae et apophtegmata. At this point Leopardi adds with an insertion sign an addition written the day after (as the date shows), which reports Orelli’s note, p. 529.

  2. Leopardi transcribes Stobaeus’s Latin translation of the passage by Cleobulus; see Orelli, vol. 1, p. 139. There follows the same sentence as reported by Diogenes Laertius, quoted by Orelli on p. 529. “Moral etiquette” [“Galateo morale”] is an entry of the 1827 Index, and one of the many books projected and never realized by Leopardi (see Prose, p. 1217).

  3. Stobaeus (Zurich 1559, p. 200) is cited from Orelli, vol. 1, p. 164.

  Z 4440

  1. “Social Machiavellianism” [“Machiavellismo di società”] is an entry of the 1827 Index, and another of the treatises projected and never realized by Leopardi (“Machiavello della vita sociale,” cf. Prose, p. 1217).

  2. That is, Cassius Dio, Historiae Romanae, loc. cit.

  3. Lambeck does not seem to refer to the name Capitone, which is mentioned, however, on the same page in a note by M. Casaubon: see the section “Testimonia de Eutropio et Paeanio” in Eutropii Breviarium historiae Romanae cum metaphrasi graeca Paeanii, Lyon 1762 (= LL).

  4. See Z 4479.

  Z 4441

  1. The “right of asylum” plays a crucial role in Vico’s reconstruction of human history: “marvelous above all is the recourse taken by human institutions in this respect, that in these new divine times there began again the first asylums of the ancient times, within which, as we learned from Livy, all the first cities were founded” (The New Science, § 1056). The word “asylum” recurs also on Z 1268 with a Vichian flavor (see note). On hospitality, “guaranteed by ancient laws” and “practiced so meticulously by the ancients,” see also Z 2254 and 4286 respectively.

  2. Orelli, tome 1, p. 542, quotes from Stobaeus, Zurich 1559, p. 47, and from Thucydides, Leipzig 1790–1804, vol. 1, p. 227.

  3. Homer, Iliad 9, 502–12.

  4. The parenthesis that follows, and the date, is added at the end of the thought, and placed at this point with a crosslet.

  5. See Du Cange.

  Z 4442

  1. The following passage, quoted from Niebuhr, is in English in the original. The interpolations by Leopardi are in Italian, except “(the inhabitants of Rome)” which is in English.

  Z 4443

  1. That is, in his Index, under “Positivized diminutives.”

  Z 4445

  1. In English in the original. The two interpolations by Leopardi a
re in Italian.

  2. In English in the original. The two interpolations by Leopardi are in Italian.

  Z 4446

  1. The preceding and the following passages from Niebuhr are in English in the original. The interpolation by Leopardi is in Italian.

  Z 4447

  1. Propertius, Elegies 2, 34, 65–66.

  2. Leopardi found this spelling in his editions. This interpolation is in Italian.

  Z 4448

  1. All the quotations in this paragraph are in English in the original.

  2. The interpolation “the Pelasgians” by Leopardi is in English; “Hellens” sic in the original.

  Z 4449

  1. Leopardi refers to Ippolito Pindemonte’s criticism in his epistle in verse “I sepolcri” (1807), ll. 346–55, which responds to Foscolo’s “Dei sepolcri” (published 1807).

  2. In English in the original.

  Z 4450

  1. Leopardi takes this quotation from the very first page of Foscolo’s preface to his translation of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey: “Che un sorriso possa aggiungere un filo alla trama brevissima della vita.” The text, from the dedication to Pitt of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, reads differently: “… being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,—but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.”

  2. This quotation from the Spanish poet Francisco de Rioja is most probably secondhand.

  3. See Genovesi, Logica per i giovanetti, bk. 5, ch. 2, § 6 (pp. 202–203).

  4. The following pages from Niebuhr are in English in the original; the footnotes are included in the text. Leopardi’s interpolations are in Italian.

  Z 4452

  1. Leopardi first writes “Addisson” (the same spelling on Z 1410), then corrects it. Hence his “(sic).”

  2. In his interpolation Leopardi uses a definition by Niebuhr.

  Z 4455

  1. It is what Livy calls “lex … horrendi carminis,” see 1, 26.

  Z 4457

  1. Horace, Epistles 2, 1, 26.

  Z 4458

  1. The following pages from Niebuhr are in English in the original. All the interpolations by Leopardi are in Italian, except the first, in English.

  Z 4459

  1. Varro 5, 80.

  2. That is, Macrobius 3, 20, 5.

  3. That is, Lucius Junius Brutus.

  Z 4460

  1. In English in the original.